Roy & Sejpaldifferently. My first political essay, “The End of Imagination,” was writ-
ten after India’s 1998 nuclear tests. The second, “The Greater Common
Good,” came after the Supreme Court lifted its stay on the building of
the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River. I didn’t know that they
were just the beginning of what would turn out to be twenty years of
essay writing. Those years of writing, traveling, arguing, being hauled
up by courts, and even going to prison deepened my understanding of
the land I lived in and the people I lived among, in ways I could not
have imagined. That understanding built up inside me, layer upon layer.
Had I not lived those twenty years the way I did, I would not
have been able to write The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. But when I
write fiction, unlike when I write political essays, I don’t write from
a place of logic, reason, argument, fact. The fiction comes from years
of contemplating that lived experience, turning it over and over until
it appears on my skin like sweat. I write fiction with my skin. By the
time I started to write The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I felt like a
sedimentary rock trying to turn itself into a novel.as: The word “empire” has often been invoked as a uniquely European
and U.S. problem. Do you see India and other postcolonial nations as
adapting older forms of empire in new geopolitical clothing? In The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, you show us how the Indian government
has developed strategies of surveillance and counterterrorism that are,
to put it mildly, totalitarian in their scope. How can we think of empire
now in the Global South, especially at a time when postcolonial nations
are emulating the moral calculus of their old colonial masters?
ar: It is interesting that countries that call themselves democracies—
India, Israel, and the United States—are busy running military occupations.
Kashmir is one of the deadliest and densest military occupations in