Chapter III

Exploration of Human Experiences and the Literary

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 Chapter III

Exploration of Human Experiences and the

Literary Imagination in The Ministry of Utmost

Happiness

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Human Experiences in General

4.3 Hardship of the Transgendered Community

4.4 The City and Community

4.5 The City and War

4.6 Cities of the Dead in the Novel

4.7 Struggle, Response and Imagination

4.8 The Narrator and His Imagination

4.9 Conclusion: The Core Issues

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Chapter III

Human Experiences and Literary Imagination in The Ministry of Utmost

Happiness

4.1 Introduction

Although we may be living in a globalised world, humanity’s natural deep love for

violating the untouchable lines explored in the past hangs about its heads like an

Albatross. It goes without mentioning that the Indian masses have often

revolutionised inter-racial marriages, live-in-relationships, and other sexual issues

previously considered illegal. It is no longer considered profane to represent certain

themes and their reflections in the academic world. Thus, it is the moral fiber, shingle

and moral fortitude of Roy, who does not escape her duty as a writer of realistic

fiction, but affirms her vision and imagination of tomorrow instead. Therefore, the

fiction by Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, unites a story that

portrays the dissimilarities and breaks, but finally unravels the web of human

associations by re-uniting the characters that make peace amid different grievances

towards each other. Some characters change their names and personalities, but

ultimately re-surface and re-evaluate themselves to bring peace. Even when Anjum is

pleased to see her adopted daughter Zainab bind the knot with Saddam, who is

grateful to pay his father, killed in cold blood, the very last rites. Musa, though Biplab

mends his fences with Musa, is united with Tilo. From his will to harmonise

everything lost on the sands of time, Biplab’s thought of initiating a music channel

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with Naga emerged. The novel’s fractured tale is blended with love’s collective

powers.

4.2 Human Experiences in General

It is widely observed into a network of various characters who, and with their

individual decisions, struggle and suffer, separating them into two categories.

Hermaphrodite belongs to the first group of people of characters and constructs their

individual world through their love for music and their own forms of living life. Even

if not suffering from sexual anomaly, another group of characters often find them

inaccurate in the real world due to major issues. In this novel, Roy’s collection of

numerous characters does not reproduce her ideological dissimilarities with the so-

called opinion of unity that, as per her, is the opponent of the select narrative.

It is a storey that comes from an ocean of languages in which, together, main

language fish, unofficial-dialect molluscs, and shining shoals of word fish swim

together, some friendly, some aggressively aggressive, and some openly carnivorous,

a stream of living organisms. Yet they are all improved by what the ocean is making.

Yet all of them, including the people in the Ministry, have no option but to co-exist,

work, and aspire to learn one another. The novel under consideration was published

after a couple of decades, and the experienced writer resumed her literary craft based

on topics and concerns surrounding ordinary human lives.

Aijaz Ahmad’s reflections of Roy’s masterpiece The God of Small Things as

her “sentimentally overwritten prose” (Tickel 110) in The Ministry of Utmost

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Happiness will find a solution where even the plot flows as a common and popular

language quite persuasively. As contrasted with the first book, the novel in question

seems to disappoint ardent Roy readers. But as a writer of outstanding mettle, she

succeeds in equanimously spinning the broken yarns that form fact and fiction. In

addition to loving poet city, serious readers of literature often derive its connotation in

the after-effects of globalization in the range of societal change quietly paving its

way. The Ministry not only reminds readers of the gloomy predictions of Aravind

Adiga, another modern Indian novelist, but also takes us back to Mulk Raj Anand,

once the persecuted champion. Trying to record that Anand’s extended self is both

Adiga and Arundhati is not unfair.

These writers do not seem to sell their soul to Mephistopheles, but with

changing times, create fiction out of their struggle with the oddities of society. In

Arundhati Roy’s literary forte, it is this element of authenticity that emerges

repeatedly.

Roy’s The Ministry represents various threads of protests manifested through a

character network. The storey begins with the hardships of Anjum alias Aftab, the son

of Jahanara and Mulaqat Ali, who fail to mask their son’s unusual characteristics.

Aftab’s mother convinces him to perform operations, but the son protests and insists

on staying in the Hizras’ with painted nails and a wrist full of bracelets and longs to

lift his salwar just a little ‘to show off his silver anklet’ (19). As chance would have

it, Aftab became Anjum... a popular Hijra, a student of Delhi Gharana’s Ustad

Kulsoom Bi, and later engaged in various political activities that sometimes upset the

whole country. Anjum feels frustrated with the state of affairs at Khwabgah after

spending many years with fellow Hizras. She desires to live life as an ordinary

individual who will take her child off to school with her books and tiffin box. A fresh

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ray of light spontaneously emerged one day at Jama Masjid, where she found an

unclaimed and abandoned boy she had wanted to welcome and discovered some of

the joys of raising a three-year-old. Anjum named her Zainab and focused all her love

upon her. The child also referred to the love of Anjum and started naming the former

as an auntie to her mother and other prisoners. In the following facts, the author

describes the latest fond bond: “The mouse absorbed love like sand absorbs the sea.

