Hello and welcome to the Discourse. 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' is Arundhati Roy's second novel, published in 2017. It was selected for the long list of the 2017 Man Booker Prize, which ultimately went to George Saunders for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
Arundhati Roy is known for her Leftist political activism with some stern and dark shades on her sides. She used her novel to propagandize and spread her ideas related to some harsh realities of modern India and a few incidences during the last half of the 20th century. Thus, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a propaganda novel that mixes up the real incidences of history with the fictional and opinionated ideas of the author and her influences. While the novel explores the fictional plight of a particular community in India, it depicts the other side as harsh, villainous, and morally wrong. The novel tries to suggest that the Kashmiri terrorists killing innocent people are somehow reasonable by depicting the authorities trying to stop and nab them as corrupt. In addition, the novel simply ignores the plight of the minority sect of Kashmir who were molested, robbed, murdered, and thrown out of their own homes. The author does so by suggesting that Hindus might be a minority in Kashmir but they are majority in India. To further justify her biasses, she includes a story of caste discrimination within the novel while ignoring the fact that caste discrimination is equally rampant in the Muslims and other sects too (which she highlighted in her first novel The God of Small Things). The author also tried to infuse a semi-autobiographical effect in the novel to offer further base to her opinionated ideas in favor of terrorism in Kashmir by depicting a main character (Tilottma) a little based on herself.
Characters of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness:
Aftab is a major character in the novel who was born with both male and female genitals (intersex) in a Muslim family. His father tries to force him to go through the medical process and become a male but Aftab is more inclined towards feminism. Ultimately, he runs away from his home and joins the community of Hijras (Intersex) at Khwabgah in Delhi. Aftab then goes through medical surgery and gets rid of his penis to become Anjum, a female intersex. When Anjum visits a Muslim shrine in Gujarat, she gets caught in a massacre of Hindu pilgrims and subsequent government reprisals against Muslims. She is deeply traumatized after the Gujrat riots of 2001 and begins to dress like a man for a while. She adopts two girls later and is fiercely jealous of everyone who acts as a mother to them. Eventually, she makes her own home in a graveyard and names it the Jannat Guest House. Mulaqat Ali and Jahanara Begum are his parents. Zainab is one of the adoptive daughters of Anjum who she found near Jama Masjid where her parents deserted her. She is an animal lover and studies fashion design. She grows distant from Anjum when she tries to dress Zainab as a boy to save her from communal rioters. Dayachand is a low-caste man, whose family occupation was to collect cow carcasses since high-caste Hindus won't touch them and use the carcasses to make leather. He witnesses his father being killed by a communal mob when a corrupt police inspector implicates his father in killing a cow, an unholy act for Hindus. He changes his name to Saddam Hussein, after seeing the manner of defiance of the Iraqi dictator at the time of his death in a video. He works several jobs all of which include petty cheating. His aim is to take revenge but with his time spent with Anjum, he gives up the idea of revenge and marries Zannat. S. Tillotma is a student of architecture and a theater actress in Delhi. She is the daughter of a high-caste Syrian Christian mother and a low-caste man her mother fell in love with. After being treated as an adoptive child by her biological mother, she grows distant from people in general. She finds solace in Musa, with whom she could relate as both were odd in their Delhi group of theatre actors. Musa Yeswi is a Kashmiri who came to Delhi to become an architect. After his wife and daughter are killed in gunfire by the army during the Kashmiri Insurgency, he disappears and works as a terrorist (Commander Gulrez). Tillotma continues to support him. Biplab Dasgupta is another friend of S. Tillotma who is smitten by her. He becomes Deputy Station Head of the Intelligence Bureau in Kashmir. Nagaraj Hariharan is another friend of Tillotma whom she met at college. He later becomes a top-notch journalist who works in Kashmir. Tilo marries Naga as suggested by Musa for strategic reasons and later abandons him. Begum Arifa Yeswi is Musa’s wife. Major Amrik Singh is a corrupt and biased military officer in charge of counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir. He murders Jalib Qadri, a well-known lawyer and human rights activist, and subsequently seeks asylum in the US. Later on, he murders himself. Comrade Revathy is a Maoist insurgent who was raped by policemen. She leaves her daughter of rape at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and joins back the insurgency. The daughter is then picked up by Anjum who names her Udaya.
Summary of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness:
The novel begins at a house built on a graveyard behind the government hospital. An old lonely woman lives there. She doesn’t get many visitors but an old blind man named Imam Ziauddin begins visiting her regularly. She reads the newspaper for him. The Imam learns that her name is Anjum and she was born intersex. Her parents were Mulaqat Ali and Begum Jahanara who wished to have a boy. They named him Aftab and his father tried to force him to go through medical surgery and become a boy. However, Aftab preferred to leave the house and join the society of Hijras at Khwabgah where he lived for many years, and for medical surgery to remove his penis and become a woman named Anjum. She says that after having a male-to-female gender transition surgery, she began feeling like the full version of herself. She became a successful Hijra and got the support of many NGOs, human rights groups, and journalists.
