© Augustus Binu Roy won the 1997 Booker prize for her novel The God of Small Things. She has written widely on the status of women in Indian society, corporate corruption and Kashmiri independence, and, in 2014, was an outspoken critic of Narendra Modi, calling his election as India’s Prime Minister a “tragedy.” Her December 2014 cover story for Prospect addressed the cruelties of India’s caste system. It was based on a long introduction Roy wrote to a new edition of Annihilation of Caste, a 1936 lecture by the Indian writer and thinker BR Ambedkar. She was criticised by some Dalit activists, who claimed that she had “diluted Ambedkar’s writing.”
