By M Alsam
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is written by Arundhati Roy, the Indian prize winning author of the internationally celebrated The God of Small Things. It’s her second novel and was published twenty years after The God of Small Things, and like its predecessor is an acclaimed masterpiece.
As well as a world renowned author, Roy is a political activist and essayist and uses her works to vent against casteism, racism and Hindu extremism –and every custom, belief, ideology and dogma that she perceives a threat to a modern India and humane values.
On the cover page, the novel’s title, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is inscribed on a tombstone, symbolising those leading lives of suffering and torture at the hands of the living –fleeing to find repose among the dead. This place of refuge is a Jannath Guesthouse built in a graveyard by the novel’s main character, Anjuman, a transgender. Anjuman, herself had escaped from a Hindu -Muslim riot.
By the novel’s end, all the suffering characters get together and find repose at the guesthouse and find happiness in each other’s company.
The novel symbolises how humanity is ruined by certain beliefs and ideologies — and those perceived a threat to traditional, political, national, social and religious norms find happiness in the world of dead where no such rules exist
The novel symbolises how humanity is ruined by certain beliefs and ideologies –and those perceived a threat to traditional, political, national, social and religious norms find happiness in the world of dead where no such rules exist.
This novel starts with fragmented stories which all get connected at the end. It starts with Anjuman’s birth, her parents, Mulaqat Ali and Zainab delighted at the birth of their first son take her home and bring her up as a boy until Anjuman is revealed as a trangender at the age of ten.
Following her female instincts she gets attracted to one of the prostitutes of khwabgah and goes to live there as a woman.
One day Anjuman goes to a cemetry in Delhi and nearly becomes a victim of a Hindu reprisal against Muslims for an attack on Hindu pilgrims. Fortunately, she escapes and finds refuge in the graveyard. She is joined there by Saddam Hussain (Dayachand). He is a low caste farmer, whose family were victims of fanatic and destructive religious beliefs. Hussain’s father was killed by Hindu fanatics for killing a cow –and his desire for revenge leads him to live in the jannat guest house.
The next chapter is the tragic love story of Tilottama, Musa, and Gulrez, the commander. Tilo, a rebellioous architect gets married to Naga for a purpose, but her soul is tied to the Kashmiri separatist commander, Musa. Musa had lost his wife, Arifa and daughter Jabeen to atrocities committed by the Pakistanis and Indian in Kashmir. Despite his personal losses, Musa’s hopes and dreams for getting a separate homeland never get dimmed until he is martyred in the snowy valley of his mother land.
Tilo can’t carry on her marriage with Naga and finally she breaks off ties with him. Accidentally, she finds a baby, Jabeen the Second abandoned on the road side during a political sit in.
Eventually, to escape the allegation of being a child kidnapper, she and the baby go to live with Anjuman. Jabeen the Second, whose real name is Udaya has her own story. She is the daughter of a revolutionary communist, Revalth. Revalty became pregnant with Udaya after being raped by five policemen. She abandoned the child near the sit-in of JantarMantar, a political party, so that she can re-join her revolutionary movement –without any obstacle.
All these desolated character that are ostracised in society gather in the Jannat Guesthouse and the novel ends on a happy note, when Hussain marries Anjuman’s adopted daughter Zainab.
This novel is a “scattered story of everybody who weep among the living and smile among the dead.”
Anjuman, Tilottama, Miss Jabeen the Second, Saddam Hussain, Commander Gulrez and all the other main characters that got to live in the Jannath Guesthouse, represent the effected lives of several Indians in the wake of particionroits, Hindo-Muslim religious and cultural conflicts and the tragedy of Kashmir.
