After her first novel,
The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy did not publish another for twenty years, when
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was released in 2017. The intervening decades were nonetheless filled with writing: essays on dams, displacement, and democracy, which appeared in newspapers and magazines such as
Outlook,
Frontline, and the
Guardian, and were collected in volumes that quickly came to outnumber the novels. Most of these essays were compiled in 2019 in
My Seditious Heart, which, with footnotes, comes to nearly a thousand pages; less than a year later she published nine new essays in
Azadi.
To see that two-decade period as a gap, or the nonfiction as separate from the fiction, would be to misunderstand Roy’s project; when finding herself described as “what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist,’ ” she confessed that term made her flinch (and feel “like a sofa-bed”). The essays exist b
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