Penguin, Palestine, and the price of Roy’s resistance

There are some figures in our public life who become larger than their words. They begin as writers, but soon turn into symbols. Arundhati Roy is one such figure. For many in India and across the world, she embodies resistance: the novelist who abandoned the comforts of literary celebrity to stand against dams, wars, Hindutva, and imperialism. She has become, in Edward Said’s words, the “conscience of the world”—that rare writer who speaks truth to power when others remain silent.

But conscience is not a permanent possession. It must be renewed by action, and it must survive the temptations of convenience. And this is why Roy’s decision to publish Mother Mary Comes To Me with Penguin must be questioned. Penguin is not innocent. It is a global giant entangled in blood.

This is the publisher that promoted Narendra Modi’s 370: Undoing the Unjust, a celebration of Kashmir’s broken autonomy. It gave a platform to Wasantha Karannagoda, the Sri Lankan navy chief accused of blockading Tamil civilians and overseeing disappearances during the genocide. It has invested in Israeli tech companies whose products help crush Palestinians in Gaza.

So, what does it mean for Roy, the writer who has spoken against Zionism, Hindutva, and state violence, to now sign with this same corporation?

The irony deepens when we recall that in 2014 Roy herself scolded Penguin for pulping Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus under right-wing pressure. “What terrified you?” she asked them then. She drew a line between herself and corporate cowardice.

But today, as Palestinian children are buried under rubble and Kashmir remains suffocated under military rule, she has crossed that line herself. The question returns: What terrified you, Arundhati Roy? The genocide continues. But you have already surrendered.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote of the “culture industry,” in which art loses its critical edge and becomes a commodity. We are seeing that process play out before our eyes. Roy’s words, once symbols of rebellion, are now circulating through the very machine that feeds on oppression.

No one can mistake this for the anxiety of a first-time author. Roy carries a Booker on her shelf and an international audience at her feet. She had the freedom to walk any path: the route of a radical publisher, the independence of self-publication, even the gift of making her words freely available. Yet she stepped willingly into Penguin’s embrace, and in doing so allowed her rebellion to be consumed by the very market it once condemned.

Hannah Arendt wrote of the “banality of evil”—atrocities carried out not only by fanatics but by institutions that act as if nothing is wrong. Penguin is one such institution. It will publish Modi, It will publish Karannagoda and now it will publish Roy. For Penguin there is no contradiction. There is only profit.

But for Roy there ought to be a contradiction. To publish with Penguin is to lend her moral authority to a corporation that launders genocide through literature. It is to join, even unwillingly, what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics—the systems that decide who may live and who must die. Publishing is never neutral. To give Penguin her book is to tie her words to Palestine’s erasure, Kashmir’s silence, and Tamil Eelam’s loss.

Defenders may argue that no writer can escape corporate publishing, that resistance still needs a platform. But this excuse does not hold. Roy’s entire career has been built on refusing compromise. She has never been just another author—she has claimed the role of moral witness. If that role is to mean anything, it must apply to her as much as to anyone else.

Nor can anyone say she had no choice. Her power gives her choices others do not have. And when the powerful act as if they are helpless, it is always the powerless who pay.

As a Muslim reader, I cannot ignore the wound here. Roy has written eloquently against the siege of Gaza, the subjugation of Kashmir, the humiliation of Indian Muslims. She has been, for many, a secular ally who spoke what we could not always say. Yet solidarity cannot stop at rhetoric. When that same ally chooses to partner with a corporation entangled with Zionist tech , with Hindutva propaganda, with war criminals, the betrayal is not symbolic. It is material.

Talal Asad has reminded us that liberalism often masks its violence by outsourcing it—by creating a distance between lofty ideals and brutal practices. Roy’s decision exemplifies that distance. Her ideals remain anti-imperial, but her practices feed the imperial machinery.

What we are witnessing is not just personal hypocrisy but a larger truth about how dissent is managed in our times. The system does not silence every critic. Instead, it domesticates some of them. It allows them to speak loudly, but through safe channels. Their words become performances of resistance that pose no real threat. This is what Edward Said warned of when he spoke about the “co-optation of intellectuals.” Resistance becomes one more commodity, an exotic spice in the banquet of empire.

Arundhati Roy has become, tragically, part of that banquet. Her voice still sounds rebellious, but it is now carried on the back of Penguin, a company that also carries the voices of Modi and Karannagoda. In this way, rebellion and propaganda sit side by side on the same shelf. The consumer can buy both. The market wins either way.

The point is not to demonise Roy as an individual, but to remind ourselves that no dissident is beyond accountability. The cult of the celebrity intellectual is dangerous precisely because it blinds us to their compromises. We must refuse to let symbolic resistance substitute for real solidarity.

Palestine does not need words alone; it needs material refusal of complicity. Kashmir does not need rhetorical sympathy; it needs a break from the institutions that legitimise its occupation. If Arundhati Roy is to remain a true voice of conscience, she must answer for her choices—not only to history, but to the people whose struggles she claims to represent.

Until then, her new book will stand not as a testimony of resistance but as a monument to the market of genocide.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.