Hello Monks...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. Today I want to talk about "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" by Arundhati Roy. This book is part of our syllabus. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr.Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of the English Department are learning the paper called Contemporary Literatures in English. So, let’s start friends. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…
📌Here is the link of the professor's blog CLICK HERE
Brief Sketch of Arundhati Roy & Novel :
Arundhati Roy is the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and went on to become the highest-selling book by a non-expat Indian author. She is also a political activist who works on issues such as human rights and the environment. In 2017 Roy published The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in 20 years. The work blends personal stories with topical issues as it uses a large cast of characters, including a transgender woman and a resistance fighter in Kashmir, to explore contemporary India. From land reform that displaced impoverished farmers to the 2002 Godhra train burning and Kashmir conflict, the novel weaves together the lives of people navigating some of the darkest and most violent moments in contemporary Indian history. Roy's protagonists span Indian culture, including an intersex lady (hijra), a renegade architect, and her landlord, an intelligence agency boss. The story spans decades and locales, although it is largely set in Delhi and Kashmir.Roy’s storytelling does not follow a linear pattern. It is composed of a variety of unrelated, fractured narratives, unified by one character – Anjum. These stories stem from situations of grief, abandonment, anger, helplessness, and above all, a lack of agency and subjectivity.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Delhi of Utmost Happiness: The Old City in Arundhati Roy's Words
The Quint
Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
📌If you want to read ' The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' click on the below image. This is the official website of the novel
Let's talk about the questions now.
1) Political Issues in the Novel :
There are several episodes in this story that are related to politics. The novel also covers some of the most heinous incidents in recent Indian history, such as land reform, the 2002 Godhra train fire, and the Kashmir insurgency. It depicts the LGBT community's struggles, sorrow, and right in contemporary India. Several social and political events that occurred in India and other regions of the world are woven throughout the plot. Roy also mentions the 1975 Emergency. Another key subject was debated in 1975 in Delhi's Jantar Mantar and in an emergency. People's statistics regarding numerous topics are compiled here.
The Godhra train burning was an incident that happened on the morning of February 27, 2002, when a fire inside the Sabarmati Express train near the Godhra railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat killed 59 Hindu pilgrims and karsevaks returning from Ayodhya. Here in the second chapter khwabgah of the novel when Anjum and Zakir Mian travel to Ahmedabad, Gujarat this episode is referred to by Roy.
"Though they had no news from Anjum, the news from Gujarat was horrible.
A railway coach had been set on fire by what the newspapers first called
‘miscreants’. Sixty Hindu pilgrims were burned alive. They were on their way
home from a trip to Ayodhya where they had carried ceremonial bricks to lay
in the foundations of a grand Hindu temple they wanted to construct at the
site where an old mosque once stood....."
(p. 37, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)
✅Episode of Jantar Mantar :
Roy spends the first quarter of the novel focusing on individuals gathered at the margins of the Jantar Mantar, a Mughal-era observatory in Delhi that also serves as a site for political protest. The media spectacle of the anti-corruption rallies launched by social activist Anna Hazare in 2011 has captivated the majority of people. The narrator, on the other hand, pulls the focus away from the media spectacle and onto the generally unseen demonstrations of communities longing for a voice in public debate, such as the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas catastrophe and the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared from Kashmir. Outraged by the Kashmiri women's "audacity," no TV camera was directed at them, "not even by accident."
"Down below, on the pavement, on the edge of Jantar Mantar, the old
observatory where our baby made her appearance, it was fairly busy even at
that time of the morning. Communists, seditionists, secessionists,
revolutionaries, dreamers, idlers, crackheads, crackpots, all manner of
freelancers, and wise men who couldn’t afford gifts for newborns, milled
around. Over the last ten days they had all been sidelined and driven off what
had once been their territory – the only place in the city where they were
allowed to gather – by the newest show in town. More than twenty TV crews,
their cameras mounted on yellow cranes, kept a round-the-clock vigil over
their bright new star: a tubby old Gandhian,
former-soldier-turned-villagesocial-worker,
who had announced a fast to the death to realize his dream of a
corruption-free India. He lay fatly on his back with the air of an ailing saint,
against a backdrop of a portrait of Mother India – a many-armed goddess with
a map-of-India-shaped body."
(p.75, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)
The Story of KashmirDEAD = 68,000DISAPPEARED = 10,000
" Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?
No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake. Most of those
engaged in India’s Second Freedom Struggle felt nothing less than outrage at
the idea of freedom for Kashmir and the Kashmiri women’s audacity.
Some of the Mothers, like some of the Bhopal gas leak victims, had
become a little jaded. They had told their stories at endless meetings and
tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief, along with other victims
of other wars in other countries. They had wept publicly and often, and
nothing had come of it. The horror they were going through had grown a
hard, bitter shell."
