Arundhati Roy as a Postcolonial Philosopher of Resistance: Literature, Ethics, and Political Praxis

This research article examines Arundhati Roy’s literary and political writings as a unified intellectual and ethical project that transcends conventional boundaries between fiction, political critique, and philosophy. It argues that Arundhati Roy’s corpus constitutes a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse in which literature becomes a form of political praxis and moral intervention. Integrating narrative imagination with political critique, Arundhati Roy constructs an epistemic framework where power is understood as a structural condition embedded in institutions, ideologies, cultural practices, and everyday life. Her work exposes the persistence of colonial logics in postcolonial societies through neoliberal capitalism, corporate globalization, militarized nationalism, caste hierarchy, patriarchy, and religious majoritarianism. The study demonstrates how Arundhati Roy’s fiction and essays collectively produce a moral epistemology of resistance in which justice is defined as dignity, resistance as responsibility, and politics as ethical struggle. Through fragmented narrative forms, subaltern-centered epistemologies, and ideological critique, her writing destabilizes dominant discourses and reconstructs alternative ways of knowing society. Marginalized figures emerge as epistemic agents, transforming storytelling into a site of knowledge production and resistance. Arundhati Roy’s critique of development, globalization, militarism, and neoliberal governance reframes political violence as ethical violence and economic injustice as moral failure rather than policy malfunction. Positioning Arundhati Roy as a postcolonial philosopher of resistance, this article argues that her intellectual project does not seek institutional solutions but consciousness transformation. Her work functions as conscience literature that reconstructs moral imagination, redefines the role of the writer as an ethical agent, and reconfigures literature as a battlefield of ideology.