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Once upon a time there was a novelist called Arundhati Roy. Her arrival in the pages of the Indian Novel in English was an event-novel as event after The Midnight's Children in this part of the world. The God of Small Things, in its art and architecture, was a rare piece of fiction in which merged the rite of memory and the lyrics of the river, the dirge of loss and the rustle of language. Few first novels matched its raw revelations, mined from the deep recesses of ancestry, its fabulous freshness.

THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE JUSTICE By Arundhati Roy Viking Price: Rs 295 Pages: 299

That was then, long long ago. Arundhati Roy Part II, too, is an event, sort of, at least for those who read English news magazines, in narratives made eventful by italics. She has travelled a long distance-from the Meenachal to the Narmada, from Ayemenem to Afghanistan, via Pokhran. This textual leap is remarkable for the geography it covers-and the ideas it misses, that too despite the italics. The tradition is there to support her, the tradition of writer as dissident, of questions as dissent, stretching from the streets and cafes of Europe to the perforated societies of Latin America. Turn the pages of the last hundred years and you see the testaments of freedom in texts of exiles and outcasts, stretching from the tragedy of Mandelstam to the triumph of Havel, that is, from the darkness of the gulag to the brightness of the Magic Lantern. You saw words announcing their redundancy after Auschwitz, then memory replacing history as in the pages of Primo Levi and W.G. Sebald, history shedding its raiment of tyranny as in the pages of the South Americans (the latest: The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa), and you saw the writer on the street, you saw his romance reaching out to Sarajevo, you saw many variations of Malraux, and you saw the Platonic triumph of philosopher as king in Prague after the Velvet Revolution. And you see Roy.

ROY: The rebel without a context

A Roy scarred by the subterranean blast in Pokhran, a Roy sinking in the stagnant waters of the Narmada, a Roy shortchanged by globalisation, a Roy, along with Mr Osama bin Laden, daring the Daisy Cutters. You see Roy as dissident, and you read her screed, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, a collection of previously published pamphlets, and marvel at the italicised banality of her text, its remoteness from the context. This is the rebel without a context, and no textual exaggeration, assisted by, apart from the italics, exclamation marks and question marks, can camouflage the desperation of a dissident in search of a situation. One example: Roy has titled her post-Pokhran pamphlet as "The End of Imagination". Really, it aspires to be the most original submission by the word after Adorno's "no poetry after Auschwitz". And only an honorary member of the left-liberal intellectual establishment, in whose angst your next door communalist is a fascist and a riot in the nearby bazaar another Holocaust, can come out with such an original phrase to fathom, well, the historic sorrow of May 1998.

This desperation runs through the rest of the text as well: the wailing rivergirl of the Narmada, the hate-America peacemonger at the site of the long dead imagination's last wreckage, her private Tora Bora ... Part Chomsky, part Pilger, and a great deal of lyrical malarkey dressed as dissent, Roy as pamphleteer is a celebration of cause that has already been mocked away by history. Post-Pokhran, she has seceded from the India of bombastic nationalism. No option, she had missed Hiroshima. Dams in the Narmada made her a pinup girl of a phony revolution on the riverbank. No choice, Rigobertu Menchu was born in a more wretched place-and more photogenic. President Bush gave her a war to write against. Big mercy, she had missed Vietnam, she had missed Pol Pot, but, inshallah, she gained bin Laden, good enough for anyone who continues to solve the problem of this world without justice through the algebra of the Left.

Ah, the profession of conscience-keeping is a writerly prerogative, but when the keeper chooses the craft of pamphleteering instead of the art of imagination or the force of ideas, it is literary sloganeering. If a dam and a few bombs killed the imagination of the author of The God of Small Things, it's very sad, and revelatory. We didn't know it was so fragile. Still, the gain of the fossilised folios of the Left is a great loss to literature.