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Arundhati Roy, a Nobel Laureate, is facing Prosecution in India

Arundhati Roy misses Munich Lit Fest due to Indian prosecution over 2010 comments. Controversy surrounds the acclaimed author's travel.
on Nov 15, 2023

Arundhati Roy, who was invited to talk at the Munich Literature Festival, is unable to go to Germany since she is facing prosecution in India over comments she made in 2010.

Arundhati Roy, an Indian author, has been selected to give the opening keynote at the Munich Literature Festival, which runs from November 15 to December 3. However, the acclaimed novelist is unable to come to Germany since she is facing criminal accusations in her home country for comments she made 13 years ago.

While she will not be delivering the festival's opening address, she will participate in a panel discussion on the situation in India on November 16 via video link at the festival.

Roy gave a lecture regarding Kashmir in 2010, and her remarks that the disputed territory has never been a "integral" part of India have been brought up again. She now faces fresh charges for "offences related to provocative speech and the promotion of enmity between different groups." The prosecution might result in a seven-year prison sentence.

A student of India's cultural complexities
The Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders ranks India 161 out of 180 countries, yet this has never stopped Roy. On the contrary, she has been prolific in the production of essays and books that effectively blend her political ideas with a deft use of language.

Roy rose to international prominence with her 1997 novel, "The God of Small Things," which earned her the Man Booker Prize (now abbreviated to Booker Prize) that year.

The novel is a family drama that follows fraternal twins as they traverse the difficulties of cultural mores in many Indian communities, faiths, locations, and castes. The novel, set in Kerala and Calcutta, is semi-autobiographical in that it depicts many elements of Roy's life.

Roy was born in Shillong, northeastern India, to a Kerala-born Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father who ran a tea farm. After her parents divorced, she moved to Kerala before returning to Delhi to pursue architecture.

Her actual calling, however, remained writing. In her early years as a writer, she authored "In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones" (1989), which was adapted into an arthouse film, and "Electric Moon" (1992).

Writing about politics
In the years following her Booker Prize win, Roy dedicated herself to social concerns and publishing her thoughts on the political and social status of the world, not just India.

In 1999, she authored a seminal essay titled "The Greater Common Good" on the resistance movement that arose in response to the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in Western India.

Roy emphasised the predicament of tribal groups whose villages would be submerged once the dam was built. The essay sparked international interest, not least because Roy was dragged into legal procedures for her "vituperative" words, according to the Indian Supreme Court.

Roy wrote on the 9/11 tragedy in 2001. Her piece, titled "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," was eventually published in a collection of the author's other political works.

"The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one," Roy wrote before the US war on terror began. If it can't identify an adversary, it'll have to create one for the sake of the outraged people back home."

She also rightly prophesied that the "war on terrorism" would result in the persecution of certain communities, harsher laws, and the limitation of human liberties.

Sedition charges have been filed.
Roy's literary-political engagement resumed in 2010, when she was arrested on sedition charges for making comments in support of Kashmir's independence from India.

A year later, she published "Walking with the Comrades," a book about her stay with communist insurgents in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. The insurgents, known as Maoists because of their allegiance to Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong's revolutionary ideology, have been fighting the Indian state for decades and claim to represent what the government considers "backward" classes, castes, and tribal people.

Roy published her second novel, "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," two decades after her first novel, "The God of Small Things," in 2017. It's the story of Anjum, a trans woman, and Tilo, an architect-turned-activist. Although the novel received varied reviews, including a "fantastic mess" from The Atlantic, it, too, melded the strains of fiction and contemporary politics to produce a reflection on contemporary India.

The 'conscience' of politics
Meanwhile, Roy appears to have claimed ownership of the genre of political essay writing. Her 2020 essay collection, "Azadi," or freedom in Urdu, addresses a variety of themes, including India's right-wing, "fascist," administration and the current epidemic.

She analyses how the spread of the coronavirus has highlighted flaws in social structures and infrastructure worldwide in an essay in the anthology titled "The Pandemic is a Portal," which was also published by The Financial Times in 2020.

In India, a lack of health-care services has widened the gap between affluent and poor, as well as between upper and lower castes and classes. She writes that in the United States, for example, the poor have received insufficient assistance.

Roy's political works have been criticised for being overly biassed and angry, yet the reality remains that, as a writer, she serves as a mirror to the society in which she lives. In her case, this includes the entire country of India as well as the entire planet. But she goes beyond simply expressing her views and encourages readers to find a solution.

Salman Rushdie criticised the latest moves to prosecute Arundhati Roy at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair. "She is one of the great writers of India and a person of enormous integrity and passion," he went on to say. "The idea that she should be brought to court for expressing those values is disgraceful."

Update: This profile was first published in 2020 and has been updated with the new charges against Arundhati Roy ahead of the Munich Literature Festival on November 14, 2023.