THE SATURDAY PROFILE/Arundhati Roy: Arundhati Roy is a strong-willed writer with a cause. This week, India's Supreme Court jailed her for 24 hours but the judges will not silence her. Rosita Boland profiles a woman of conscience.
India is a country defined by extravagant contradictions. Bombay has both some of the world's most notorious slums, and also some of its most expensive real estate. There are droughts and also monsoons.
The cow is sacred, but human life is often not, as the murders last week of 500 Muslims by Hindu fanatics illustrated yet again.
And this week, India's most famous writer, the Booker prizewinner Arundhati Roy, was sentenced to one day of "symbolic imprisonment" by the Supreme Court in Delhi after it found her guilty of criminal contempt.
Arundhati Roy came to international attention in 1997, with the publication of her first, and as yet, only novel, The God of Small Things.
The book is set in her native Kerala, South India; a lyrical examination of the consequences over two decades of the death of a child.
Infused with magic-realism, the small things the novel celebrated are the details of a rural life.
When London agent David Godwin received a copy of the manuscript, he was so impressed by what he read that he arrived in Delhi within a week and came knocking on Roy's door to ask if he could represent her.
The manuscript was sold for £500,000, and the book went on to sell more than six million copies worldwide, winning the Booker in 1997.
Roy spent the following year on an international book tour; she now rarely gives readings and has not toured since.
During that year, in an interview with the Irish Times, when asked if she saw herself as an ambassador for her country, she said: "One of the things I am not is a spokesperson for my country. I speak only for myself. I am who I am, I'm not representing anything."
In retrospect, the signs of the strong-minded individualism of Roy's opinions were already there: it was only a matter of time before they were fully formed. Roy had always been unafraid of standing out.
She was herself, like her characters in The God of Small Things, the child of a broken marriage between a Christian and a Hindu.
As an architect student, she was distinctive for a foul mouth and her strange dress; she lived in a squatter's colony and made extra money by scrounging beer bottles and selling them on.
While this may seem more or less normal student behaviour for a Western student, for a young Indian woman, it was definitely not the norm.
What has marked Roy out as different from other writers with an international profile is that instead of putting that energy into her fiction, she has chosen to articulate her social and political conscience.
With the publication of her novel came wealth; something which she has never been comfortable with, given the fact that so many of her compatriots have so little.
The chief focus of Roy's attention in the last few years has been India's development; its nuclear tests, its dam-construction projects and its transparent admiration for Western corporate power.
She has written incisive and savage criticisms of India's development policies, with "the analytical prose worthy of a barrister", as the Guardian noted in an interview last year. In the process, she has gathered many enemies. The poorer a country, the more to be gained by corruption, and anyone who has ever spent even a short period in India will understand that corruption is a way of life there.
The fact that Roy was writing deeply critical essays, which appeared in Power Politics, about the Enron corporation long before they fell so spectacularly from favour, has marked her out as an uncannily sharp observer.
She is no half-baked conscience with a cause: her intelligence and courage have forced people to take her seriously, and predictably, she is lauded in the West, yet demonised in her own country, where she has embarrassed the government many times.
The issue which has attracted most attention, both nationally and internationally, is the Narmada dam-building project.
This is the proposal to build a staggering 3,200 dams, displacing hundreds of thousands of rural-based people in the process, with the ultimate and sole benefactors being urban industries. "It's like putting a jackboot in a spider's web," Roy states. Compensation is a concept not practised in India.
Given that people in rural India are already living on subsistence levels, displacement means a downwards slide towards destitution. In many cases, there is nowhere to go, other than to the city and a life in the slums.
Think of Cromwell and "To hell or to Connaught", and you're a small way there on the impact of dam-building in India.
Roy's campaigning attracted so much worldwide publicity that several Western contractors withdrew from the project, including the World Bank.
There were mass protests in India, yet in 2000, the Supreme Court still ruled that the project was to go ahead.
That Supreme Court ruling was to have surreal consequences for Roy. A group of activists staged a peaceful sit-in outside the Supreme Court after the ruling.
Roy turned up briefly, and then sat in a friend's car; it was as innocuous as it seemed.
However, the following day, a group of lawyers filed a petition accusing Roy of attempting to murder them, and saying also that she had been drunk and abusive outside the court.
Unbelievable as it sounds, the Supreme Court took these lurid accusations seriously, and hauled Roy before it to explain herself. She explained herself with a stinging affidavit, in which she made it clear how absurd she found the accusations.
The court's response was to charge her with contempt of court, a decision which many have read as a sinister right-wing example of India's growing intolerance of criticism. Roy was facing a prison sentence that could have extended to six months.
The case was heard this week, and she was sentenced to one symbolic day in Tihar prison, with an accompanying fine of 2,000 rupees.
She had shown "no remorse or repentance", Justice RP Sethi found, but because she was a woman, she was being treated "magnanimously".
Roy paid the fine after her overnight in jail, and thus avoided a further three months in prison. Given that the sentence attracted international coverage and international criticism of her treatment, it could be seen as a Pyrrhic victory for the Indian Supreme Court.
Unless, of course, you are a member of the Indian Supreme Court, and its right-wing following.
It's entirely possible that history will mark Arundhati Roy as a political activist first and writer second.