In Conversation: Arundhati Roy on Writing as Resistance

# In Conversation: Arundhati Roy on Writing as Resistance *Zara Hussain meets the celebrated author in Delhi to discuss her latest work and the role of literature in troubled times.* --- **ZARA HUSSAIN:** It's been seven years since "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness." What have you been working on? **ARUNDHATI ROY:** Everything and nothing. Writing, but also reading—reading as a form of preparation, of patience. A novel isn't something you decide to write; it's something that accumulates until it becomes unbearable not to write. **ZH:** And has something been accumulating? **AR:** Always. I'm interested in what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, which are of course political choices even when they feel personal. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, who we were, who we might become—these are not innocent stories. **ZH:** Your work has always engaged with history—the Emergency, the nuclear tests, the Gujarat riots. Do you see yourself as a political writer? **AR:** I see myself as a writer who is political because I am alive in the world. This distinction that gets made between "literary" fiction and "political" fiction—as if literature exists in some pure realm untouched by power, by history, by the violence of the present—it's a fantasy. And a dangerous one. Every novel is political. A novel that pretends politics doesn't exist is making a political choice. A novel that centers the experiences of the privileged while ignoring everyone else is making a political choice. Apolitical art is a lie told by those who benefit from the status quo. **ZH:** Critics have sometimes accused you of being too political, of sacrificing art for argument. **AR:** [laughing] I love this criticism. It assumes there's a proper amount of politics a writer is allowed—like a serving suggestion. Two tablespoons of justice, a dash of inequality, don't overdo the systemic violence or the dish becomes unpalatable. Look, I understand the concern. Propaganda disguised as literature is tedious; it insults the reader and diminishes the form. But I'm not writing propaganda. I'm writing stories about people living in a particular time and place, and that time and place happen to be marked by profound injustice. To ignore that would be the real artistic failure. **ZH:** "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" has an extraordinary structure—multiple timelines, dozens of characters, stories nested within stories. How do you find form for such complex material? **AR:** The form emerges from the material itself. This isn't mystical; it's practical. I had so many stories to tell, so many voices to include, and a conventional linear narrative couldn't hold them. So the novel became this other thing—a building with many rooms, many entrances, where you might encounter the same character in different periods of their life, where causality works in multiple directions. This is also, by the way, how history actually works. We experience it as linear because we're trapped in time, but looking back, we see how everything connects to everything else in ways that weren't visible from inside the moment. **ZH:** You spent years working on political essays—"The Algebra of Infinite Justice," "Walking with the Comrades"—before returning to fiction. What draws you to each form? **AR:** They serve different purposes. An essay is an argument—it marshals evidence, builds a case, aims for a specific effect. Fiction is more like an experience. It doesn't tell you what to think; it puts you inside a consciousness, a situation, and lets you feel the complexity for yourself. I need both. Some things require the precision of argument, the confrontational directness of essay. Others need the obliqueness of fiction, the way a story can hold contradictions without resolving them, can let you love a character while judging their actions, can make you complicit in ways that essay cannot. **ZH:** Speaking of complicity—your work often implicates the reader. Was that deliberate? **AR:** Absolutely. I have no interest in letting anyone off the hook, including myself. We're all participants in these systems. We all benefit from some injustice, even as we're harmed by others. The challenge is to hold that complexity without using it as an excuse for inaction. Fiction is particularly good at this—at showing how ordinary people become complicit in extraordinary violence, how good intentions curdle, how the systems we live within shape us even as we resist them. This isn't despair; it's honesty. And from honesty, maybe, we can begin to imagine something different. **ZH:** What gives you hope? **AR:** [long pause] People. Not "the people" as an abstraction, but actual people doing actual things. The adivasis in Chhattisgarh who've been fighting for their forests for decades. The women in Kashmir who've been documenting disappearances for thirty years. The students who keep coming out despite everything. Hope isn't optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the decision to act as if they might, even when evidence suggests otherwise. That's different. That's harder. But I see it everywhere, this stubborn, irrational, magnificent hope. It's the most human thing there is. **ZH:** One final question: what advice would you give to young writers in India today? **AR:** Read everything. Read what you love, but also read what you don't understand, what makes you uncomfortable, what comes from experiences utterly unlike your own. Then forget everything you've read and write what only you can write. And don't wait for permission. Don't wait for the right credentials, the right connections, the approval of the literary establishment. The establishment exists to reproduce itself; it's not interested in your particular vision. Write anyway. Write badly if necessary. Write in the margins of your other life. But write. The world needs your stories. Not because they'll change anything—they might not—but because telling them is how we know we're alive, how we insist on our humanity in the face of everything that would diminish it. That's not nothing. That's everything. --- *Arundhati Roy's new novel will be published in Spring 2027.*