Pandya Chandani : The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Hello Friends!

Today I'm going to write about Thinking Activity Task given by our Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir. We have one paper on contemporary literature and in this blog, I am going to discuss a few questions about a contemporary novel by Arundhati Roy The novel 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'.

Here is the link to the teacher’s blog.

https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2021/12/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness.html?m=1

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, political activist. She is best known for her first novel The God of Small Things which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She was also awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a very fascinating novel by Arundhati Roy. It was published in 2017. It’s a very interesting novel. It discusses issues like political, transgender, social and especially it covers contemporary India. It was her second novel.

Originally published :- June 6, 2017
Author :- Arundhati Roy
Genre :- Fiction
Publisher :- Hamish Hamilton
Pages :- 449
Setting :- India

Here are the questions to ponder.

1. Political issues in the novel.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness paints a portrait of contemporary, postcolonial Indian politics. Through the differing points of view of the story’s characters, Arundhati Roy illustrates the many ways in which various groups of the Indian population have been let down and oppressed by their political leaders after the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan. In particular, through her illustration of the ongoing Kashmir conflict between these two countries, she highlights corruption in all political groups involved: the Indian army, Indian leftists who oppose the occupation of Kashmir, and the Kashmiri locals and militants who apparently resist the military occupation. Each group claims to have a moral or religious imperative behind what they advocate for, and yet they take actions that are often selfishly motivated by monetary gain and therefore out of alignment with their alleged beliefs. In questioning the integrity of each group involved, Roy ultimately sheds light on the ways in which corrupt capitalism undermines the supposedly moral intentions of the groups involved in the Kashmir conflict.

2. Gender concern in the Novel.

The first half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is told through the point of view of Anjum, a transgender woman and former sex worker who was born intersex—with both female and male genitalia. (Her mother gendered Anjum a boy and named him Aftab, and he/him/his pronouns are used to refer to Aftab at the beginning of his life before he starts identifying as a trans woman.) Through Anjum’s eyes, readers are exposed to the various inequalities and forms of violence that plague the city in which she lives. The Urdu word for transwoman is Hijra, an identity that is very important to Anjum and the other trans women she lives with. Through exploring the ways in which Anjum navigates gender identity and by portraying her trans identity in a positive and nuanced light, Roy challenges not only the idea of a gender binary, but also other artificial forms of social division—particularly nationality and religion. Although Anjum lives in a highly sexist society that privileges the masculine over the feminine, her identity as a Hijra grants her a special social status that sometimes protects her. Traveling to a popular Muslim shrine, Anjum and a host of other pilgrims are attacked by Hindu terrorists seeking justice for Hindus recently killed by Muslim militants. Every Muslim in the area is massacred, except for Anjum, who is spared because, as one of the extremists observes, “killing Hijras brings bad luck.” In this instance, Anjum’s marginalized identity literally saves her life. Although she suffers discrimination in her society for being a Hijra, in instances like this, the folklore surrounding Hijras—that they are “holy souls trapped in bodies”—protects her. While Roy in no way seems to argue that being a Hijra is a privilege, she does highlight some ways in which Anjum’s inability to participate in the gender binary has special, positive effects.

3. Environmental Concern

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy has these lines as her opening:

At magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unbinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures…that have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning.Starting positively with the description of the magic hour of twilight, Roy wasting no time dwells into the negative effects of human greed. It is humans who want to eat ‘more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate chip’, drink ‘more mango milkshake’.

The harsh reality of how the behaviour of humans is affecting the environment and destroying the lives of birds and animals which are as much a part of the living community in this earth is elaborated by the author. This is the theme which runs through the entire novel.

River in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. As Tilo walks near the riverfront and stopped on a bridge, she ‘watched a man row a circular raft built with old mineral-water bottles and plastic jerrycans across the thick, slow, filthy river. Buffaloes sank blissfully into the black water. On the pavement vendors sold lush melons and sleek green cucumbers grown in pure factory effluent’ (234). Giving a true picture of the havoc caused by the river Jhelum, in Kashmir, during the floods, Roy writes: ‘When the Jhelum rose and breached its banks, the city disappeared. Whole housing colonies went underwater. Army camps, torture centres, hospitals, courthouses, police stations – all went down. Houseboats floated over what had once been market places’ (264).

Narrative Patterns

The narrative pattern of ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' is very hard and tough to understand. Because it is not easy to understand Roy’s technique of writing. One of the best parts is here that describes sadness in writing.