NAME : Mahida Bhumika Prakashbhai
M A Sem - 4
ROLL NUMBER : 4
ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021
SUBJECT :Paper 207: Contemporary Literatures in English
"The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness as a Political Novel"
Introduction:
Arundhati Roy:
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things , which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a 2017 novel by Arundhati Roy, follows the interconnected lives of several characters against the backdrop of contemporary India. The novel skips backwards and forwards in time freely, often pauses for detours into the stories of minor characters and includes several texts within the main text. At heart, however, the novel consists of two main narrative threads, one of which is centered in Delhi, and the other in Kashmir.
The first begins with Anjum, a Muslim Hijra. Anjum, who is born intersex and named Aftab, is initially raised as a boy. Once Aftab enters adolescence, however, he rejects this male identity and joins the Khwabgah, or “House of Dreams”—a local community of Hijras—taking the name Anjum. Anjum spends more than three decades in the Khwabgah, earning her living as an entertainer and a sex worker. Although she becomes quite successful, she longs to experience life as an “ordinary” woman and, in her 40s, adopts an abandoned toddler whom she names Zainab. However, her plans to leave the Khwabgah and live with Zainab as a typical mother and daughter are thwarted by the rise of anti-Muslim feeling in the early 2000s. While making a religious pilgrimage, Anjum is attacked by rioting Hindu nationalists in the Indian state of Gujarat—an experience that leaves her too traumatized to care for Zainab and eventually prompts her to leave the Khwabgah altogether.
Anjum moves into an old Muslim cemetery, intending to stay there until she herself dies. Over time, however, and with the support of friends from her former life, Anjum begins to come to terms with her experiences, and makes a real home for herself in the graveyard. She builds a house, complete with facilities like electricity, and eventually takes in fellow lodgers. The two most significant of these are a blind imam named Ziauddin, and a young man who gives his name as Saddam Hussain, but who is in fact a Dalit seeking vengeance for his father’s murder.
The second major storyline takes place partly in Delhi, but primarily concerns events that occurred in Kashmir in the 1990s, which Roy explores from several different characters’ perspectives. The figure at the heart of all these narratives is S. Tilottama, or “Tilo”—the illegitimate daughter of a well-to-do Syrian Indian woman who “adopted” Tilo several months after the child was actually born. Tilo grows up to attend architectural school in Delhi, which is where she meets three men who fall in love with her: Biplab Dasgupta, Nagaraj Hariharan, and Musa Yeswi. All four characters fall out of contact after college, but their lives intersect again years later in Kashmir, where separatists are waging a war for independence against the Indian Army.
One night in Kashmir, Biplab Dasgupta receives a call that Tilo has been arrested in a raid and sends Musa to pick her up from army headquarters. Both men assume that the “Commander Gulrez” who was killed in the raid alongside Tilo must have been Musa, who had joined the separatist movement after his wife and daughter were mistakenly shot and killed by Indian forces. However, Roy eventually reveals that this was not the case: The man identified as “Commander Gulrez” was simply a mentally disabled man who worked on the houseboat where Musa and Tilo were visiting with one another.
On Musa’s advice, Tilo marries Naga shortly after her arrest. Soon after the wedding, she discovers that she is pregnant but has an abortion because she fears that her own relationship with a child would be no better than her mother’s relationship was with her. She also remains traumatized by her experiences in Kashmir and eventually separates from Naga after 14 years of marriage, no longer able to bear the double life she’s leading. After the divorce, she spends four years in an apartment she rents from Dasgupta, who, after she leaves, finds an array of papers in her rooms dealing with Kashmir and the trips Tilo has made there over the years.
Tilo’s reasons for leaving her apartment are where her story intersects with Anjum’s. Sometime in the 2010s, a series of protests erupt at Jantar Mantar in downtown Delhi. Anjum, Saddam Hussain, and a few of their friends have gone to Jantar Mantar to see the demonstrations for themselves, when they suddenly hear that an abandoned baby has been found in the crowd. Anjum hopes to take charge of the little girl herself, but before she can, a mysterious woman—Tilo—whisks the child away.
Tilo takes the baby on impulse, feeling that the child will somehow “turn the tide”. Fearing police involvement, however, she readily agrees to leave her apartment when Saddam Hussain leaves a card for her with the address of Anjum’s cemetery home, Jannat Guest House and Funeral Parlor. Tilo accordingly moves into the cemetery with the baby and slowly begins to move beyond the trauma of her experiences in Kashmir.
Jannat Guest House, meanwhile, has become a bustling business and community center. One regular visitor is Zainab, who eventually becomes engaged to and marries Saddam, who has decided to set aside his quest for vengeance in the knowledge that other Dalits are carrying on the fight. Both he and Tilo gain additional closure when Imam Ziauddin, Anjum, and the rest of Jannat’s makeshift family symbolically “bury” the ashes of Jannat’s makeshift family symbolically “bury” the ashes of Tilo’s mother, as well as a shirt they have bought in honor of Saddam’s father. Eventually, the group also buries a letter they receive from Miss Jebeen the Second’s birthmother—a Maoist freedom fighter who became pregnant as the result of rape and who has since died in action.
