words by Inés Paris
Almost twenty years after her Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy returned to fiction with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), also set in India but with a very different flavour: more chaotic and defiant than her first. This is a book about borders and limits, about space and community, a novel that gives voice to everyone—or at least tries to—and about what it means to survive. The result is nothing short of spectacular.
How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.¹
Borders in this novel take many forms—the invisible lines that run within each character, the division between good and evil, love and duty, religions and castes, and so on. Roy introduces the tumultuous, multicultural, and cacophonous life of India through two main liminal spaces: a cemetery in Delhi, and Kashmir, a war zone (and India’s literal border) in which, as the book says, 'the dead will live forever; and the living are only dead people, pretending'².
The graveyard, where, in the end, the titular ‘ministry’ takes shape—though, as the novel makes clear, happiness will never be a real institution—sits between the living and the dead, between the buzzing of a massive city and the quiet of the cemetery’s decay. Roy’s is a choral novel; it belongs to people living in the small window between oppressions: at the borders of gender, religion, and the caste system, as well as the national border. Inside this symphony, we follow Anjum, a trans woman from the Hijra community, and Tilo, a free-spirited, sometimes whimsical woman in love with a Kashmiri rebel.
Arundhati Roy’s ambition to become ‘everybody’ is both her strength and her doom. The novel can feel chaotic at times, and this has been one of its main critiqued characteristics, but so are cities and humans. The multitude of voices in this novel seems impossible to contain or explain. Reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is like having a bird's-eye view of a world so vast that it overflows the limits of the page. And of course, it is not just the human world: animals, trees, and landscapes all have their place in Roy’s chorus. Without them, the book would not be complete because, as Arundhati Roy said in her interview at the Chicago Humanities Festival, it is not only the human story that matters, but the stories of the earth³.
Still, reader, beware; Roy does not shield us from misery or violence in these spaces. Instead, she demands that we inhabit them, that we see how people can build community within them. There are many kinds of brutality depicted: the violence between religions, the mistreatment of the Muslim community, violence from the government against the Kashmiri people, violence between the castes in India, and the violence inside of us. One of the most chilling excerpts captures how this violence consumes identity itself:
You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves… such terrible things have happened to our people… in every single household something horrible has happened… but self-pity is so… so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for dignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back, even if we lose, even if we die. But for that, we as a people–as an ordinary people-have to become a fighting force … an army. To do that, we have to simplify ourselves, standardise ourselves, reduce ourselves … everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing … we have to do away with our complexities, our differences, our absurdities, our nuance, we have to make ourselves as single-minded … as monolithic… as stupid … as the army we face. But they’re professionals, and we are just people. This is the worst part of the Occupation… what it makes us do to ourselves. This reduction, this standardisation, this stupidification… Is that a word? (…) This stupidification … this idiotification… if and when we achieve it … it will be our salvation. It will make it impossible for us to defeat. First, it will be our salvation, and then … after we win… it will be our nemesis. First Azadi. Then annihilation. That’s the pattern.⁴
Violence forces humanity out of people, and erodes complexity, transforming us into a machine that knows nothing but brutality. The mob is both victim and perpetrator—the government and the citizens, human and monster. The mob only has the power to fight and destroy, and it is also part of our nature; no creative outcome, no real change can come from it. There is no space for heroes; nobody can be one in a system that thrives on exploitation, or in the systems implemented during the colonial period. The true struggle is to remain an individual, not just to survive but to keep one’s humanity intact while surrounded by dehumanisation.
Roy makes it very clear to the reader that this will not be possible amid the various conflicts in which the mob takes the lead, especially those in which the government gives the mob power and voice. Arundhati Roy said in her Chicago Humanities Festival interview that it is through fiction that these types of violence can and must be explored, because we need to ask what this violence does to us⁵. What is violence doing inside of us, to our humanity, when we let it happen, when we institutionalise it and when we live next door to it?
There is a very big difference between the fiction and the non-fiction, and that is that when I have written non-fiction essays, they have always been very urgent interventions [...] but when I was travelling in Kashmir I realised the only way you can tell that story is through fiction because it is not just about cataloguing the dead, or the disappeared or the graveyards, but what it does to us, as Indians even, to swallow that kind of injustice, and be expected to celebrate it and wave the national flag? What does it do? What does it do to Americans who have to watch their government destroy countries? It is not about those people, but what about us!⁶
This violence reaches its most devastating expression in Kashmir, and on this topic, I have come to agree with some of the criticism this book has received. Roy’s eye for beauty in despair flickers here; she abandons the reader, something that is powerful but that can feel hard to navigate in a book that, until the very end, does not seem to offer much in the shape of hope. Liberation seems impossible, so I found myself a bit betrayed by the title, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It is only in the final fifty pages that hope resurfaces as Roy reminds us, once more of her gift: to find tenderness and light even among ruins.
(Raqib Shaw, 'Ode to the Country Without a Post Office', 2019)
Hope and happiness take the shape of the found family in the novel, and the power of community to beat all odds is palpable. The ‘ministry’ becomes a place of chosen kinship beyond the strict rules and postcolonial legacies of Indian society; love and care transcend blood and nation. Here, the other crucial topics of this immense narrative—motherhood and womanhood—are reimagined as communal, collective acts rather than fixed identities. Following the book's tenet, there is no single way to be a mother, only countless flawed, deeply human ways of nurturing life. Happiness seems to escape the pages, but really it is something that can be recognised between challenging moments—a transient feeling, something we decide to hold for a while, and, more than anything, something that cannot be institutionalised, something that will never belong to the mob.
Arundhati Roy spent around ten years writing this novel, which is not surprising; it unfolds over time, and as a reading experience, it expands, leaving a lasting impression that needs space to be digested. She kept referring in her reading and talk at Politics and Prose to the fact that she had these characters in her head⁷. These characters were the reason why the novel exists; the book itself is a space of survival, a sanctuary for those whose stories are usually silenced, and it is that violent mob, those who are proud of the abuses they commit, who will have to read this book and see what they have done. As one of the characters says:
You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.⁸
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not a history or politics lesson; this is a journey into the depths of what it means to survive with humanity, without losing ourselves. This novel will help you find your place amongst strange homes and impossible mothers. There is no paternalism, no false hope, just a constant echo that seems to ask: How can we, while facing horror, still find utmost happiness?