Azadi (Freedom) gathers essays Arundhati Roy wrote between 2018 and 2020, addressing the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the crackdown in Kashmir, alongside broader reflections on language, translation, and fiction's political role. The title — Urdu and Hindi for "freedom" — has been a rallying cry both for Kashmiri self-determination and for India's own protest movements, and Roy traces its contested, shifting meanings across the book.
Roy writes as both novelist and activist, moving between close political reportage — the CAA-NRC protests, majoritarian violence, media capture — and more personal essays on what it means to write fiction, and in which language, under conditions of rising authoritarianism. Expanded editions add material addressing the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on India's poorest and most marginalized communities.
The collection extends the political arguments of Roy's earlier nonfiction (The Cost of Living, The End of Imagination), applying them to India's most recent decade of Hindu-nationalist government.