Very quickly she metamorphosed into a cheeky young lady with rowdy, distinctly

bandicoot-like tendencies (that could only barely be managed)” (31).

Other Khwabgah participants, in comparison to Anjum, have always longed

for viable alliances to carve out their identity. In this relation, Zainab provided filial

emotion floodgates in Anjum and bred envy in Saeeda, who also wanted to possess

the growing child. Smelting Saeeda’s longings, Anjum grew cynical and, in the

situation of Zainab, blamed the former for any inappropriate event, if there is any.

Roy creates tales within the book, rooted in a sort of dissatisfaction with the

present order that destabilizes the solidarity of fellow beings. What makes the novel

unique is the writer’s methodology of weaving and connecting all other histories into

a single object. The novel also shows the division between two cultures, apart from

illustrating the tangled web of interpersonal behavior. This is really in reference to the

inmates of the Khwabgah, who are primarily Muslims, but welcome people from

other communities of different faiths. References to the conflicts between the two

communities are often stated from time to time. The differences between the two main

philosophies damage foreign forces, too: “The poet-prime minister of the country and

several of his senior ministers were members of an old organization that believed

India was essentially a Hindu nation and that, just as Pakistan had declared itself an

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Islamic Republic, India should declare itself a Hindu one” (41). The lines in the

context are a stab at the Indian theory of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, i.e. the entire

world is one community. This is shaken by the divisive policies of our so-called

leaders, which threaten the unity of millions of individuals just to obtain entry to the

corridors of power. Roy does not side with any political party, so far as her

understanding of politics is concerned. The change of states, too, does not affect the

commoners’ destiny. The author makes a perfect contrast between lisping and the

complacency of the captured rabbit from the poet-prime minister. In the following

lines, the passiveness of the current Prime Minister is illustrated as:

He spoke like a marionette. Only his lower jaw moved. Nothing else

did. His bushy white eyebrows looked as though they were attached to

his spectacles and not his face. His expression never changed. At the

end of his speech he raised his hand in a limp salute and signed off

with a high, reedy Jai Hind. (82)

It’s really quite ironic to remember that after the change in guards at the

centre, nothing changes as well. In the minds of people of the years of rebellion

simmering, one culture or the other is now a survivor. The death of Mrs. Indira

Gandhi, the Gujarat riot, the Kashmir crisis are all of these issues that need

considerable attention. However the trend for power leaves most political parties ding

dong, often in the glitter of populism deviating the common crowds, and at other

times calming their wounds in the interests of solidarity. This makes it easy for

several intellectuals, battling nationalism on one side and red tapestry on the other, to

devote themselves to death. True issues are mostly limited to the margins as well.

Graphically, the authors asserted:

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 The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of

scams- coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, stamp paper scams,

phone scams, land-scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and

ammunition scams, petrol- pump scams, polio-vaccine scams,

electricity bills scams, school- book scams, god-men scams, drought-

relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity– card

scams—in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians

and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities

of public money. (102- 03)

Roy’s continuing general emphasis has been and continues to be the assertion

of power; her attention on this field has gone through many phases from confrontation

between state or national government institutions and regional India to the

development of Indian atomic bombs and Indo-Pak tensions to the U.S. reaction to

9/11, and most recently to the War on Terror, which she sees as the militarist

Establishment of the American Empire.

Tilo’s wedding to Naga, Ambassador Hariharan’s son, and their lavish life

soon lost its brilliance. Out of collapse, Tilo leaves Naga as the ex wanted an in solar

independence’ (Roy216). She was exhausted of giving life that wasn’t really her

satanic dress she oughtn’t to beat’ (Roy231). Tilo decided to sink into oblivion while

Naga wanted to shine as a ‘celebrity’. When Naga packed Tilo’s items to be placed in

a carton, he was shocked by the medical reports from Mariam Ipe that exposed the

relationship between mother and daughter. He later learns that the individuality of

Tilo and her abnormal quirkiness is the product of the influence of her mother on her.

He failed to note that Tilo was adversely affected by the distance from her mother, but

Naga realized it was too late. In addition to forcing her to live in a primary residence,

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the absence of love and affection forced her to kidnap Jantar Mantar’s unclaimed

child. But this didn’t last long either, when the police started hunting for the robber,

and they suspected Tilo of doing so. The mother of the unclaimed child had

confirmed the alleged whereabouts of Tilo to the officers. Tilo was forced into the

Jannat Guest House built by Anjum and many others to seek refuge.

