Infoshop News - Arundhati Roy: Life Comes Between a Firebrand and Her Fiction

Infoshop News - Arundhati Roy: Life Comes Between a Firebrand and Her Fiction: "The applause started at 7:40 p.m., when she was first introduced to the overflow crowd at the San Francisco Hilton. By the time Arundhati Roy finished an hour later -- by the time this novelist-activist-public intellectual completed her speech titled "Public Power in the Age of Empire" - - the audience had given her two standing ovations, 20 more rounds of applause and countless variations of more personal salutations like, "That's right!"

Roy says she doesn't want to be "iconized" by the public, but it's happening anyway. After readings and speeches, she's mobbed by people seeking her handshake, her signature in a book or a photograph to prove they got close to this firebrand from India. Firebrand may be an understatement. Last Monday at the Hilton, where she addressed the American Sociological Association, Roy generated some of her biggest responses when she urged the United States to immediately pull its troops from Iraq and "pay reparations" to Iraqis, criticized John Kerry and other Democrats ("How dare the Democrats not be anti-war!") and described President Bush's Cabinet as "thugs."

Two days later, at a KPFA fund-raiser in Berkeley, Roy energized the sold- out crowd within minutes of taking the stage by saying, "We have to strategize and take our struggle forward."

It's been seven years since Roy burst onto the international literary scene with "The God of Small Things," her semiautobiographical novel about a hard-luck family in southern India. Roy could have been content to stay within the confines of fiction -- and some critics say she should have -- but she was too restless for that. Her first big project: fighting dam building in India. Roy's celebrity helped generate media coverage of India's anti-dam movement, which objects to the way New Delhi's water projects have displaced millions of poor people. Roy has also opposed India's nuclear weapons capabilities and its embrace of capitalism -- issues that connected her with international human rights groups such as the World Social Forum.

Roy's name is now synonymous with other well-known activists and liberal figures, including Noam Chomsky (who calls Roy "a wonder"), Howard Zinn (another big fan) and Michael Moore. In fact, Roy has essentially given up her love of fiction for a full-time career as a social critic. She still writes prodigiously, but every one of her new books -- such as the just-released "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire" -- is a critique of current affairs. It's hard to find another writer who made such a big splash with a first novel ("The God of Small Things" commanded a $1 million advance, won the Booker Prize and has been translated into more than 30 languages), then veered so quickly into activist nonfiction, but Roy's background gives clues to her transition."

by Jonathan Curiel
San Francisco Chronicle