“India does not mow down its people”: Arundhati Roy in conversation with David Barsamian

There is a high-stakes drama playing out in India these days, and the novelist Arundhati Roy is one of its most visible actors. Multinational companies, in collusion with much of India's upper class, are lining up to turn the country into one big franchise. Roy puts it this way: "Is globalisation about 'the eradication of world poverty', or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?"

Roy lives in New Delhi, where she first went to become an architect. But she's not working as an architect or even as a novelist these days. She's thrown herself into political activism. In the central and western states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, a series of dams threatens the homes and livelihoods of tens of millions. A huge, grassroots organisation, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), has arisen to resist these dams, and Roy has joined it. Her devastating essay on dams, "The Greater Common Good", and her searing denunciation of India's nuclear testing, "The End of Imagination", have literally kindled bonfires. The upper class didn't appreciate her critique of development, and the nationalists abhorred her for questioning India's nuclear arsenal. (These two essays comprise her latest book, The Cost of Living, Modern Library, 1999.)