The ambiguity behind the abducted girl, originally called Miss Jebeen, the

second, is what further tangles human ties in the novel. Revathy, the real mother of

the child, receives a text from Dr. Azad describing her miserable condition and

loathing relationship with the child. She admits with disgust that the infant was

secretly born and, after her rape, the child was conceived by police departments.

Revathy joined the Communist Party only to take vengeance for the atrocities

committed against her mother by her father. Though because of her stubborn ways,

she was arrested by several policemen who assaulted her one after another. She was

born and gave birth in the rain to an ill-fated child. She despised the child and named

her Udaya, who had a mother-like river and a father-like forest, along with her. The

removal of the child at Jantar Mantar stemmed from both Revathy’s hatred of her and

also from the hope that a certain good soul would take possession of the child.

Revathy reveals in her letter the brutal face of the military services and the generous

essence of recalcitrant persons like Dr. Azad Bhartiya and many others:

I saw many good people in Jantar Mantar so I had the idea to leave

Udaya there. I cannot be like you and them. I cannot go on hunger-

strike and make requests. In the forest every day police is burning

killing raping poor people. Outside there are you people to fight and

take up issues. But inside there is us only. So I am returned to

Dandakaranya to live and die by my gun. (Roy 426- 2)

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 Roy depicts the dark sides of a multicultural country though her writings.

There are people from different castes and religions in India. The different religious

beliefs and caste ideologies sometimes fail to make a balance and end up in violence.

Roy exhibits this notion and shows the maltreatment happening with the lower class

people in society. Most often clashes are between Muslims and Hindus but there are

also clashes in between the same religion.

Speaking about micro narrative, Roy in her novel The Ministry of Utmost

Happiness writes about the minorities of the society. She shows the difficulties of the

transgender community, focuses on caste issues and the survival of woman in society,

lastly the main subject of the novel that revolves around war in Kashmir where she

shows how war and religion in different places can make people helpless. Further, in

The God of Small Things the unaccepted love laws portray the barriers of patriarchal

society and the suppression of lower class people.

4.3 Hardship of the Transgendered Community

In the first place, Roy illustrates the lives of transgender, where she depicts their

limitations, sufferings and deprivations. There is a complex history of transgender

exclusion, ranging from the religious beliefs to the social mythical narratives. In this

section, the unfortunate state of ‘Hijra’ community (transgender) in Indian society

will be discussed as portrayed in the novel. The key text The Ministry of Utmost

Happiness will be centered to explore the situations faced by them (transgender) on a

daily basis.

Transgender people are individuals just like any other human beings but their

duel biological identity makes it difficult for them to survive in the society. As Javeed

Ahmed Rainastates that, “In every society, they are marginalized and forced to live a

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life of an ‘other’. Their behaviour and identity are not similar to the “normal” gender

norms, and this is why they are not considered “normal” ‘man’ or ‘woman’. The

protagonist Anjum faces this discrimination from his childhood, “He’s a She. He’s not

a He or a She. He’s a He and a She. She- He, He- She Hee! Hee! Hee!” (Roy, 12).

The teasing becomes unbearable and Anjum stops going to the music class. Being a

child facing all these pain sometimes makes people traumatic.

The transgender community constitutes marginalized section of the Indian

society. They are denied proper education, health services and other human rights.

Again, Raiana states about Indian Transgender situation in his article that, “Their

education as well as public space is restricted or they themselves choose to live a life

of seclusion due to certain limitations” (829). Roy in the novel portrays how everyday

they are shunned by both family and society equally, and face severe identity crisis as

they could not define themselves in the conventional male and female boundaries.

Concerning this, the novel starts with Anjum’s surviving story as a ‘hijra’. Anjum’s

life is not any different from other struggling transgender persons. She was named as

Aftab after her birth and later became Anjum. Although Aftab’s parents try to hide his

original identity as a ‘transgender’ but Anjum chooses to live with that. Aftab is born

with exceptional talent and passion for music but his physical complexity has been

exposed when his voice changed. He is born with both male and female genitals

which makes his identity more complex. He is not allowed to go to school for his

complex identity. However, one day he discovers a ‘hijra’ outside their home and all

Aftab wants is to be like her. “Whatever she was, Aftab wanted to be her; he wanted

to be her more than he wanted to be Borte Khatun” (Roy 19). Finally, Aftab manages

to enter Khwabgah and starts living with the other people. The restrictions of

transgender in the society are more visible to Anjum when she starts to live there. “In

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the next hour Anjum learned that the Holy Souls were a diverse lot and that the world

of the Khwabgah was just as complicated, if not more so, than the Duniya” (27).

The undergoing pain of being a hijra is seen in every individual living in

Khwabagh. For instance, Bismillah is thrown out by her husband for not bearing him

a child, even though it was her husband who was responsible for it, “Of course it

never occurred to him that he might have been responsible for their childlessness”

(21). Their whole world is filled up with pain. Developments of society do not make

any changes in their lives. As Nimmo Gorakhpuri says to Anjum that, nothing settles

down for them, societal problems like: Price-rise, school admission, Hindu Muslim

riot makes ‘normal people’ unhappy but it solves at times for them, whereas

transgender’s life remains the same with or without any changes of society. Humans

have a riot inside us. There is fighting inside of them. There’s Indo-Pak inside us.

