A dung beetle named Guih Kyom, one of many in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’s crowd of characters, performs a mammoth task. He lies on his back in a graveyard, holding the heavens up with his legs. The idea that one might examine the writings of Arundhati Roy in an article with a prescribed word count is perhaps as audacious and absurd as Guih Kyom’s bid to save the world if the sky comes crashing down. How can one attempt to describe—or is ‘discuss’ the less sleepy, more spirited verb here?—her oeuvre in a page or two? Is it possible to embark upon a tour of a universe, expansive and messy, from the comfortable confines of a writing desk, a laptop and some reference material? This is a universe teeming with filthy multitudes, their glorious dreams, their rivers, their dead cities and animated graveyards, their movements, their transgressions, their militants, their martyrs. This is an oeuvre that rages against convenient definitions. This is a writer who is also an activist, a writer-activist, a novelist-essayist, if you will.

But hyphenated terms offer only a limited categorisation. Roy’s fiction and non-fiction, which bleed into one another, resist this easy indexing. “I have never felt that my fiction and non-fiction were warring factions battling for suzerainty,” she declares in her essay ‘The Language of Literature’, the fourth in a collection titled Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction, published in 2020. (This particular essay was first delivered as the PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at the Apollo Theater, New York, in 2019.) Roy mentions receiving a handwritten letter from John Berger, whose work has influenced her own. His message confirms that Roy the essayist and Roy the novelist are, in fact, allies: “Your fiction and non-fiction—they walk you around the world like your two legs.”

• Tags: Arundhati Roy, India, Issue 34, Radhika Oberoi