Profiling controversial social movements: Arundhati Roy’s challenges, style and insights

How can the profile be used to make the politics of the dispossessed – championed by Maoists who resort to violence in self-defence – an engaging topic for global audiences? This is the challenge that faced Arundhati Roy in ‘Walking with the Comrades’. This chapter analyses the issues and techniques surrounding her 2010 long form essay. Her writing uses an unique blend of emotion, rationality and polemics to profile a community and a movement rather than just an individual. Roy describes a dangerous journey with guerrillas through the central Indian jungle, and also records her instant feelings about the experience, the people, their organisation, and the constant threat of attack and/or death. The result is a controversial piece, stretching the range of journalistic tools for the profile. The author of this chapter argues that Roy’s hybrid form of literary journalism is distinguished by generic stylistic techniques that can be used in other contexts and with other content. Her choice of topic provoked strong reactions in India and abroad - both for and against – yet her appealing literary expertise provides a fresh dimension to the political profile.