Syed Hamad Ali: Roy's canon still has the power to shake India

"Every time someone asks me this question I keep wondering 'but why don't you talk about the love?'" She says. "Why don't you talk about the embrace? We forget that is the majority of people in that country. Why don't you talk about the fact that every single piece I write is translated into every little language and it's translated into pamphlets and it's sold at the level crossing?"

Her critics insist there is something "wrong" in her analysis of India. Some feel she is too harsh, others think her a kind of loose cannon.

Roy is often looked upon as something of an "outsider" among the Indian elites. It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, back in 1997, when Roy won the Booker prize for The God of Small Things, she was viewed very differently. This was a woman who had made India proud on the world stage, and so India was proud of her.

But then, in the face of international condemnation, India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998. People in both countries rejoiced at this demonstration of power, but Roy couldn't contain her anger and wrote The End of Imagination, in which she argued against nuclear weapons.

It was the beginning of her troubles.

"They are not my troubles," she insists.

Okay, criticism.

"Criticism from the few who own the media and who have a voice," Roy begins to lecture. "But I don't see them as my troubles. I see them as the beginning of a huge romance of resistance and writing in the place that I live in."

It is this word "resistance" which has kept her going since. From being ostracised by the Indian media to more recent accusations of sedition over remarks made about Kashmir and a mob attack on her home last year.

That is not to say she doesn't have admirers. Her tireless work in exposing a darker side to "shining" India has won over many - including across the border in neighbouring Pakistan. Some of those fans are, perhaps, fond of her for all the wrong reasons. "They may see me as somebody who, because I criticise India, I am embracing of the Pakistani state which I am not," she says.

I ask her to imagine if she had been born a Pakistani, and lived in that country, would she still be so critical of the Indian state?

"Obviously I would be more involved in what is happening inside Pakistan," she says. "Because I see myself very much as a person who says what I say about India in order to make it a more just society. And wherever I lived that would be what I did. So if I was living in Pakistan I wouldn't be praising the Pakistani state for what is happening in Balochistan, you know, I would not be. And I think that in so many ways Pakistan is in a far more perilous situation. Because it has not been allowed to develop institutions of democracy as India was in the first place.

"It was always geopolitically in a state where there was interference and where its military dictators were being supported by powers from the outside. I think even the elite of Pakistan is being humiliated by the United States."With all the threats and attacks she has faced, doesn't her family ever ask her to tone it down?

"No, my mother would never say that and neither would my husband," she says. "I live alone because my life is too bizarre for anybody to put up with. For me, the definition of a family is a rather huge one."

Does she believe in god? "I don't follow any particular religion but I believe in the god of small things. I believe in the intricate connection between everything and implicit importance of understanding and valuing that."

Roy clearly doesn't regret her dressing-down by India's elite. "I was asked on TV 'how it feels to be the writer that India hates?'" she says. "I said to her, it is very grand of you to represent India. You know, like who the hell gives you the right to call yourself India?"