Anjum tells Imam that she found an abandoned baby girl outside the mosque and decided to adopt her. The chief of the Khwabgah supported her and Anjum named the girl Zainab. One day, Zainab got ill and Anjum decided to visit a holy Muslim shrine in Gujarat to pray for her health. One of her associates Zakir Mian accompanied her to Gujarat where they were caught in a massacre. The Hindu mob killed Zakir Mian but left Anjum alive because she was a Hijra. Somehow, she returned to Delhi but was very terrified. To protect Zainab, she began dressing her as a boy. However, Zainab didn’t like her, nor did the chief of Khwabgah who objected to it. Anjum got angry and left Khwabgah and decided to make her own house in the graveyard of her ancestors behind the government hospital, leaving Zainab in one of her associates Hijra Saeeda’s care.
After some days, a stranger began visiting Anjum at her new home in the graveyard. His name was Dhyanchand, a low-caste man whose father was killed by a mob instigated by the policemen. Anjum allowed him to stay with her and he adopted the name Saddam Hussain. Saddam suggested to Anjum to charge for guests and for funeral services. Soon, Anjum begins calling her home Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. However, she continued to offer free services and help for outcast downtrodden people.
The story changes to Tillotma who has been missing from her room for many days. Biplab Dasgupta, a bureaucrat in the Indian government notices it. He has been in unrequited love with her since he first saw her when they acted together in a play for their college of architecture. The other two actors were Nagaraj Hariharan and Musa. Biplab realizes Tilottma was more interested in Musa who later became her boyfriend.
Currently, Biplab is appointed Deputy Station Head of the Intelligence Bureau in Kashmir though he works from Delhi. His main objective is to cover up the atrocities committed by the Indian Army in the region. He takes the help of Nagaraja Hariharan who is now a reputed journalist. Biplab trusts Nagraja that he won’t reveal anything to the media more than the government wishes him to. One day, during his visit to Kashmir, Biplab receives a phone call from an interrogation center in Srinagar informing him that they have arrested Tilottma. Biplab sends Nagaraja to help her out.
Meanwhile, Biplab remembers what occurred before Tilottma’s disappearance. A well-known Gandhian activist was on a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar against the rampant corruption in the government and bureaucracy. As the Hunger strike continued to go long, the TV news anchors and journalists began giving him ample coverage. Soon, many other people hoping to grab the limelight gathered around him. Anjum and Saddam Hussain go together to see what is going on with the protest. In the crowd, someone left a newlyborn baby on the pavement in front of the protest. A group named Mothers of the Disappeared found the baby and decided to hand the baby to the police. However, Anjum who wished to adopt the baby girl intervened and suggested that the baby should be given to her. The other people objected and during the debate, the baby disappeared. Nobody knew who took the baby away.
It is later revealed that Tilottma took the baby away and named her Jebeen the second, after Musa’s daughter, who was murdered with her mother, Arifa, in a massacre by the Indian government in Kashmir. From there she went to Kashmir to meet Musa and began assisting her in his terrorist activities. Tillotma believed that now when Arifa is dead, Musa will marry her. However, Musa suggested she marry someone else and keep helping him in a hidden manner. During her operations with Musa, she gets arrested by the military headed by Major Amrik Singh. During the same military raid, Major Amrik Singh murders Commander Gulrez, alias Musa. After the death of Musa, Tillotma vows to take revenge by murdering Major Amrik Singh. However, Major Amrik Singh retires and moves away to the USA where he commits suicide.
When Tilottma is rescued by Nagaraja, she proposes to marry him as she knows he is smitten by her. Musa had advised her to maintain a safe identity while working as a terrorist hideously. However, the baby Zebeen the Second is a major hurdle for Tilottma. Someone suggested she should offer the child to Jannat Guest House. Tilottma writes a letter to Saddam Hussain about the baby she wishes to hand over to the Jannat Guest House. Saddam meets her who is now working as a school teacher, and takes the baby from her and takes her to Anjum.
Anjum embraces the baby wholeheartedly as her own child and renames her as Udaya. Meanwhile, Saddam meets Zainab and they fall in love. They decide to get married as Saddam decides to give up his idea of revenge against the police officer to restart his life with a new perspective. Later it is revealed that Udaya, or Zebeen the Second is the biological daughter of a Maoist insurgent who was tortured and raped by police. Anjum makes sure that she is raised and educated well.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of Indian English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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