No alibis in resistance: Why Roy’s Penguin choice matters

Mohammad Faisal’s response “The futility of demanding purity” to my piece “Penguin, Palestine, and the price of Roy’s resistance” argues that the critique of Arundhati Roy amounts to a misplaced “purity test.” He suggests that an impossible innocence is being asked of her, and that doing so trivialises the very idea of complicity. The argument is dressed in the parable of the adulterous woman in the Bible, as though pointing out contradictions in Roy’s practice is no different from throwing stones at the vulnerable. This is a misreading. The point was never that Roy must live above the messiness of history, untouched by power or capital. Rather, her choice to publish her latest work with Penguin, a publisher deeply entangled with the very structures she denounces, signals a troubling gap between her radical rhetoric and her material practice. To name this gap is not to demand purity but to demand consistency.

The response tries to blur this distinction by collapsing all forms of institutional entanglement into one. “If Roy publishing with Penguin makes her compromised, then Noam Chomsky teaching at MIT is also compromised; if Penguin publishes Modi, then Talal Asad or Edward Said must also be guilty for teaching in Western universities.” This is a false analogy. There is a difference between being structurally entangled in institutions none of us can fully escape, and voluntarily giving one’s work to a corporate platform that thrives precisely by absorbing and neutralising dissent. Said’s lectures at Columbia did not give legitimacy to the American state. Roy’s association with Penguin, however, allows the company to claim both Modi and Roy as evidence of its “plural” catalogue, folding empire’s critic and empire’s servant into the same bookshelf. That exchange is not neutral. Roy gains circulation; Penguin gains credibility. Penguin can now parade its catalogue as proof that it accommodates all sides, from the Prime Minister whose politics normalise authoritarianism, to the novelist-essayist who resists it. The irony deepens when one recalls that in 2014 Roy herself scolded Penguin for pulping Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus under right-wing pressure: “What terrified you?” she demanded of them then, drawing a sharp line between herself and corporate cowardice. To now appear under the same publisher’s banner is not balance but branding, and it turns critique into a marketable asset. To pretend this transaction is no different from Chomsky paying his electricity bill at MIT is to misunderstand how dissent is commodified.

It is also no answer to invoke Roy’s personal sacrifices, as the response does. There is no doubt she has paid costs that most public figures would never dare to face: sedition trials, surveillance, constant threats of arrest. These sacrifices are real. But biography cannot become an alibi. The question is not whether Roy is courageous, but whether certain choices, however small, reinforce the very structures she critiques. In a time when genocide in Gaza is televised daily, when Kashmir remains under suffocation, when Indian Muslims live under siege, the spectacle of resistance matters as much as the content of resistance. To see Roy and Modi appear side by side under Penguin’s banner is not a trivial detail, it is how empire metabolises critique, how it turns resistance into brand capital.

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The response also tries to turn the language of solidarity against critique. It is said that what we need is not accusations but alliances. This is true, but solidarity does not mean indulgence. To refuse to question our most celebrated dissenters is not solidarity; it is reverence. If the act of critique is treated as cruelty, then dissent itself becomes hollow, reduced to applause for those already in the spotlight. The problem is not that Roy published a book, but that she published as Roy, with all the symbolic weight her name carries. When such a figure chooses Penguin, the consequences are not the same as an anonymous scholar publishing a paper or teaching at a Western university. To erase this difference is to confuse scale with equivalence.

What truly trivialises complicity is not the critique, but the opposite position, that everyone is guilty and therefore no one is accountable. To say that Roy’s choice matters is not to collapse her politics into hypocrisy, but to insist that complicity has degrees, that some acts feed power more directly than others. In an age where publishers, universities, and cultural industries profit equally from empire’s voice and its critic’s, the question of where and how dissent is voiced cannot be dismissed as mere moral exhibitionism.

The reply ends with an appeal to humility: no one stands outside history; therefore, we must accept messy alliances. That much is undeniable, but humility is not silence. Justice requires clarity, and clarity requires that even our icons be held to account. If Roy is beyond critique, then critique has already been domesticated. To point out the contradiction of publishing with Penguin is not to erase her courage or deny her sacrifices. It is to insist that resistance is not only about what is said, but about the conditions under which it is said.

If one insists on returning to the biblical parable, then let it be remembered differently. The lesson is not simply not to throw stones. It is that truth can be spoken even to those who stand closest to us. The real danger today is not an excess of purity tests, but a culture of indulgence, where sacrifice buys immunity and celebrity becomes untouchable. If solidarity means anything in this moment of siege, it must mean the courage to speak honestly to our own dissenters—not to destroy them but to remind ourselves that resistance too must remain accountable, or it risks being absorbed into the very structures it set out to oppose.

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