Feted in the salons of the West she may be, but Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy now finds herself in some hot water at home.
The successor to her acclaimed God of Small Things - a slim volume entitled The Greater Common Good - has recently been burned on bonfires and refused shelf space by frightened booksellers in India. Supreme Court judges in New Delhi have accused her of being part of an attempt to undermine their dignity, even to pervert the course of justice.
The growing brouhaha is over a campaign against dams, in which Roy is playing an increasingly vociferous part. This week, the diminutive author is taking part in a much-publicised rally against the Narmada Valley project, designed to erect more than 3,000 dams along a river more sacred than the Ganges. The protest will take her and fellow activists in to areas soon to be submerged under hundreds of feet of water.
"Her entry on the scene has really given the anti-dam movement a shot of adrenalin," observes one development commentator. "She's stirred up a real hornet's nest."
The Greater Common Good has been hailed by environmentalists as a great work of committed journalism. Based on several visits to the Narmada Valley in western India, it delivers a stinging critique of contemporary development technology. It concludes with a rousing exhortation to the public to join the campaign against the dams, in particular the Sardar Sarovar project which will soon inundate dozens of villages and dispossess thousands of people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra states.
"Whether you love the dam or hate it," she writes, "whether you want it or don't, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that's being paid for it . . ."
Roy argues that big dams usurp the resources of the countryside, removing them to the city to serve a metropolitan elite. She says more than 80 per cent of rural households in India have no electricity, 350 million people live below the poverty line and 250 mil lion have no clean drinking water.
"Many people think her a bit of a jholawallah (a cloth bag carrier)," says one social commentator, "the sort of person who wears sandals and carries a placard, what you'd call a peacenik or an old hippy, but there's no doubting her passion."
Roy has courted controversy since last year's publication of an impassioned essay about the dangers of the Indo-Pakistani arms race. India's nuclear advocates were outraged. Conservative elements in Indian society were again critical when in January she announced she would hand over the royalties from an ethnic language edition of her novel to a minority-rights organisation.
She really threw down the gauntlet though with the publication of her anti-dam treatise and the donation of her £20,000 Booker prize winnings to the Narmada protest movement.
The catalyst was a Supreme Court judgment allowing the continued construction of the huge Sardar Sarovar dam which was originally designed to last four years. In recent months it has been raised a further eight metres, ensuring that, according to protesters, up to 60 villages will be either wholly or partially submerged during this current monsoon season.
The anti-dam movement has little support outside a small clique. Millions of farmers, hoteliers and manufacturers in the project area believe the construction of the dams will bring employment and prosperity to the region.
Green issues are not the sexy cause in India that they are in the West. When India tests a nuclear device, you do not find thousands of chanting students marching through the streets of New Delhi.
Similarly, the country's huge dam construction project has aroused little more than muted protest from a small coterie of people. The Rally for the Valley, which sets off from the capital today, is expected to attract no more than a few hundred people, mainly artists, environmentalists and intellectuals.