They try to be content in their entire lives, but fail over and over again.

Nimmo, therefore, refers to God in order to determine why God made hijras:

“it was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is

incapable of happiness. So he made us” (23). The pains of social discourse make them

(third gender) hide their identity sometimes. They often seek to avoid desire

altogether. Their public humiliation has no bound. These people try to ease the

sufferings caused by social stratification through hiding themselves or putting their

lives at the whims of others. Sushree Smita Raj states about Roy’s text regarding the

transgender that, “In the text Roy has captured the transformation, the plight, the

struggle of Anjum which symbolically presented for every transgender living in a

democratic country.

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 Roy also portrays this phenomenon in the novel by depicting the character

Raiza. “Shewas a man who liked to dress in women’s clothes” (22). Also it is

mentioned about her that: “However, she did not want to think of as a woman, but as

a man who wanted to be a woman. She had stopped trying to explain the difference to

people (including to Hijras) long ago” (22). Raiza is a man but she chooses to be in

the transgender community as she wanted herself to be a female in a man’s body. In

any conservative society telling the truth of gender complexity is difficult because it is

a significant decision which people rarely accept.

4.4 The City and Community

The chapter explores the distinctive development of urban space in Roy’s The

Ministry, which is built as a series of sometimes overlapping representational

“framings” of two different cities, Delhi and Srinagar. My objective is to demonstrate

that the politics of Roy’s second novel are fundamental to his fictional topography:

the urban setting of the Ministry is not just a multifarious shifting stage for Roy’s

protagonists, but the basis for a lengthy, historically rooted debate on the identity,

opposition and dispute of India today. This extended commentary or critical motif

seeks a presiding motive in the grave or tomb that runs through the novel, linking both

its city-settings, and focusing on broader issues of culture and remembrance. It is also

a work of suffering, one that places the metropolis as a necropolis, and also a place of

death-in-life, as well as discussing the personal arrangement of the existence of

suffering and death. If Roy’s second book can then be categorised as a work of the

living city.

In her lengthy non-fiction work as an activist and public intellectual, Roy has

regularly returned to the cause of social justice and inclusion since the late 1990s:

such as on issues such as caste, communal exclusion, land ownership and the

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environment at national level, and internationally in her post-9/11 writing on

international affairs. These problems, generally understood in opposition to the

‘algebra’ of (in) justice, named after the self-appointed ‘Operation Limitless Justice’

global counter-terror policy of America, often alert the city-settings of the Ministry,

and form Roy’s dissident vision of urban space as an alternate group venue. The

simple, often powerless human sense of the stresses of survival against the grain of an

identified sex is Anjum, the hijra heroine of the Shahjahanabad portions of the

Ministry, even though she is a rebellious character, accepting the resistant, profane

tools of the hijra classes. As instruments against even a male-oriented society in

which sexual misunderstanding is strictly discouraged, they must use traditionally

acceptable means of blackmail which is a kind of extreme burlesque sexuality. A

thematic echo between both the hijras of Shahjahanabad, who challenge the

conventional world of men and women but sometimes counterfeit it in exaggerated

forms, and the city where only they live, can be seen in Roy’s ultimate symbol of

Delhi as an old lady. A ‘Thousand-year-old sorceress’ battling under Hindu

nationalism’s dual attack, and the pressures of a neoliberalism that needs ‘she’ to be

converted into a ‘World Class’ city, meretriciously and with significant lack of face.

Not simply is this an uniqueness which exemplifies on religious myth, as Loh’s

investigation on real-life Gujarat hijra communities give details in The Ministry it is

also a behavior that declares legality in countrywide mythologies, confirmation of

which is found at the sound and shine show at the Red Fort where, on the soundtrack,

in an occurrence detailing the mid-eighteenth-century time in power of Mohammed

Shah Rangeela, the laughter of a court eunuch can be heard. This is taken by the chief

of the Hijra party of Anjum as absolute proof of chronological authenticity:

‘There!’ Ustad Kulsoom Bi would say, like a triumphant lepidopterist

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 who has just netted a rare moth. ‘Did you hear that? That is us. That is

our ancestry, our history, our story’. The moment passed in a heartbeat.

