Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy’s little jab at “banker or accountant” is doing double duty: it’s a defense of artistic freedom and a rejection of the polite marketplace that wants every sentence to come with a price tag. She frames calculation as a kind of moral contamination, the language of profit-and-loss invading the space where a novelist is supposed to listen, notice, and tell the truth. The insult lands because it’s not really about accountants; it’s about a culture that treats writing as “content” and political speech as “branding,” then asks the artist to optimize for palatability.

The subtext is a preemptive strike against the accusation that she’s “using” her platform. Roy is often positioned as a novelist who should stay in the lane of fiction, or as an activist who should justify the cost of her outspokenness. She refuses both frames. “I do what I do” reads like stubbornness, but it’s also a claim of jurisdiction: the writer answers to conscience and timing, not to institutional reward.

Then comes the most revealing line: “there is a time when a political statement needs to be made.” She’s arguing for political speech as an ethical reflex, not a constant performance. That conditional “time” matters. It suggests discernment - not the spreadsheet kind, but the novelist’s sense of pressure in the world, moments when silence becomes complicity. In the context of Roy’s career - from The God of Small Things to high-profile critiques of Indian nationalism, militarism, and corporate power - the quote reads as a manifesto for selective, necessary interruption: art that won’t be audited into quiet.