Meanwhile, Dasgupta continues to obsess over the documents he found in Tilo’s apartment. When Musa unexpectedly stops by one night, Dasgupta admits that he now believes the Kashmiri separatists are in the right. However, he doesn’t move beyond this realization and begins to slide into alcoholism.
In the final pages of the novel, Musa visits Tilo at Jannat Guest House; although both he and Tilo are aware that he will likely be killed when he returns to the fighting in Kashmir, she is now able to make peace with that fact. As the novel ends, Anjum takes Miss Jebeen the Second out for a walk through nighttime Delhi, and even the dung beetle that lives near Jannat Guest House feels that “things would turn out alright in the end Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, has come.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as a Political Novel:
Arundhati Roy is a prolific novelist who understands the spirit of the time. Her present novel deals with varied contemporary issues of ‘Modern India’ like “the matter of the hijra communities, the rise of Hindu nationalism, the struggle for Kashmiri
independence, the plight of caste discrimination, the impact of rapid industrialization on the environment and the effects of globalization on society”.India has seen major social and political ups and down in recent years, especially after the year 2000. After winning the general elections extraordinarily in 2014, Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India. Since then, in many people’s opinion, the RSS1 backed Modi government is trying to saffronise2, the ‘secular India’. So, a flock of Hindu nationalist, Cow protectors or Saffron Parakeets, to use Roy’s term, have shot up to execute the process of saffronisation.Many incidents of atrocities against minorities and Dalits in the name of cow protection, love-jihad have been reported since Narendra Modi became the prime minister. 2014 is also the year when the Supreme Court of India in its historic judgement declared transgender people as “third gender” giving them equal fundamental rights like any other sex in India. This is also very central to Roy’s novel because her protagonist is a hermaphrodite, struggling to gain recognition in ‘duniya. Arundhati Roy has overly criticized the current Modi-Government of India as well as its policies in Kashmir in many of her public interviews. The same resentment can be seen in her novel where she is hinting at the political issue of Kashmir and propagation of Hindu nationalism under cover of Anjum’s story. All such happenings and events in India in the past few years inspires Roy’s novel, where she, through her Muslim, hermaphrodite protagonist Anjum is creating the situations and is making her witness these situations, directly or indirectly. The present novel is a mixture of literary and political things. It “encapsulates the rapidly transforming face of Indian democracy with the rise of right-wing political ideology, the degenerating condition of the marginalized groups of people, the atrocities that are rampant in Kashmir valley". As in any literary work “the nature and relevance of allusions are not explained by the writer but relies on the reader's familiarity with what is thus mentioned”, it becomes difficult for the readers to appreciate or criticize the literary piece, if the allusions are not clear to them. A reader who is not aware of the past and current political atmosphere of India may find the present novel difficult to understand or to understand it properly, as the present novel is full of numerous allusions to contemporary people, political situations, events, incidents and news limelights from India. It also covers a few major incidents that happened around the world. Thus in this paper, we are aiming to highlight the political overtones implicit in the novel by explaining a few major allusions used in the novel. For convenience, we have arranged the allusions chronologically.
The Emergency of 1975:
The Emergency was followed by a 20-point program by Indira Gandhi in which ‘sterilization’ to control the increasing population of India was a prominent agenda. According to Mara Hvistendahl, the author of much-acclaimed book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the consequences of a World Full of Men, “an astonishing 6.2 million Indian men were sterilized in just a year, which was 15 times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis".
Anjum in the novel is a participant and witness of the Emergency. Anjum and her colleague, who were at a wedding party in their professional capacity for offering blessings and merry-making, were beaten by the police and were instructed to leave the place immediately as the
police arrested and driven away the host of the party and his three guests from the site. Roy by situating her protagonist in the time period of Emergency seems to be subtly criticizing the whimsical decision of Indira Gandhi, for the imposition of Emergency, that ensued
problems and created disturbances to the common public who suffered a lot in their day to day life.