But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present

in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away

from being absent from it. (Roy 12)

Roy introduces Delhi as both a supremely alienating place in the first six

chapters of The Ministry, a predatory world reminiscent of the cruel, massacring

modern city of Aravind Adiga in The White Tiger, and a site of the substitute or

oppressed national community. Perhaps in the ‘Nativity’ scene at the Jantar Mantar in

chapter three, the success report of the city as an unconventional community is

identified, in which the second seems to be Miss Jebeen, taking into account Roy’s

extensive sports analysis and social movements. The Jantar Mantar- the location of a

historic observatory-is a town room accepted as a group objection zone by the police

(after the decision of political protesters on Rajpath was forbidden), and is thus a

place of pan-Indian opposition: grouped there are a group of objection crowds and

supplicants, “communists, seditionists, secessionists, revolutionaries, dreamers, idlers,

crackheads, crackpots, all manner of freelancers, and wise men who couldn’t afford

gifts for newborns” (14-15).

4.5 The City and War

In public space, the city is often depicted as a space of war and as a hideous

expression of the violence exerted by the Indian state in its role as an occupying or

justify force across the two intertwined sections of the Ministry, set simultaneously in

Delhi and Srinagar (with the latter part also extending into the Kashmir Valley) (with

the latter part also extending into the Kashmir Valley). There have been at least three

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ways in which Roy conceptualizes combat in The Ministry, styles that have evolved

from tropes in her non-fiction works, and are arranged around the doubled atmosphere

of her second novel. First one of these is the actual brutality of military invasion and

focuses in the novel’s Kashmir parts on Indian army activities and on the resistance of

rebels. This includes the characteristic exploitation or warping in the novel of realistic

elements and is further described below.

The Second World War encompasses a much wider scope of ‘structural’

brutality carried out by people of the Indian state or in cooperation with it. As Roy has

often noted, India would therefore be ‘at war with itself’ in its protection of injustice

and its punitive response to multiple claims for social equality. In Roy’s previous

Delhi effort, her script for The association between city people and non-city is

similarly cruel the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988): “Every Indian

city consists of a “City’ and a “Non-City”. And they are often at war between each

other ‘The presence of this larger statement in Roy’s city visuals is divided so that the

belongings of policy outcomes and political shifts in the centre (in Delhi) have

ramifying consequences in secondary or boundary spaces (for example Srinagar). As

a personal and social effect, the consequences of war and war-like wars, such as the

destruction of Godhra or the counter-rebellion against Naxalite rebels in Telangana,

return to the national capital. In many other aspects, too, war reaches Delhi. As the

legacy of pain and mental trauma that Anjum carries back to the city after her

exposure to violence in Gujarat, and in the person of Miss Jebeen the second, who is

the physical aftermath of the rape used by Maoist woman soldiers in Telangana as a

weapon. The purpose of civil inequality is often translated as war-like in The

Ministry, as mentioned above, so that the stylistic voice states in the Delhi hospital

where Tilo has an abortion on her release from Kashmir: it was like a fight segment.

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Except that in Delhi there was no war other than a normal one- the war of the wealthy

against all the oppressed.

Not only is the war in The Ministry registered as something of a conflict or

imprecation of municipal property; it is also a power that forms the region’s very

composition. Roy, in fact, transmits a strategy in her book’s symbolic techniques, so

that irrelevant facts become freighted and grandiose. Critics have begun to analyze

Roy’s use of The Ministry’s realistic and anti-realistic effects, and the full results of

these tests could not be thoroughly clarified here. Just as in her narrative, Roy’s policy

in The Ministry is to defamiliarize war as a status so that, as described above, the

recognized essence of its strangeness or ugliness becomes freshly evident, an

imaginative interest in exploded or ‘shattered’ construct as a reaction to conflict and

trauma is also recognizable from her previous work.

4.6 Cities of the Dead in the Novel

The historic connectivity of city and funeral architecture established in Mughal-era

South Asia is evident in the tombs and shrines dominating the built environment of

cities such as Delhi and Lahore. The other fractal pattern of many ancient town-sites

layered in the same metropolitan area also shows and even at the height of the Mughal

period, the walled city of Shahjahanabad was surrounded by tombs and devastation. It

was common practice for inhabitants to take refuge in outlying tombs in times of

strife or civil upheaval, and these spaces also frequently provided some sanctuary for

in on itself refugees displaced by conflict or starvation. In the Ministry, where she is

almost killed by a crowd of Hindu nationalists, the violence experienced by Anjum in

Godhra traumatizes her to the extent that she seems unable to continue in the

Khwabgah, and she moves to a small ‘unprepossessing’ cemetery adjacent to the

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government hospital and the hospital ward, building a new home, the Jannat

(Paradise) Guest House, amid all the tombs there. The step is a familiar one, read

against the urban background of refuge and sanctuary offered by the funeral

monuments of the city. But Anjum’s attempt to find a new home among the dead also

literalizes the dangerous desire of the group at the core of radical Hindu nationalism

and is a reaction to the Hindu mob’s calls to Godhra that the only location for Indian

Muslims is Pakistan or the graveyard. Throughout this way, the landscape of the

Jannat Guest House is a place of both real and figurative separation: a zone where for

those who are not accepted or embraced in larger society, something of a refuge can

be discovered.

