Evil Empire 41The Absurd Apocalypse
Arundhati Roy interviewed by Avni Sejpal
in her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017),
Arundhati Roy asks, “What is the acceptable amount of blood for good
literature?” This relationship between the imagination and the stuff of
real life—violence, injustice, power—is central to Roy’s writing, dating
back to her Booker Prize–winning debut novel The God of Small Things
(1997). For the twenty years between the release of her first and second
novels, the Indian writer has dismayed many—those who preferred that
she stick to storytelling and those who were comfortable with the turn of
global politics around 9/11—by voicing her political dissent loudly and
publicly. Her critical essays, many published in major Indian newspapers,
take on nuclear weapons, big dams, corporate globalization, India’s caste
system, the rise of Hindu nationalism, the many faces of empire, and
the U.S. war machine. They have garnered both acclaim and anger. In
India Roy has often been vilified by the media, and accused of sedi-
tion, for her views on the Indian state, the corruption of the country’s
courts, and India’s brutal counterinsurgency in Kashmir. She has, on
one occasion, even been sent to prison for committing “contempt of