“In India,” Arundhati Roy wrote in 2002, “if you are a butcher or a genocidist who happens to be a politician, you have every reason to be optimistic.” Roy was referring to Narendra Modi, the then-chief minister of Gujarat who had been implicated in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the state that killed at least 1,000 people. Modi has always maintained his innocence—implausibly so, in many eyes—but Roy’s assessment of his future proved prescient. Following India’s latest elections, which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won with a landslide on a brazen message of Hindu supremacy, he is set for a second term as prime minister—and is more powerful than ever.



As Roy puts it, the “world’s largest democracy”—a proud national epithet Roy places within scare quotes—exists in several centuries at once, caught between tradition, the caste system, and the chaos of turbo-charged capitalism. Modi embodies these contradictions more than most: a figure at once authentic and aspirational, promising both the glorious resurrection of Hindustan and neoliberal reforms; the mythical child chaiwala who now wears $16,000 suits.

Modi was not named in Roy’s long-awaited second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published in 2017. But his vision of a Hindu nation haunted the book. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this,” she has said, “but if a novel can have an enemy, then the enemy of this novel is the idea of ‘one nation, one religion, one language,’” which is the slogan of Modi’s Hindutva ideology.

Though Roy first rose to fame for her fiction, winning the Man Booker Prize in 1997 with her debut novel The God of Small Things, she never wanted to be known, as she once said, as “some pretty woman who wrote a book.” Nor was she interested in becoming a cultural ambassador for the modern, “rising” India that has dominated the Western media’s characterization of the country in the 21st century. Today, Roy is known as much for her politics as for her fiction. She has been imprisoned and charged with sedition, joined Maoists in India’s jungle, and thrown her weight behind political movements across the globe. In June, she publishes her collected non-fiction, My Seditious Heart, a book that runs to over a thousand pages.

I recently spoke to Roy over email about the Indian election result, the meaning of Modi, and the role of a writer when—in her words—“the world is in a churning.” This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and style.