Roy projects the contemporary critical and sensitive socio-political issues of

India. Under the covers of secularism and democracy how intolerance, racism,

discrimination and injustice frequently practiced. How people are slaughtered and

innocents are buried in the dark. The text is an uttered truth. She projected a

transgender as a protagonist. By doing that she has given chances to the readers to

have glimpse over such life, a life considered as a curse. But Anjum was never

ashamed of her. She became what she wanted to and never afraid of taking a step

ahead. She was capable of building for herself ‘Jannat’, a heaven. She also adopted a

girl child named her Zainab and started to have a family. Roy used the metaphor of a

tree to describe the life of Anjum. She describes:

She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off

and welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did the opposite. Between

shifts she conferred with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high

branches. She felt the gentle grip of their talons like an ache in an

amputated limb. She gathered they weren’t altogether unhappy at

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 having excused themselves and exited from the story. (3)

In the very first paragraph Roy made very clear the protagonist Anjum is an epitome

of strength, patience and power. She has the courage to accept the feminine side as

well as the nasty opinion of people about her being a transgender. She has the power

to transform the graveyard into a heaven for herself and create a new world. As a tree

she also opened the doors for other helpless rejected people. Roy completely

contradict the belief of the society that transgender are abnormal.

Roy showed concerns for the growing environmental decay due to

deforestation, sewage system and mining projects affecting the ecosystem. As per the

government’s order Adivasi forced to leave their village so that they can build

industries and town. It not only affect the inhabitant bot also the animals that live in

the forest. The Bhopal gas leak incident in India affected the thousand lives. It caused

deaths and some of them became permanently blind. “The Union Carbide pesticide

plant in Bhopal sprang a deadly gas leak that killed thousands of people. The

newspapers were full of accounts people trying to flee the poisonous cloud that

perused them, their eyes and lungs on fire. There was something almost biblical about

the nature and the scale of horror” (129). The poor are exploited in every other way

for the benefit of the nation’s economy.

4.7 Struggle, Response and Imagination

First and foremost issue that Roy took through her central character Anjum is that of

transgender. In the first few lines of the novel Roy has hit hard with the reality when

she writes:

She didn’t turn to see which small boy had thrown a stone at her,

didn’t crane her neck to read the insults scratched into her bark. When

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 people called her names - clown without a circus, queen without a

palace - she let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and

used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease her pain. (MUH

3)

Later upon asked by Imam that how the last rites of the transgender are performed.

Are they buried or cremated? Who bathed their bodies, Roy pointed out the very fact

that humans in Indian subcontinent has been conditioned so deeply to follow a

particular religion, gender and even sexuality that they have forgotten the basic fact

that humanity dies a hundred times with incidents like these. Anjum has a very brave

and apt reply to this she says:

You tell me...You’re the Imam Sahib, not me. Where do old birds go to

die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on

their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All-seeing,

Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements

to take us away? (MUH 5)

In the 7th chapter of her novel, after the simultaneous explosions tore the city, Tilo is

introduced as an architecture student. Her background isn’t really known as she has

been described as: “...a girl who didn’t seem to have a past, a family, a community, a

people, or even home” (MUH 155). The latter didn’t discourage Naga and Musa from

getting affection for her, even though she didn’t belong to any different community.

She was not a beautiful girl as per Indian’s definition of beauty, she was poor, she

lived in slums and yet she was special to these two boys. Naga was even insecure

whenever he was around Musa because he thought Musa had better chances to win

over Tilo. After their graduation Musa went back to Kashmir but later somehow both

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Musa and Tilo managed to stay together and got married to each other. It was the time

of Kashmir being a war zone and Musa was a young man who died during the war.

Musa was a militant. Soon after his death, Tilo married Naga. As the chapter

progresses we witness the third person narration is from a person named Biplab

Dasgupta, who had been in love with Tilo too but because of his Brahmin parentage

never spoke of it. Later, Naga emerges out to be a spokesperson for the Leftists and

Biplab couldn’t understand him and his ideology. According to Naga:

The falsehood of our 330 million mute idols, the selfish deities we call

Ram and Krishna are not going to save us from hunger, disease and

poverty. Our foolish faith in monkeys and elephant-headed apparitions

is not going to feed our starving masses.... (MUH 164)

Roy in the form of Naga has represented today’s young man who is more sensible and

realistic than his ancestors. The man of today talks of reasoning and logic and that’s

what exactly Naga used to do. In a way, the glimpses of Roy herself are seen in Naga.

Roy takes up the issue of nationalism and patriotism in the best possible way through

the two different perspectives of Naga and Biplab who had been in love with Tilo

once. Naga though more practical in his approach was more of an enthusiast as he

never thought of the consequences of his words. Biplab on the other hand was very

well aware of the present day condition of the country as he pointed out: “People are

being lynched for far less. Even my colleagues in the Bureau don’t seem to be able to

see the difference between religious faith and patriotism” (MUH 165).

