In Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Edward Said poses an important question: how far should an intellectual go in getting involved? Arundhati Roy, the 1997 Booker prize winner, is like Edward Said committed to social justice. Through her writings and political activism she has considerably redefined the role of an artist and intellectual in modern times. My paper will attempt to explore some of Arundhati Roy’s non-fictional writings and subsequently assess the importance of the works of the writer-activist Edward Said to her project of resistance to neo-colonialism.
My theoretical framework for reading Arundhati Roy is gathered from Said’s writings and his intellectual engagement with culture and politics. His theories of the worldliness of the text and the critic (by which he meant locating the cultural practices back in the mundane, the contextual and the historical detail of everyday life) allow the critic to analyze the literary work as a phenomenon located in the world within a network of non-literary, non-canonical, non-traditional practices. Said’s work has constantly addressed the role of the intellectual in the context of his own disenchantment with literary theory and he has looked upon the intellectual as someone who can retrieve theory from its abstractions to relate it back to worldly affairs and concerns of human rights and social justice.