Arundhati Roy on Indian Democracy in Peril

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Soon to speak in New Zealand, Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy discusses her complex relationship with her native India with Sally Blundell.

In a neglected graveyard in Old Delhi, Anjum, a Muslim hijra, or transgender woman, sets up a makeshift home. Others join her – untouchables, Muslim converts, addicts, the impoverished and the abandoned drawn together in a multi-faith caste-less sanctuary, a place of freedom, equity and acceptance. “And humour!” says author Arundhati Roy of her 2017 novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a bounteous, baggy, densely populated story unfolding from the slums of Delhi to the disputed valleys of Kashmir. “If you think about who lives there, and who dies there, it is a revolution!”

Roy is on a video call from her Delhi apartment, where she lives with her two rescued street dogs amid shelves and piles and a precariously leaning tower of books in a country she loves and critiques in all its uncertainty, corruption, humour and hope. India is a microcosm of the world, she says. Versions of what happens there happen everywhere. “The difference in India is in the scale, the magnitude and the sheer proximity of the disparity. In India, your face is slammed up right against it.” 
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