Arundhati Roy’s Radical Zeal

After bagging the Booker for The God of Small Things in 1997, Arundhati Roy made a life-altering decision: “to postpone reading Don DeLillo’s big book” about nuclear and bodily waste in order to make time for “reports on drainage”. This was a swipe at Mahatma Gandhi, a curmudgeonly champion and later a begrudging reformer of the caste system, who could do no better than deride the American writer Katherine Mayo’s criticisms of casteism and misogyny in Mother India as a “drain inspector’s report”. Roy has the obverse habit of mind: bring on the drain inspectors’ reports.