( p.84, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)
2) Gender Concerns in the Novel :
Some of the key subject issues of Roy's work are gender identities, caste and class inequalities, the faults of neoliberalism, and globalization. Jahanara Begum, Anjum's (Aftab) mother, is taken aback when she discovers a 'girl-part' in her kid. Aftab was intended to be the 'desired' son who would carry on the family name after three girls. Instead, Jahanara Begum was unprepared for the realities of having a Muslim "hijra." She attempts to keep the child's identity hidden until it's no longer a viable option.
In a patriarchal, orthodox, religious household, Aftab strives to control their 'feminine' behavior and feels claustrophobic. For Aftab, whose identity is in flux, gender conventions and preconceptions are major restraints.
In this context, it's critical to comprehend postmodern feminist Judith Butler's thesis on 'performativity,' and how traditional binaries reinforce sexism. Butler explains how sexual identities are nothing but social constructs. “Gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real,” argues Butler, who says that gender subjectivity cannot be restricted to either ‘male’ or ‘female’. Therefore, Anjum’s gender identity is, as Butler argues, always in a “state of contextually dependent flux”. Anjum becomes a prey to derision and castigation because she does not conform to the strict gender categories of either male or female. Butler asserts, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”
3)Environmental Concerns in the Novel/Ecofeminist study:
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy is a multi-level tale that spans ancient history to the current day through flashbacks. It looks at a variety of environmental and feminist topics.
🔍What is Ecofeminism?
Ecofeminism is a subset of feminism that considers environmental issues and the link between women and the environment to be central to its theory and practice. Ecofeminist theorists use the notion of gender to examine how people interact with the natural environment. Françoise d'Eaubonne, a French writer, invented the phrase in her novel Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory is a feminist approach to green politics that advocates for a more equitable, collaborative society with no single dominating faction. Liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism are three streams of ecofeminism that have different perspectives and analyses today (or materialist ecofeminism). Ecofeminist art, social justice, and political theory are examples of how ecofeminism may be applied to social philosophy.
The opening coda laments the departure of sparrows and vultures from Indian metropolitan areas. The reasons for the sparrows' exodus are unknown, but their absence creates an audible hole that even the raucous "homecoming" of crows and bats cannot fill. After feasting on the carcasses of cattle injected with the chemical, the vultures die of "diclofenac poisoning." Diclofenac makes cattle "great dairy machines," yet it acts on vultures "like nerve gas." "Not many noticed the departure of the friendly elderly birds," the narrator continues. There was so much to anticipate." The vultures lose their grip in the future wall as the epic march of development discourses continues.
The other feminist character apart from Anjum is Tillotama, Maryam Ipe, Revathy.In all these characters we can read ecofeminism.
4) Narrative Patterns in the Novel :
The narrative pattern of 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' is quite difficult to grasp. The narration in this work shifts from first to third person. The first part of the novel is told in the third person by an omnipresent narrator who describes Anjum's life and the people who surround her. The second section begins with Biplab Das as the narrator, introduced as 'The Landlord' by the title, and then as Hobart Garson (the name by which Tilo called him since he acted out that role in their skit). As a result of the evidence, this section of the story is subjective and prejudiced, "Or at least that's the way I see it," resulting in an untrustworthy narration.
The novel is disjointed and unwieldy, lacking in cohesion and succinctness. It is a hybrid of two books, one dealing with the hijra community and the downtrodden middle class, and the other with the topic of terrorism in Kashmir. Even the third short storey, about a lady Naxalite, is attempting to be loosely related towards the conclusion. The arrival of Azad Bhartiya in the early section of the narrative is only tangentially linked to the major plot. His appearance at the end of the novel to seek Miss Jebeen's Naxalite mother is also an afterthought, not essential to the plot.
As if this were not enough, there is an exasperating mix of registers also – Urdu poetry, mundane reportage, personal notings, etc., which test the reader’s patience – “frustratingly rambling”, as a critic
comments, “shockingly uneven in its register. Soaring to flights of irony and poetry one moment, plunging into anodyne reportage the next, it appears to be composed by several minds and hands, unable to decide its tone and texture”.
Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is much more than a work of fiction; it is a social commentary on the existent realities of gender, class, caste, and sexuality, which are frequently pushed under the carpet for fear of exposing the democratic society's flaws and loopholes. But it is hard to imagine an equitable society where various lives may coexist without fear of compulsion, castigation, violence, or criticism until these flaws are addressed and ways to bridge the gaps are found. Roy's storey challenges us to consider, rethink, conceive, and reinvent our own positions in society, whether privileged or oppressed, and to fight toward a more equal and powerful world.
Additional Resources :
Work Cited :
- Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge
- Ghoshal, Somak. Book Review: The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness By Arundhati Roy. Hufpost. 2 June, 2017.
- Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. 2017.
- Suleman, Danish. "political and Gender issues in Arundhati Roy’s "TheMinistry of Utmost Happiness"Masalah Politik dan Gender dalam Arundhati Roy "The Ministryof Utmost Happiness"." ReserchGate (2020): 8.
- Tikkanen, Amy. "Arundhati Roy". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Nov. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arundhati-Roy. Accessed 11 January 2022.
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