The Kashmir issue has been an apple of discord between India and Pakistan

since the partition of the country in 1947. People have suffered due to politics which

should otherwise have been instrumental in solving the conflict, mainly because of the

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intervention of terrorism. The Booker Prize awardee Arundhati Roy’s most recent

narrative The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has appeared after a gap of 20 years and

touches upon this problem of the Indian subcontinent. On Booker’s long list again,

this novel straddles the twin domains of politics and literature in that it airs the

writer’s political philosophy in her powerful narrative couched in rich language and a

mocking style. My thesis deconstructs the strategy adopted in the novel and also

administers it a reality check which shows the writer’s courage of conviction even as

the narrative throws up more questions than it answers.

4.8 The Narrator and His Imagination

There has been a lot of criticism that propped up after the publication of The Ministry

of Utmost Happiness due to the incoherency in the narrative pattern. The narrative

starts at the unusual setting of a necropolis, to depict the long litany of necropolitics

created by the corrupted pseudo-democratic setup of India, under the clutches of

globalization, materialization, industrialization, westernization and the other long list

of existing political scams. By the order of structure, the novel starts with the story of

Anjum, a trans-woman, precisely a woman trapped in a man’s body. The time gap is

adjusted to tell the story of Anjum right from her birth to the events that led her to the

first setting of the graveyard. Through this part of the narrative, Roy molds the one

half of the dystopian sphere by etching the caste craze, media politics, gender politics,

globalization, islamophobia etc. that rules the democratic India, which cracked the

whole set up and demolished the “the ministry of utmost happiness”.

This is a direct blow to writers who create junk works just for the commercial

popularity of these works, and is a question towards popular fiction versus serious

fiction. Roy is also harping on the influential and educative value of literature, like

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how Arnold believed that poetry could have redemptive powers and urged his readers

to promote good literature by touchstone method to refine literature to attain this goal.

The ungrammatical sentence used in the above story shows how the role of a writer

and literature itself has been degraded in the contemporary scenario where even art is

approached with a materialistic instinct.

4.9 Conclusion: The Core Issues

Arundhati Roy on Role of Writers in Society On 15th February 2001, Roy delivered a

talk in Hampshire College, Amherst, in the USA which was intriguingly titled “The

Ladies Have Feelings, So . . .: Shall We Leave It to the Experts?” Before this Roy had

published The God of Small Things and three of her subsequent major essays on

nuclear bombs, big dams and on a seedy form of corporate globalization in power

projects. This essay takes up, in its initial pages, the debates around forays of a feted

literary writer into very political and economic issues and justifies the apparent

change of course for her from fiction to non-fiction and from literary to political.

Though she expounds these justifications in a subjective way, the gist and scope of

her arguments transcend personal proclivities or clarifications.

While addressing a crowd in the American college, Roy spoke about India and

its specific complexities: its vastness, diversity, problems among which abject poverty

and illiteracy, and above all corruption, figure in a pronounced way. It is a country

which is simultaneously uber-modern and medieval. And it is “dubious honour” to be

and known as a famous writer in a country where so many cannot read and write

(189). The writers are likely to be observant in nature because they gather their

materials through observations (and sometimes painstaking research). Of course there

are readings, travelling, personal or known life histories; but all this requires a

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constant exposure to the world and later a retreat in solitude to shape these materials

and create something out of these which is, or approximates art. In India the exposure

to daily depredations is a fact of life and usual responses range widely. One may

choose to look away from such realities either out of helplessness or callousness. One

may make a personal vow to become a change-maker at least to his or her own self.

Roy presents the gamut of everyday life: “As Indian citizens, we subsist on a

regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breaking and fashion shows,

church burning and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labour and the digital

revolution, female infanticide and the Nasdaq crash, husbands who continue to burn

their wives for dowry, and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds” (187-88). Though

there are exaggerations in this list as one cannot claim regularity about nuclear tests,

mosque breaking or winning Miss World titles, however, it would be hard to deny the

veracity of the list. The events have happened and perhaps the writer in Roy wants to

keep memories of the events alive for the people, not only for the native population,

but also for people elsewhere who might share bits and pieces of their patterns in

history. Faced with juxtaposed tragic-comic gallimaufry, a writer, along with a

citizen, psychologically learns to adjust to keep basic operational faculties alive. It is

fairly understandable that all share the responsibility (however small) of having made

the situations as they are around them and at large in the world. But a writer as a

professional is unfortunately unable to duck forever the questions concerning such

intransigent materials as abject penury and wretchedness.

