Field Notes on Democracy

Listening to Grasshoppers

Arundhati Roy is among the most well-known writers and social justice activists in the world today, with a committed global audience. Her best-selling 1997 novel "The God of Small Things" and her courageous, popular interviews and essays on war and peace, contemporary India and Kashmir, U.S. imperial power, and a renewal of popular democracy across the world, have earned her a large audience and international profile. Roy's writings on Southeast Asia come at a time of renewed interest in the subcontinent. But Roy offers an essential counterpoint to the caricatured Western image surrounding India's precarious version of secular democracy. As indicated by the title of the book, the topics Roy explores are also of global concern. These include war, terrorism, national and ethnic identity, social inequality, the environment, and globalization itself.