Che adorns tee-shirts, coffee-mugs, stationery, caps and any number of material objects, most of which have little to do with the avowedly left-oriented social reformer and revolutionary. “Regimes of value,” as John Frow reminds us (2002), organise the aesthetic space in which an icon is circulated: so Che's visage circulates simultaneously among dissident teenagers, grunge dressing and high-end fashion products just as his Motorcycle Diaries does. “Insurgent celebrityhood” is my term for the inextricable link of mobility with dissidence, a mobility that then, within the regimes of value of contemporary popular and public culture enables the mobilisation of protest, sentiments and political activism. The sense of mobility is of course embedded in the very word “insurgence,” from “insurgere,” meaning “to rise up in revolt.”

Starting off her career as a scriptwriter for films, receiving critical acclaim and literary celebritydom for The God of Small Things (1997), and finally a substantial mass popularity among activists stemming from her association with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Roy has demonstrated a kind of celebrity that is rare in India. For a literary figure to metamorphose into a cultural commentator is fairly easy—in recent times we have seen the best-selling author Chetan Bhagat do this. For an academic to be involved in public debates is also common enough (Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha, Ashis Nandy, Romila Thapar, Shiv Vishvanathan, Kancha Ilaiah). Her early activist writing included a clinical-yet-poetic dissection of Shekar Kapur's biopic, Bandit Queen, on the Indian woman bandit, Phoolan Devi (Roy's review essay, “The Great Indian Rape Trick” appeared in two parts in 1994 in the now-defunct periodical Sunday, well before the release of her novel). In this early piece, Roy made an explicitly feminist reading of the film, arguing that it rendered the protagonist only as a rape-victim but, most importantly, ignored the caste and land-ownership angle which Mala Sen's biography (which Shekar Kapur adapted) highlighted, and neutralised the rebel-woman. The debate provoked by Roy's defence of the woman bandit (see, notably, Sen 1995) gave the world the first glimpse of what Roy clearly does: it discerns, and it divides readers.