When Arundhati Roy, draped in a sari the colour of red wine and sporting a diamond nose-stud, gave a wide grin after the announcement that she had won the Booker Prize for 1997, she instantly became India’s newest heartthrob. The following year the Pokhran tests happened. And at the beginning of a passionate plea against nuclear weapons, titled The End of Imagination, Roy said, “My world has died. I write to mourn its passing.” Since then

India’s literary sensation has been reincarnated as a public intellectual.

Mumbai enjoyed an interaction with one of India’s prominent public intellectuals on Thursday evening. The Booker-winner is here to promote the latest collection of her political essays called Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. However, that’s not her whole agenda. She spent time with the mill-workers’ families and addressed them on Friday as their union Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti turned 20.

With a friendly smile fixed on her face, the 48-year-old conceals her feisty image, almost. But when she starts taking about the repercussions of people’s militia against Maoists in Chhattisgarh; the military presence in Kashmir, Nagaland and Manipur; the displacement for the Sardar Sarovar Dam or bauxite mining in Orissa, it becomes clear she is a writer with larger commitments. “After the Pokhran test, it became clear that keeping quiet is as much a political act as speaking. But by remaining silent, I will be walking into a prison of my making,” she says. The writer presents a fascinating picture of herself with radiating, youthful skin and clipped shoulder-length salt-paper hair.

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