In 1994 there was a court case over an article she wrote accusing director Shekhar Kapur of exploiting Phoolan Devi in his film Bandit Queen. Then came obscenity charges over the inter-caste relationship in The God of Small Things, followed by outrage from the local Communist party over the book’s portrayal of Marxists.In March this year, Roy was sent to jail for contempt of court following a petition that she’d tried to kill “five thugs” over the dam protest “People think I was put into jail for a day,” Roy adds. “They don’t realise that I was under trial for a year, and that’s much worse. That’s how they break you.”It’s not just the authorities who are out to get her: Roy’s fiercest critics are activists who accuse her of hijacking their causes. “There’s a lesson that activists in India need to learn, which is not about self-righteousness and showing how hard you’re working,” counters Roy. “It’s important to re-imagine dissent, so that it’s exciting.

If you’re just going to tire yourself out with your own virtue, you’ve had it. But if you’re having a high old time while you’re doing it, then you’re a proper fighter.”It must be a baffling life. Tihar jail one minute, an offer (declined) to model Gap Khakis the next. A request to inaugurate a lung-infection unit in a Kerala hospital. A request from an underwear company asking whether she’ll write their chairman’s speech. Will she talk on literature, on water, on nuclear weapons? With every disaster comes a call asking her opinion. “A lot of people think you’re just some gun for hire – that they’ll tell you the cause and you’ll just churn out this passionate piece,” says Roy A phone call from one editor sticks in her mind.

“She said, ‘Darling, I just read that lovely piece you wrote on the dam. Could you do one for me on child abuse?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure. For or against?’ “”Each time I write, in India especially, I get so much flak that I think I’m never doing this again. Then something happens and this hammering sets up in my head I can’t ignore,” Roy explains. A hammering so urgent, there’s been no time or space to let it distil into fiction.

At least until now.”I don’t want to be the kind of person who has to comment on everything,” says Roy. “It’s a crucial thing to remove yourself from the centre of the narrative. There are a million things that are important in the world, but they don’t all have to be addressed by me. I know there is a time – and maybe that time has come – when I will just pull back and say, OK: I’m writing something else now.”BiographyArundhati Roy was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong (then in Assam), where her Bengali father was a tea-planter She has one older brother. When she was about two, her parents separated, and she moved with her mother, Mary Roy, to Kerala, where her uncle ran a pickle factory. She studied at home until 10, when she became the first pupil in the school her mother still runs She left home at 17 to study architecture in Delhi. She qualified and won a scholarship to Florence, studying restoration.