Taking on India’s nationalistic narratives
Arundhati Roy re-emerges onto the literary scene with a second novel, her first in 20 years. Set in bustling New Delhi, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ brings India’s modern political history to life
It’s been 20 years since Arundhati Roy published her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” and it’s hard to imagine being able to surpass a debut that wins the Man Booker Prize. And yet, her second novel might just do that.
While the literary world has missed her, Roy has been busy as a public intellectual, publishing many non-fiction books, including a book of essays and conversations co-authored by John Cusack reflecting on the pair’s meeting with Edward Snowden. The 57year-old is a fierce political critic — she spoke out against Indian nuclear tests in 1998, has been in steadfast opposition to India’s heavy military presence in Kashmir, and spent a day in jail over her protest of the Narmada valley mega-dam projects, which threatened to displace hundreds of thousands.
Her fiction benefits immensely from her decades of careful observation and sharp analysis as an activist. In “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” Roy puts humans at the centre of the messy business of a postcolonial country aspiring to superpower status.
Roy was born in Kerala, India and raised by her Syrian Christian mother. Her first book reflected her South Indian upbringing, while her latest work is grounded in New Delhi, where she’s spent much of her adult life. She begins by taking readers into seldom-visited corners of the city, opening with the birth of a child who doesn’t neatly fit into one gender — enough to make a mother contemplate killing herself and the newborn. While the urge passes, the mother tries to make her child a boy, naming him Aftab.
But Aftab only finds solace when he becomes Anjum, joining a household of hijras (a South Asian term for trans women) where she’ll spend decades before becoming an innkeeper in a quirky project built in a cemetery.
As Roy unravels Anjum’s story, she introduces characters who take the reader from Gujarat to the front lines of the unending war in Kashmir. Roy seamlessly weaves in watershed political moments in India’s modern history, bringing events such as the Gujarat riots to life by using carefully selected details, such as chilling refrains from murderous mobs: “Only one place for Mussalmans. The Graveyard or Pakistan!”
She bookends the incredible journey she takes readers on with another newborn, who is a product of violence and yet, somehow still offers profound hope.
Roy’s mastery knows no bounds. She traces the past few decades of political strife to India’s identity today through an impressive number of characters and subplots. Throughout the book, she subtly sounds an alarm, coaxing people to see the policies behind the “polite prime minister” she never names but is clearly inspired by Narendra Modi. And while she writes about the rise of Hindu nationalism and the use of “opulent displays of piety” as political currency, she also addresses the absurdity of protest becoming a brand, writing about a man on a hunger strike against corruption: “The old man’s rustic rhetoric and earthy aphorisms trended on Twitter and swamped Facebook.”
While tackling the official national narrative and countless forms of resistance to it, Roy also manages to flick at the treatment of transgender women, local religious traditions under assault, attitudes toward abortion and violence against women.
What she does most brilliantly is bring this all together through empathetic characters whose perspectives are often obscured by tokenizing portraits of the militant Muslim, peace-loving Hindu or sad single woman.
Her absurdly-named character Saddam Hussein is a prime example of how she critiques Hindu nationalism without condemning all Hindus for it by revealing how many Hindus, especially those from lower castes, suffer as a result of it — Hussein is a Hindu man who recast himself as a Muslim to escape his past, where he watched his own father get lynched by a crowd who accuses the lowercaste man of killing a cow.
Through rich storytelling and gorgeous prose, Roy doesn’t just reject jingoistic slogans and nationalistic narratives celebrating the making of modern India — she unmasks them.