More recently, though, this criticism has been flipped around. Roy is now seen as a 'campaigning novelist,' and this infuriates her, too. All she is doing, she insists, is what any good novelist should do—make connections between fiction and reality. Instead, she finds that people put her in a box. She tells the story about a phone call she got when 'The Greater Common Good' was published. 'This society editor rang me up and said, ‘Oh, darling, that was such a lovely essay. Now I want you to do a piece for me on child abuse.’ So I said, ‘Sure. For or against?’ She put down the phone.'

The point, she says, is that both supporters and critics have been too quick to categorize her views. Though she opposes India’s building of nuclear arms and big dams, she is 'not an anti-development junkie, nor a proselytizer for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition.' She does believe, however, that the growing urban-rural divide is killing India, and that the country’s legions of technocratic experts are far more dangerous to its future than its illiterate peasantry could ever be.
Though this political perspective clearly informs Roy’s essays, it also weaves more subtly through The God of Small Things––a book that could never be called a 'political' novel in the conventional sense.

As Roy explains, the novel is 'not just about small things. It’s about how the smallest things connect to the biggest things––that’s the important thing. And that’s what writing will always be about for me. . . . I’m not a crusader in any sense.' Her opponents might dispute this, but Roy sees her place in the Narmada struggle as that of a writer and, ultimately, an outsider. 'I can’t fight their fight,' she says. 'I can fight as a writer to prevent it, but my house isn’t drowning, my land isn’t being submerged, and my anger shall never be more than theirs. They have to fight. I don’t.'

A paragraph in 'The Greater Common Good' explores the link between Roy’s two chosen emblems of national disaster: the big bomb and the big dam. 'They’re both weapons of mass destruction,' she writes. 'They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. . . . They represent the severing of the link, not just the link––the understanding––between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.'

Again, the message is about connections. Failure to make connections, she says, is what is leading India––and the West, upon which it increasingly models itself––astray. 'I have to believe,' she says, 'that what is being done––the dams and the nuclear bombs, the whole development model––are the symptoms of a terrible malaise, and that lies inside people’s heads. I don’t know how you address that . . . but the idea that you just accept it all makes me angry.'