AN ORDINARY PERSON'S GUIDE TO EMPIRE By Arundhati Roy Viking Price: Rs 395 Pages: 424

The testament is there in the very beginning: "For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning." It was a word-shifting performance in Indian novel when The God of Small Things danced out of Arundhati Roy. It was sometime ago, long before 9/11 and Afghanistan, before war and imperial immorality, before Osama, Islam's Che, had his Tora Bora moment, before the legend of Saddam the Magnificent ended up in a spider hole, it was before the Evil Emperor of Washington began extending his domain. It was before history, and Roy on the riverbank was in conversation with memory. "The aching, broken world" intervened to take her away from the Meenachal, and brought her face to face with power and its dehumanising synonyms. For, "my writing is not really about nations and histories, it's about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power". About writer as conscience keeper.

PICTURE SPEAK

ROY: The end of imagination

Or even the writer as a street fighter, a narrative stretching from Malraux to Sartre to Bernard Henri-Levy. Exhibitionism of dissent? It is always a bit like that when art aspires to change society. Take a return trip to Prague 1989 and you'll see how romantic liberation looks in the glow of the Magic Lantern. It was the name of the theatre from where began the velvet revolution, the moral rejoinder to communism-what Vaclav Havel calls the power of the powerless. Or, reread the back pages of Latin American literature or watch again the masters of East European cinema and you will see arguments with power that vindicate Jorge Luis Borges: censorship is the mother of metaphor. So there is a tradition to endorse Roy. Still, does Roy have the words to enrich the tradition?

Well, she liberally uses words like holocaust, fascism and genocide- words weighed down by too much history. In India-a nation afflicted by bomb, dams, Modi and globalisation-the first casualty of left-liberal angst is language. Roy, the Aishwarya Rai of Indian dissent, borrows liberally from the glossary of the worst yesterday to make our day darker. Post-Pokhran, it was the end of imagination, a travesty of Adorno's "there is no poetry after Auschwitz". Roy has the text but India, despite nuclear temptation and "Hindu fascism", is the wrong context. The Algebra of Infinite Justice, her last collection of pamphlets, was a celebration of that misplaced text. Now we are with the second instalment, and the poetic shrill has not diminished, though there are incidental beauties like "Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead".

Otherwise, Roy's case against the variations of Empire is a familiar territory: Noam Chomsky Zindabad. She loves antiquity and collects icons and gets disillusioned the moment she steps out of the museum-rich with items like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, the mythical Muhammad Ali and the lonely Chomsky-into the moral indignities of the imperium. They are the Great Betrayal, today's black leaders like Colin Powell and Condi Rice, party to the perfidies of George W. Bush. Anti-Americanism, the religion of the left-liberal evangelists, could not have been wordier, but Roy's alternative is not as clear as her demonology. 9/11 was an incident, and an inevitable one. She doesn't say so, still you get the feeling. The US reaction, the war on terror, is a war on humanity, imperial transgression of the worst kind. The logical extension of such an argument is: the world could have afforded to live with Saddam and the absence of two towers in Manhattan.

Roy needs an Empire, a cause to play out her angst. She constructs one, more forbidding than the real one. Freedom owes a great deal to the missile-borne morality of the Emperor. To see the first notation of the power of the powerless, look elsewhere, in the war-scarred 21st century, in Baghdad or Beirut, so remote from this guide book of the lost cause.