Review of Arundhati Roy's "The Ministry of

Utmost Happpiness"

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(Dr Karanam R Rao)

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Arundhati Roy's newest novel, "The

Ministry of Utmost Happiness,"is a gritty and baggy fictional tome that defies the
binaries that operate the narrative structure of fiction.Rather, the novel makes an
attempt to agglutinate as much as possible into its narrative structure.The spa
able to be able absorb hefty details by closely moving towards the genre of realism
that became most popular with writers like Naipaul It's the mid-space between
fiction and meta-fiction that becomes a leeway for creatively exploiting the post-
truth reality as lucidly and autthentically as possible.Roy's deft choice of the
subject is so geared as to encompass contemporary reality of twenty-years period
that spans between her first novel "THe God of Small Things " and the present.She
says:" I write a book when I've to write.The only ambition I've is the ambition of
art.I wanted to experiment to be able to throw it away."This the solid core of the
novel that reveals Roy in her most ambitious best, with material of the twenty long
eventful years of contemporary Indian history shaping the finer contours of her
fiction.It also carries her felt-experience recorded with utmost fidelity so as to
achieve fictional verisimilude.As a "performative radicalyst",Roy shifts the whole
axis of the novel into an exposition of the political and social realities as she
confronts them.As Human Right's activist who is wedded to HUaman Rights and civil
liberties she has cherished, and aspired to continue with them, her ciri de couer
is as much against the architecture of a political hegemony that denies freedom to
individuals as against "man's in humanity to man." Her activism so pervasive that
it, at times, throws up the fictional deriguer larboard that destroys the ambient
narrative movement.
In fact, there is not much of a story in
thenovel.It centres around Anjum, who runs out of her family to join the hijra
commune intending to lead a life of freedom and seclusion , away from the glare
and glitter ofthe civilised urban Delhi's life.In fact, the self-chosen her privacy
becomes her modus vivendi, Here is succinctly the description of her predicament
painted by the novelist in the starkest of details: "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 confirred the ghosts of vultures that loomed in
the high branche.p.1"She calls her home "Kwabgah" , a parallel world whose
inhabitants are marginalised and dispossessed individualslike Sayeeda,Zainab,Ustad
Khusloom,Saddam, and Mary, and the irrepressible Nimmo Gorukpuri with whom she
shares her life of privation.Hell closes in on them with the shift occurs in their
lives when there is a change in the politics of the country with the advent of the
BJP rule that ushers in the politics of division. Roy describes the evntualities
that followed in some telling details:"Gujarat ka Lalla had swept the polls and was
the new Primew Minister.A devotee giftedtakes on him a pin-striped suit with Lalla
Lalla Lalla woven into the fabric.He wore it to greet the visiting Heads of
State.Every week, he addressed the people of the country directly in an emotional
radio broadcast.He disseminated his message of Cleanliness, Purity and Sacrifice
for the nation...p.401".This bears a resemblance with real persons, but one cannot
read too much between the lines.Here reality merges with the fictive nature of the
narrative.The truth is that Roy fails to play down her suppressio vari such that
her anger takes over the sobriety she could have allowed to seep through the pages
of her book.She writes elsewhere:"How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming
it and everybody.p.416 "3.This is her own admission as to why the novel became so
discursive and rambling that one needs to piece th togeth to arriv at the meaning.
 This sets the tone and texture of the whole
novel that takes on the establishment in the form of an extended diatribe .Roy is
as much against the forces of evil let lose by the present-day rulers as against
the agendising politics unleashed by the ruling government.Though Anjum becomes a
celebrity on her own, and being visited by politicians of all hues, cinema
personalities, and journalists seeking her favour, she is haunted by the social
ostracism that impedes her flight into freedom."Anjum would ordinarily have been in
danger.But her desolation pretected her.Unleashed at last from her social
protocall,it rose her up in all her majesty.p.61".And she fights back the saffron
brigade that tried to sujugate her.She defends all her flock from any humiliation
from politicians or social groups which hindered their progress towards self-
definition and recognition as homo sapiens.This quest for self-definition made her
stubborn and revolting, and transformed into a veritable viragom and a woman with
a substance.
It's only in the second half of the book,
when ths scene shifts to Kashmir, that the narrative acquires both self-defining
precision and inrernal cohesion by shifting the locus on the triadic characters-
Tilottama,Naga and Musa, the architecture students of Delhi university whose lives
take diverse courses of experiential awareness..Naga becomes a journalist ,and
takes on the establishment, while Musa tries to dangle with bellicose
insurrection ,and joins the band of Kashmiri jihadis only to be hunted down, and
rendered a homeless.In his serach for freedom and with a missionary zeal for
collective happines, he espouses the cause of all the people of Kasmir.With his
mission turning shattered and dented, he turns to unbridled violence, aspiring to
liberate the land and his people from military occupation,The love- story that
could have run smoothly between Tillo and Musad edges them out into a series of
traumatic shits .Musa is caught by the Captain Amrik Sigh, the miltary officer
postsed in Kashmir to supress jihadism, but manages escape into freedom.Roy
describes how militancy in Kashmir raised its hydra-head abetted by terrorists in
Pakistan, and how the Indian military rulers failed to curb terrorism in spite of
the strong-arm techniques they deployed to extirminate terrorism from Kashmir.The
army camps became veritable torture chambers.Poeple were arrested and beaten up,
and many times they became so distraught that they have lost their hope to to live
peacefully .Schools were closed and colleges and universities shut down for
months.Roy describes the trauma that Kashmir went through in telling details:"As
the war progressed in the Kashmir valley, garveyards became as common as multy-
storey parking lots that were springing up like burgeoning cities in the
plains.When they ran out of space,they became double deckered like the buses in
Srinagar..P.319."4.The narrative ends with rhe hope of a new resurgent Kashmir
,where its people could live peacefully without hysterics and hysteria that so for
wrapped them up into jejune discomfiture.The apt quote from Mandalstam amply sums
up a happy ending: "This is also a journey, and they can't take it away from
us."Hopefully,Tillo and Musa are reunited when the scene shits to Delhi again.

The trouble with Roy is that she attempts to

plunge so deeply into the facade of reality that she forgets she is bound to "the
art", of fiction rather than hankering after her pet theme of ferreting out a
rebellion for a cause 7uat a heavy toll on the fictive nature of the narrative.She
takes a detours into sentimen gluey setimentality and rubuctious vituparation.But
her extensive use of "magical realism" takes us so closer to V S Naipaul to Marquez
and Rushdie saves her dystpic vision.Nonetheless Roy joins the canon of writing
that gratuitously zooms her into a celebrity status, especially in the west that
heaps a lavish praise on her novel.And if her novel is short- listed for the
Booker again,it reveals the gravitas and aural ambience that controls the structure
of the narrative..As one of her critics,James Wouldm had asked her rightly;"Which
way will the ambitious contemporary novel go?Will it dare a picture of life or just
a shout a spectacle." I think, she did both to abide as a novelist of no mean
talent.
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