In India, caste-that most brutal system of social hierarchy-and capitalism have fused into a dangerous new alloy.

It doesn’t help that there has been a failure on the part of the left in general to properly address these issues. How long will it be before the world’s elite feel that almost all the world’s problems could be solved by getting rid of that surplus population?Īrundhati Roy: That was fourteen years ago! The updates now would include the ways in which big capital uses racism, caste-ism (the Hindu version of racism, more elaborate, and sanctioned by the holy books), and sexism and gender bigotry (sanctioned in almost every holy book) in intricate and extremely imaginative ways to reinforce itself, protect itself, to undermine democracy, and to splinter resistance. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.” How would you update this today? You write, “The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code of democracy. In this interview, she reflects on the relationship between the aesthetic and the political in her work, how to think about power, and what it means to live and write in imperial times.Īvni Sejpal: In your book, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), you identify a few different pillars of empire: globalization and neoliberalism, militarism, and the corporate media. She has, on one occasion, even been sent to prison for committing “contempt of court.” In spite of this, Roy remains outspoken. 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. They have garnered both acclaim and anger. 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.

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. 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).

Capitalism ii media empire