Writers seek explanations and create narratives and those narratives help make

sense of the reality—its violence and beauty. Only dogmatically fatalists or purely

naïve can settle in the consolation that things are so because they are ordained to be

such. Most people, being neither fatalist nor naïve, often retreat into narrow

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individualism and hope to face challenges of a near-Darwinist social space with

whatever resources they have. This option is also available to writers who may

grapple, or refuse to grapple, with this sort of disparity between lives. But this retreat

is called by Roy a “fine art” or a “form of insular, inward-looking insanity” or “both”

(189). The core issues that demand examination and re-defining are the following: (i)

the politics of the subcontinent, (ii) the threat to democracy from terrorism, (iii) the

equation between religion and terrorism, and (iv) the terrorists’ claim to human rights.

In an article published long back in The Guardian, Roy had said, “I spoke about

justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military

occupations in the world” (Chamberlain). She needs to acquaint herself with the

inside situation in countries like North Korea, China, and Pakistan itself to understand

the meaning of the term. Putting a question mark on legitimacy is untenable in a

democratic set-up despite its various flaws (and which system is bereft of it?). Roy is

justified in expressing her sympathy for the people of Kashmir who have been

suffering for long. But Roy uses her heart not the brains to analyse the problem. Her

novel fails to go deeper into the history to trace the chain leading to present problems.

Pakistan, in fact, never reconciled to the merger of Kashmir with India back in 1947

when immediately after the Partition; it sent its army dressed as Mujahideen fighters

to annex the state coaxing the ruler of the state to accede to India. Starting with the

West Pakistan’s atrocities in East Pakistan leading to the birth of Bangladesh,

Pakistan reactive policy of ‘a thousand cuts’ through indoctrinated jihadi terrorists,

ethnic cleansing of Kashmir by driving out the Hindu Pandit community, the

unleashing of terrorist attacks all over India including Kashmir. Roy fails to fathom

the issue as also how the peace initiatives undertaken by successive governments to

bring Pakistan to see reason paid back with attacks on Kargil heights or army bases at

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Pathankot, Uri and so on. To her, if the people of Kashmir are terrorized into

demanding Azadi, they should be granted it, but supposing this was to materialize,

what would be the future scenario? It would not stop at that. Rather it would mean

relapsing into the two-nation theory on the basis of religion. In that case, all minorities

dominated areas must secede from India. How is that going to bring peace? Roy

evinces the tendency to flow along with her rhetoric and forget her own protestations

of secularism or she wilfully abstains from deriving lesson for future from history

through a dispassionate and unbiased study.

According to Wilkinson, “If unchecked, terrorism can easily escalate to a civil

war situation, which the terrorist may seek to exploit in order to establish a terrorist-

style dictatorship” (77). And we have seen this happen in the emergence of Daesh or

ISIS! So, there could be no hope at the end of the tunnel if India were to catapult to

the terrorists’ wishes. The problem of terrorism which is talked about in the novel

deserves more insight than is available with the writer. The largest body of terrorists

threatening the world today is doing so in the name of religion. On the face of it, no

religion claims to support terrorism but we know that fundamentalists tend to be

exclusivist with regard to other religions and some of them even support militancy to

advance their agenda. Without discussing it further for want of scope here, I shall like

to quote Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader, who said recently: “People cease

to be Muslim, Christian or any group the moment they become terrorists” (“Ultras

embrace”). Non-violence and universal love are the founding principles of all great

religions. The bogey of violation of human rights is often raised by the terrorists when

they are at the receiving end in a judicial forum. The chief plank of the writer’s

protest is the issue of human rights on which she takes an idealist stand. The issue of

reconciling the ends of human rights with control of violent extremism is indeed

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challenging. The moot question is whether one, who openly flouts the human rights of

peaceful innocent people by killing them like mosquitoes is entitled to appeal for

safeguarding his human rights. Democratic societies, as Wilkinson says, are “clearly

vulnerable to terrorist attacks because of the openness of their societies and the ease

of movement across and within frontiers. It is always easy for extremists to exploit

democratic freedoms with the aim of destroying democracy” (196). In the case of

subversion supported by an outside state, and for the mistake of treating a state’s

terrorist as a freedom fighter, the states “must adopt the clear principle that ‘one

democracy’s terrorist is another democracy’s terrorist” (Wilkinson 207).

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a complete satire aiming to attack the

ways of patriarch society and where a transgender beg for their place, women are

raped and bound to seize their lips, abandoned lives of Dalits and Hindus and

Muslims war. The blind government taking all of the political advantages from those

events. The actual victims are the citizens. Roy always captures real events in her

texts and this so-called fiction is no less. The story takes us through the lanes between

the graveyards to Valley, forest to protest field, and silent tears to demonstration.

Apart from a social reformer, Roy is famous for her wonderful use of words.

Each and every word of her work has a purpose. Her remarks about the political

situation always attracted controversy because very few writers use the medium of

literature to speak the truth. She never thought of popularity or awards or rejections.

But she always attempts to sooth the wounds of the excluded crowd. She tries to see

through their eyes, aims to console them, help them and stand with them.

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