The brave struggle of this lone woman

'This is not purely a struggle about free speech. It is a political struggle. It is about power and resources and land'

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Court gives Roy one night in jail for contempt

Arundhati Roy has just received a one-day jail sentence from India's Supreme Court for criticising its procedures. A one-day sentence and a small fine is hardly the harshest sentence handed out, nor one that will cause Roy very much hardship. But, as the Supreme Court said in its sentencing, the imprisonment is "symbolic".

With a symbolic sentence, it's easy to lose sight of the real case. But with this case we have to try to remember the reality that stands behind it, and why it is important to all of us – not just to the brave novelist. This case started more than a year ago when Arundhati Roy joined a peaceful protest outside the Supreme Court in Delhi against the Narmada dam project. Roy was surprised when, the day after the protest, she heard that some lawyers had claimed she had abused and threatened to kill them. That claim was later thrown out, but in her affidavits she accused the court of trying to "silence criticism and muzzle dissent". In response, she was charged with contempt of court.

The coverage in the West has been sympathetic to Roy's case. But it is interesting that even in this sympathetic coverage, something often gets lost. And that is the radicalism of what Roy is currently saying.

To us, Roy is a novelist. "Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy", is how she is always described. "Booker winner must stay out of jail," read the headlines until yesterday, and then "Booker winner jailed". That's understandable. Her hold on us is, above all, as a fiction writer.

Roy's one, extraordinarily successful novel, The God of Small Things, achieved that rare double feat of winning over not only critics but also a larger readership with its lyrical, clotted prose and its breathless love story. It also had a strongly charged sense of morality – a love that reached across caste boundaries, for instance – although that seemed less important than Roy's ability to evoke sensual beauty in words. If we fell in love with Arundhati Roy when she won the Booker Prize in 1997 it was certainly because of her imaginative vision, not her political thought.

That's why, if you look at the coverage of her case here, it tends to emphasise that free speech is at stake, and Roy is standing up for her right to say what she wants. After all, that is what writers are expected to ask for, and something we would all concede.

Western reporters also tend to emphasise the fact that other writers have supported Roy in her struggle with the Supreme Court – writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie and Amy Tan. The inference is that fiction writers are sticking together to defend the freedom of the imagination, as they did in the case of Salman Rushdie himself. As far as Roy's experience within India goes, commentators have tended to emphasise that she is isolated. Her lonely bravery is emphasised.

This all makes sense, but another side of this case is getting lost. Arundhati Roy is indeed an imaginative writer, she is standing up for freedom, and she is a brave individual. But she has now also become a part of a wider struggle, into which she is channelling her extraordinary energy. This is not purely a struggle about free speech. It is a political struggle. It is about power and resources and land.

It was three years ago that Arundhati Roy waded into the political fray by publishing an essay on dams, in India in general and the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river in particular. In her essay, it became clear that the mistress of the lyrical imagination had taught herself to become a mistress of hard facts on irrigation, drainage and the displacement of people. As she wrote, "Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not any more. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point."

Her essay was fierce. It argued that the dams – sold to India's people by their governments, big business and the World Bank as the answer to water and power shortages – in fact resulted in the most horrific human suffering. The suffering not of hundreds or thousands, but millions of Indian people displaced by dam development over the years.

Here in the West it is Arundhati Roy's own face and words that are reported as the most important aspect of this case. But if you read her essay on the Narmada dam, you see this clever and beautiful woman standing back and asking you to concentrate all your understanding on other people who usually remain anonymous.

She takes you to places where people displaced by dams are forced to live short and brutish lives, far from their traditional environmental and social supports. To one resettlement, for instance, where people were living in tin huts on dry river beds. "The man who was talking to me rocked his sick baby in his arms. He was making a list of the fruit he used to pick in the forest. He counted 48 kinds. He told me that he didn't think he or his children would ever be able to eat any fruit again. He said it would be better for the baby to die than to have to live like this."

These are people whose sufferings usually go unreported. Arundhati Roy's achievement is to push them into the foreground where they belong, before they slip back into the ranks of the forgotten victims of state and corporate greed. Over the years she has built up a powerful critique of the way globalisation has operated in India, to the enrichment of the few and the dispossession of the majority. In a recent essay Roy has unpicked the scandal of the way Enron bled an Indian state dry with a shady deal on power plants – and she did that before Enron's collapse made it a filthy word in global trade. No wonder India's Supreme Court was out to get her: she even pointed to the court's complicity in not bringing Enron to account.

In her political writings, Roy has a useful lesson for people in the West who speak glibly of the benefits of globalisation. She has tried to get to grips with the real costs of putting faith in corporate interests for millions of ordinary individuals in her vast country. And she writes not just of the victims, but also of the fighters, the thousands of men and women in India who have been engaging in civil disobedience against the Narmada dam and similar projects for decades.

Anti-globalisation is seen over here as a movement for naive white kids. Roy's description of the courageous efforts of ordinary Indian people to achieve justice in the face of corporate rapacity reminds us that there is an international swell of resistance, which stems from the dispossessed as well as the privileged.

Although we tend to see Roy as a single, isolated voice, we should remember that she is also part of this larger movement. But it's not easy for us to confront the radicalism of her political thought. Because the reality that she is drawing to our attention is an extremely uncomfortable one, and it is one that we all have a stake in, for good or ill. As she says, "One is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One is involved because one is a human being."

n.walter@btinternet.com