The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
Hello readers ! The blog is part of my academic writing. The blog is about various topics of the novel The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy.
ABOUT WRITER
Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to Mary Ro, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala and Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager from Calcutta. When she was two, her parents divorced and she returned to Kerala with her mother and brother. For some time, the family lived with Roy's maternal grandfather in Ooty, TamilNadu. When she was five, the family moved back to Kerala, where her mother started a school.
Roy attended school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedal, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, where she met architect Gerard da Cunha.They married in 1978 and lived together in Delhi, and then Goa, before they separated and divorced in 1982.
THE MINISTRY OF ATMOST HAPPINESS
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, published in 2017, twenty years after her debut, The God of small Things.
| Author | Arundhati Roy |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Mayank Austen Soofi |
| Country | India |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Set in | |
| India Publication date | June 6, 2017 |
| Pages | 449 |
Arundhati Rao is an acute observer of the very fabric of Indian society. She is an activist and social reformer for the marginal, downtrodden and a revolutionary spark for the 21st century litterateurs. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel of Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy which is published in 2017 after twenty years of the publication of his debut novel The God of Small Things.
The novel recounts some of the egregious events of Contemporary Indian history such as land reform, 2002 Godhra train burning and Kashmir insurgency as well. It illustrates the sufferings, pain and the right of the LGBT community in contemporary India. The novel also incorporates many social and political events occurred in India and other parts of the world against the backdrop of its story. The paper argues upon the political and gender issues with the reference of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Rao.
Arundhati Roy has written before, “…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. … They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin.… In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.” And that is what The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is – a Great Story.
The novel, perhaps more relatable and somehow yet more distant than Roy’s maiden venture, tells more than one story. It tells of a colourful range of characters hitherto unimaginable on any canvas other than India. And yet, it feels that the palette has been tinged with a hardened reality which is precisely what makes it relatable to us and our time. The characters are effortlessly interwoven with the political milieu and motivations of India over the past couple of decades – the time Roy spent writing this novel, since God of Small Things fetched her the acclaimed Booker Prize. Through it all, Roy paints the pictures of every political event that has shaped the geography of our country, providing (affectionate? acrimonious?) nicknames to each relevant member of the raajneeti.
Whether these are just another literary brushstroke, or a well-planned device to evade defamation suits, is left to the reader to pick his version. But one thing is clear – Roy makes no apologies for the unmistakable identification her pseudonyms provide.
We are taken on a journey which shows us a diverse world of Delhi’s eunuchs via Aftab, who soon becomes Anjum, referred to as a ‘hijra’. She refers to her gender identity confusion as her inner Indo-Pak – an internal conflict that has no solution in sight. She meets an unusually-named Hindu Chamar who is shielding himself from his own history of demons. They meet Tilo, a mysterious kidnapper of a baby from Jantar Mantar, the venue of unfulfilled promises. The mystery is unravelled to the reader through the eyes of her three lovers – at first, all members of a theatrical production, and then, each forming a different vantage point of Kashmir.
This story has been told using redolent imagery so strong that it transports you first-hand alongside the characters and the 20 years they experience. Several starkly real moments come, as a genius writing tactic, in the form of letters or stories within the novel – a late one being a letter from a raped, tortured Communist woman, born illegitimate, on the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, with a threat to break up Anjum’s bliss.
One lands up rooting for them as they camp together in a shanty of a lodging house erected on a burial ground, and laconically called Jannat; but one also mourns for their losses and their heartaches, which are only partly cured by the subtle flavour of magic realism Roy imbues in her characters’ endings. Reader and characters both feel at peace as new lives commence at a graveyard.
Evidence of Ecofeminism in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
In the novel, Roy explores the environment degradation and the plight of women and their conflicts with the outside world. Arundhati Roy’s stature as an Indian female writer is both reformative as well as rebellious. Her fiction is not grandiose, but rather intricately designed and richly layered with a generous amount of thematic concerns, symbolisms, well-crafted characters and meticulously architectured plot. Her current novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), with its epic-like stature traverses beyond the dictates of conventional storytelling.
This novel is neither a political treatise nor a journalistic report that condenses the facts about life in India. On the contrary this novel explores the societal dimensions and the political sphere with curiosity so as to provide the readers with wholesome realities. The narrative of Roy is deeply informed, seamlessly woven pragmatic and judicious.
The corpus of Indian writing in English is an outcome of a counter-culture that came into being as a post-colonial narrative strategy. The method of subversion has permeated the genre of fiction writing in India to such an extent that writers like Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, Suketu Mehta, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Amitav Ghosh do not hesitate in experimenting with literary strategies and in promoting the interplay of genres. Literary works of Roy have unfailingly contributed to the cult of environment writing.
Issues ranging from Indian vultures crises, deforestation, dismal condition of migrants and quarry workers, predicament of captivated zoo animals, deficient health facilities, scum-laden rivers, mushrooming slums, mounting poverty, speedily increasing dumping grounds, unplanned urbanization and enslavement of Adivasi (Tribal) girl have been comprehensively studied. She writes to inspire action and encourage her readers to participate in the process of nation building and for creating a more sustainable planet.
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