The limits of empathy in literature?

This paper deals with the ethical, political and aesthetic issues linked to literary empathy, within a context of globalised circulation and mediatisation of literary works. It focuses on the study of a singular work that lends itself particularly well to such reflection: that of the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, a world-renowned author often presented as the voice of the oppressed in contemporary India. The paper starts with a contextualised analysis of the heated debate that Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen sparked in the 1990s, a debate to which Arundhati Roy actively contributed. This is followed by a micro-reading of a passage from Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017, 2018 for the French edition), to see how interpretations from a close reading allow one to shift, or even partially respond to, the problems of literary empathy raised in criticisms of the film