characters in the ministry of utmost happiness

They can all be counted among the “Unconsoled” to whom the novel is dedicated, and whose “Minister”, 5 Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, symbolises the refusal to submit to any authority other than one’s conscience, one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity. In a country that is supposedly postcolonial, but which she often accuses of “colonising itself”, she also chose her heroes among the Kashmiris, who face a brutal military occupation, and among the Adivasis, who are sometimes as ruthlessly “colonised” off their lands as the Native Americans once were. 3 In a country of rigidly codified grids of identity and belonging, Roy chose her heroes and heroines among those who straddle boundaries, like the hijras, 4 and among the Dalits, sometimes tempted to convert to another religion, because, as Ambedkar stated, “o the Untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors” (qtd in Roy 2020, 671). 2 However, Roy concentrates on telling the stories of those Indians who are, in her view, persecuted by a Hindu Nationalist government that is waging a civil war, in the name of the nation-state, against a portion of its own people, those whose lives are expendable and do not matter. 1 Unlike her first novel, focused mostly on one village in the state of Kerala, and on a caste-ridden Syriac Christian community, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness seems to embrace the “whole” of India, from its Dravidian southern tip to its Northern reaches in Kashmir, which was then still (in theory if not in fact) the autonomous state of Jammu and Kashmir. 6 See for example the last, eponymous essay in My Seditious Heart where Roy sums up the role played b (.)ġ Arundhati Roy published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in June 2017.4 Hijra (a Persian word) designates intersex or transgender people who identify as neither men nor wo (.).3 See Roy’s variation on the American slogan “Black Lives Matter” (Roy 2017, 257).2 In August 2019, the Indian Government abrogated article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which had g (.).1 Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was published in 1997.

Characters in the ministry of utmost happiness