You will know Arundhati Roy as a novelist, who won the Booker prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, but, not long into this book about rampant capitalism in India, you realise she is also a criminal. On page 19 of her compelling polemic, she refers to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, and says they “make even thinking an antigovernment thought a cognisable offense”.

Hang on, I thought, that’s a bit much, so I checked Wikipedia and noted that “The [Unlawful Activities Prevention] Act makes it a crime to support any secessionist movement, or to support claims by a foreign power to what India claims as its territory.” And the latter Act “bars the media from carrying reports of any kind of ‘unlawful activities’ in the state”. So while the Acts are meant to stop anyone talking about Kashmir, there is a larger purpose behind them: according to the UAP Act it is also a crime to say as well as write anything “intended to cause disaffection against India”. But boy, is she going to cause disaffection among readers of this book.

Roy is, of course, too big to touch, even though she lives in Delhi. She has clearly goaded the authorities over the years; she knows it, and we should be grateful that she uses her international standing to stick her neck out.

It could be said that India is a part of the world where capitalism tries out its dirtiest tricks to see what it can get away with. No one who has been there could fail to notice the staggeringly unequal conditions under which Indians live: 80% subsist on the equivalent of 50 US cents a day, or less, while one residence in Mumbai boasts “twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms [no, I don’t know either], gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and six hundred servants”. This palace belongs to Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. “Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn,” adds Roy, when she sees the house, referring to the living wall that has been attached to the side of the building – all 27 storeys of it.

Corruption is seemingly hard-wired into the Indian political system. Akhil Sharma’s debut novel, An Obedient Father, dealt with the graft and sleaze of a low-level civil servant, but it was obviously a metonym for the larger picture. Roy gives us some facts and figures, but special mention should be made of Kisan Baburao “Anna” Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign, in the form of repeated “fasts unto death”, to encourage grass-roots organisations and greater government transparency. However, these don’t fool Roy for a second; Hazare’s cunning use of the media – surrounding himself with cameras at every opportunity – is actually, she reveals, enabled by the government, which sees him as a handy fig-leaf for their own shame and usefully silent on the question of wide-scale privatisation.

The book is centred on India, but it is part of a larger global movement that is getting increasingly worried about the unchecked excesses of the market. The subtitle is a nod to Indian superstitions about bad luck, the spirits of the farmers who died by their own hands, and the fact that many of the super-rich don’t even live in the palaces they build. Roy may allow her rhetoric to run away with itself at times – the occupation of Afghanistan was not a disaster, if you value freedom of expression – but she’s not bound by the conventions, or the risks to her liberty, of more sober explicators; visiting academics, judged to be security risks, are often refused visas; and there are parts of the country where the army can legally shoot you even if they only suspect you of insurrectionary tendencies. Long may she rattle the Indian plutocracy’s cage.

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