Bhopal Gas Tragedy:
n one of his articles published in 2004, S. Sriramachari writes about the Bhopal Gas tragedy that “by all accounts the Bhopal gas leak on the night of 2–3 December 1984, is the worst chemical disaster in history". Roy in her novel mentions about the sufferers of one of the biggest tragedies that have occurred in India. On the night of 2nd December 1984, a gas leak incident occurred in Union Carbide India Limited situated in Bhopal, the capital city of Madhya Pradesh in India. The gas leaked was methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic and hazardous gas which killed thousands of people in a few days. According to Sriramchari, the tragedy “took a heavy toll of human lives. People started dying within hours, and more than 2000 lives were lost in the first few days”. The
aftermath of the tragedy was not only massive human loss but also increase in disability and biological deformation of the future generation. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide Corporation was
accused of this mishappening, but he, later on, fled from
India by the support of few Indian politicians to avoid legal prosecutions. Though it is still a debatable issue that who had helped him to flee. Roy in this novel has given a voice to those who have been wounded, died and those who are still suffering due to the aftermath of Bhopal Gas tragedy. Anjum meets the group of fifty representatives protesting at Jantar Mantar demanding for justice, in this case. They are on the protest, with banners which say “Warren Anderson has killed more than Osama bin Laden”. Roy here is
comparing the accused Warren Anderson with the mastermind of September 11 attacks of New York, and in doing so, she is probably mapping the intensity of the
tragedy which was much more tremendous and horrible than 9/11 attacks. By comparing the two accused, she is also highlighting the ‘little justice’ done to the victims of the Bhopal tragedy who are still suffering from its
aftermath. In this connection, Sriram Panchu in his article notes that “Over the years, the death and disability total attributable to the gas leak is far higher than what was then officially recorded, with succeeding generations inheriting the health and environmental
disabilities”. Not enough has been done by the
government to compensate the victims of the tragedy as they can still be seen protesting and demanding justice. While U.S.A has at least “quenched Americans’ thirst for revenge for 9/11” by killing Osama bin Laden, India even failed in alleviating extradition of Anderson from America.
September 11 Attacks:
The whole world was surprised, shocked and appalled at the sudden attack on the World Trade Center buildings in New York City of the U.S.A. on September 11, 2001. An Islamic terrorist group al-Qaedahad hijacked two American domestic flights “American Airlines Flight 11” and “United Airlines Flight 175” and had dashed them into the World Trade Center buildings. That dreadful, abominable and condemnable act of human massacre and terrorism had led the whole world in mourning and profound grief. People across the world were bewailing the action and were one in sentiments with the families of the bereaved. The residents of “Khwabgah” in the novel, who are a thousand kilometres far from New York can be seen sharing the grief and sentiments of the people of the USA. “The usually garrulous residents of the Khwabgah watched in
dead silence as the tall buildings buckled like pillars of sand”. The tall buildings here are a reference to World Trade Center buildings. Everyone in the Khwabgah was watching the live broadcast of the
burning down the towers silently, with their mouths shut in great shock. In that prolonged silence, the utterance of Bismillah, “Do they speak Urdu?” shows his disposition to associate himself with those trapped and losing their lives in the ablaze buildings. This incident in the USA had not only perturbed the United States but India also. The fictional characters of the novel are also no different to it. The Poet-Prime Minister of India in the novel is an allusion to late Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee who has been the Prime Minister of India for three terms.
2002 Gujarat Riots:
The flames of recent terrorist attacks were not yet cooled; a fresh incident happened at Godhra Railway Station in Panchmahal district of Gujarat, where a train coach full of Hindu pilgrims, was set alight by a few vandals. The official investigations done later, figured out that there were few Muslim masterminds behind that incendiarism. The Hindu Pilgrims burnt alive in the fire were returning from Ayodhya after participating in a religious ceremony. It is to be noted here that Ayodhya is also the site of the disputed “Babri Mosque” of Babur which was demolished in 1992, as it is believed by many Hindus that it was built by demolishing the Rama Temple which had existed earlier at the site. The barbaric incident of burning down of train coach and the site of the dispute has also been referred to in the novel. Arundhati writes in the novel that “A senior cabinet minister said the burning of the train definitely looked like the work of Pakistani terrorists". The senior cabinet Minister referred here is Lal Krishna Advani who has been also the ex-Deputy Prime Minister of India. The aftermath of the Godhra The incident was a three-day inter communal riot in Gujarat between Hindus and Muslims. Roy has efficiently situated Anjum and Zakir Mia in the riots. Both characters get trapped in the riots in Ahmedabad, which was burning in the fire of communal riot at that time. Roy delineating the situation during the riot in Ahmedabad writes that Muslims in Ahmedabad were attacked by a mob who were “armed with swords and tridents and wore saffron headbands".
Works Cited :
Chamberlain, Gethin. “Arundhati Roy faces arrest over Kashmir remark”. The Guardian. India. 26 October,
2010. Accessed 17 Sept., 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/26/arundhati-roy-kashmir-india
Ghoshal, Somak. Book Review: The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness By Arundhati Roy. Hufpost. 2 June, 2017.
Accessed 2 Sept., 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/06/01/book-review-the-ministry-of-utmost-
happiness-by-arundhati-roy_a_22121017/
Rooney, Kathleen. “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’: Arundhati Roy’s long-awaited new novel is grand and
perplexing”. Chicago Tribune. 19 June, 2017. Accessed 15 Sept., 2017. http://www.chicagotribune.com/
lifestyles/books/sc-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-arundhati-roy-books-0621-20170622-story.html
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