The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

  I am Asari Bhavyang and I am a student of English Department at Mkbu. recently we completed "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness" book by Arundhati Roy. we got a goggle classroom task by Dilip Barad sir. we have talked about Political issues in the novel,  Gender concerns in the novel, Environmental concerns in the novel / Ecofeminist study, Narrative Patterns in the novel. so, let's begin...

Arundhati Roy :-

Arundhati Roy, born in 1960 in Kerala, India, was an architecture student at the Delhi School of Architecture. Although she was trained in architecture, her interest was not in that field; she envisioned herself growing as a writer. Her first work, ‘The God of Small Things’ (1997) kickstarted her career as an author. This work led to her winning the Booker Prize for Fiction and was published in 19 countries in 16 languages, selling around 6 million copies. Her general style of literary output was composed of political nonfiction, capitalism, and struggles related to her homeland. She was often met with conflict with Indian authorities because of her active role in numerous human rights and environmental causes. She faced criticism because she vocally supported Naxalite insurgency groups. She voiced out her concerns and thoughts about various issues such as, the need for inclusion of Afghan women in the peace talks between the Untied States and Taliban, against the arrest of a professor who was arrested for alleged Maoist links, Kashmiri independence, prevention of the construction of dams in Narmada etc. Hence, in recognition of her involvement in her advocacy of human rights, in 2002, she was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 and also the Sahitya Akademi Award from the Indian Academy of Letters in 2006.

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness :- 

1) Political issues in the novel:- 

The novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, reflects a specific political purpose and acts as a tool of political propaganda. The idea of political fiction became common in the twentieth century, mostly after World War I. This new fictional pattern gave a chance of expressing to those sensible groups of writers who were disturbed by the power-hungry dictatorial governments. Those political works included different political ideologies, the impact of politics on society, people, their hopes, and their fears. Writers found space for writing on issues that were dominant at that time, such as war, gender discrimination, justice, race, economic problems, etc. thus, the genre of political novels gained the attention of the writers.

However, the idea of a political novel has remained unclear because the concept of politics, to be represented by a political novel is vague as well as complicated. In a layman's language, a political novel is a work of fiction that discusses politics, politicians, governments, political leaders, etc. It discusses political behavior and most importantly contemporary ideas, life, and issues of society. Any novel written in support of a particular faction, is in effect a political instrument, even if not in intent. A writer may claim to be impartial, yet the readers may observe the ideology in the work. Such novels present phenomena or people, with intense political seriousness. Joseph Blotner, in his book The Modern American Political Novel, explains the concept of political fiction in detail. He has classified the political novels into the sub-categories, such as, "the novel as a political instrument", "the novel as a mirror of national character", "the novel as an analyst of group behavior" or "the novelist as a political historian". He has further explained the concept of the novel as a political instrument in his book. By political instrument, he means a novel that serves a specific purpose, mainly as a tool of political propaganda for a particular ideology, party, or individual. It could also have been written favoring a particular political faction over the other. 

According to her, the solution to the problem of Kashmir is independence from India. Her stance on the Kashmir issue has been highlighted in the various stages of the second part of the novel. Her ideology of freedom for Kashmir is evident through the character of Musa, a freedom fighter. The novel depicts the activist side of the author, through the characters and the incidents narrated. The historical references of the Ahmedabad Massacre and the Kashmir fight also illustrate the political ideas of the writer. Her choice of the word "Ministry" in the title also shows that the novel aims to point out the political issues under the cover of social matters and the lives of the unique characters.

2) Gender concerns in the novel:-

Hijra is a distinctive South Asia known for their gender and sexual difference and associated with their transgender and intersex identities. Otherwise known as transwomen, they are traditionally subjected to prejudices and embedded within narratives of exclusion, discrimination, and the subculture. As a result, Hijras are typically perceived as isolated, abject, and passive victims who remain social and economic peripheries. Concerning the stereotypical image of hijras, this study explores Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to examine the novel’s problematization of hijras in India. In this novel, sexual and gender non-conformity are addressed within characters desiring to be neither a man nor a woman.  This framework allows for a manifestation of gender flexibility and feminine writing as a tool for self-emancipation. Both protagonists Anjum and Tilo, illustrate that hijras are not predetermined but are formulated in a complex process of a conscious rewriting of the self. While the former character resists heteropatriarchal normativity through her conscious alterations of the phallogocentric structure of her Urdu language, the latter defies societal conventions of family and marriage with unorthodox views and actions that are materialized in the writing of her story.

3) Environmental concerns in the novel / Ecofeminist study :-

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, draws out the issues of the deteriorated condition of river due to construction of dams and the sewage system of industrial wastages, the ‘otherness’ of animals , birds, fishes and trees and their easy exploitation, the wiping out of sparrow, vulture from biodiversity due to excessive scientific manifestations, the predicament of zoo animals, the abolition of forest for the steel and mining factories and the uselessness of nuclear testing etc. The author unravels that most of the environmental delapidations are the result of Euro-American ideology of ‘development’ project which is a disguised form of neo-colonialism and imperialism.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness investigates the current environmental problems and my whole-hearted endevour in  Roy’s influential task in the light of postcolonial ecocriticism.The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has shown this in an unobtrusive way and demands a sharp and scholastic observation from the readers. The novel opens with a prologue and the prologue provides author’s concern for lower species. The unquenchable thirst of human beings has led the demise of ‘white-baked vulture’, the scavengers of dead and the death of sparrow due to environmental changes, -

 “sparrow that have gone missing, and the old white-baked vultures custodians of dead for more than a hundred years, that have been wiped out,”

Thus Arundhuti Roy has expressed her libertarian and ecological ideas in a penetrative way in this novel. The present novel criticizes the development and questions the state-oriented policy and betrays the root cause of ecological problems and explores the after-effect of dominating nature. She caters the whole world by hinting solutions to the ecological problems prevalent in the present world. She tries whole-heartedly to save the costly lives of the people of this world by creating an eco-consciousness among readers. Arundhati Roy’s only concern is to create public awareness about environmental degradation and its negative impact of human life and other species through her writings. And as a responsible writer she has penned her experience beautifully in her present novel and successfully decodes the ecological imperialism of First World nations.

4) Narrative Patterns in the novel :-

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”. The when Anjum and her party on the process of molding the utopia within the necropolis reaches Janata Mantar, the conjoining point of the novel, Anjum falls into a rabbit-hole, and the readers are tangentially taken into another dystopian half, to bring out some characters from that side into the fabrication of the utopia in the necropolis.

 The novel depicts the tales of four college mates, whose lives are intertwined by love. Tilo, the unconventional, rebellious, architect student and a to-be member of Anjum‟s utopia, is the unfulfilled love of the next narrator Biplab Das, who later to become a bureaucrat, Naga later to become a successful journalist and Musa, a Kashmiri forced to intensely involve himself in the struggle for freedom. The other half of the already framed dystopia is created through the star-crossed love of Musa and Tilo by showing the injustice of the government towards the downtrodden marginalized masses like women, poor, Kashmiri people, orphans, untouchables etc. This phase deconstructs the stereotypical notion of hero-worship of army,and the corruption in other governmental institution like police forces, doctors, politicians etc.

The narrative builds up the dystopian society, giving the readers an apocalyptical warning, whereas in the undercurrent Roy creates a utopia, build up by the rejects of the society under the guidance of Anjum. Miss Jebeen the second or Miss Udaya Jabeen is the ultimate diptych link in the narrative, connecting both halves of the dystopia, and is considered as a savior, who would help in the propagation of the maneuver of empathy, which in turn shows Roy‟s hope in the future generation, unlike her tone in The End of Imagination.