The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

One of the most prominent motifs in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is that of internal division, whether within nations and movements or within individual people. The most obvious example of the latter comes in Roy’s depiction of Anjum and her fellow Hijras: biologically male (or, in Anjum’s case, intersex) individuals who feel partially or fully female. For this reason, Anjum experiences the masculinizing effects of puberty as her body “wag[ing] war” on her, and although surgery and hormonal therapy alleviate some of what Western medicine would call “gender dysphoria,” she can never have the precise body she desires. The result is a constant state of inner tension that is physically symbolized by her hormonally-changed voice: “Dr. Mukhtar’s pills did underpin [Anjum’s] voice. But it restricted its resonance, coarsened its timbre and gave it a peculiar rasping quality, which sometimes sounded like two voices quarreling with each other instead of one” (32-33).

Tellingly, another Hijra, Nimmo, likens this feeling of internal discord to the split between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, thus linking the pain of being a Hijra to the pain of civil war and ethnic or religious tension. In Roy’s novel, the most prominent example of the latter is the conflict in Kashmir, where the predominantly Muslim Kashmiri population is engaged in a bloody war of independence against Indian government forces. The separatist movement is internally fractured as well, split between Muslim fundamentalists and those who prefer a more secular and tolerant approach—a division the Indian government encourages by secretly providing the more hardline rebels with arms and money. The result is an endless cycle of violence and death as Kashmiris fight not only the Indian Army but one another.

However, as destructive as these differences can be, the novel portrays them as preferable to the alternative; in fact, what makes the situation in Kashmir so destructive is not so much the diversity of peoples and opinions, but rather the attempts by both the Indian government and the more hardline rebels to enforce a single way of thinking and behaving in the face of the country’s historical diversity. As Musa notes, “do[ing] away with [one’s] complexities, [one’s] differences, [one’s] absurdities, [one’s] nuances” is an effective way of winning a war, but only because there is something inherently violent about that form of “reduction” (377); ultimately, he says, it will cause Kashmir to self-destruct. Even in instances where the drive toward uniformity doesn’t result in literal death, Roy suggests that it can have a figuratively deadening effect. This is evident in the stand-off that takes place between Anjum and Mr. Aggarwal—an accountant and former bureaucrat who questions her right to take charge of the abandoned child in Jantar Mantar (or, in fact, even be in the square at all without governmental “permission”). As Roy describes him, Aggarwal is “reduced by his certainties,” whereas Anjum is “augmented by her ambiguity” (126). Aggarwal is so concerned with ensuring that everything is properly categorized and codified that he fails to recognize the larger issue at stake—namely, the life of a child.

By contrast, Anjum’s actions and motivations in the scene imply that the experience of being “ambiguous” has heightened her ability to love, particularly anyone who is similarly outcast or traumatized. The novel suggests that where attempts to unify and standardize are destructive and even deadly, there is something life-affirming about people relating to one another from a place of difference or brokenness. This is the guiding logic behind Jannat Guest House, which becomes a thriving community by welcoming in anyone who doesn’t fit in elsewhere.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness spans several decades (though not in chronological order). The bulk of the story’s action, however, takes place in the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century, and is set against a backdrop of rapid modernization. In practice, this often means Westernization, as in this description the “summer of [Delhi’s] renewal”:

Namaste, [people] said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with maharaja mustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels. […] The world rose to its feet, roaring its appreciation. Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where factories used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy (101-02).

The heavily ironic tone of the above passage points to one major criticism Roy levels at these attempts to modernize: the destructiveness of Western-style capitalism. In some cases, the destruction is symbolic; in the above passage, for instance, the tourist industry degrades India’s culture and history by commercializing it. In other cases, however, India’s economic growth takes a very literal toll. Although the above passage claims that “everyone was happy,” it becomes clear only a few pages later that “everyone” only includes those who “[count] as people” (103). India’s growing wealth and world standing come at the expense of many of its people—farmers whose lands are confiscated, beggars whose very existence is prohibited, etc. These people have no place in the new India, and therefore suffer a kind of figurative (or in some cases literal) death.

Kashmir provides an example of the latter. The ongoing violence between separatists and government forces is a profitable business for those in the weapons trade or armed forces, as one rebel explains:

I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons … We buy our ammunition form the army. […] They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris (232).

Even beyond this, however, there are complex ties between the situation in Kashmir and India’s supposed “progress” as a country. For instance, the toll that modernization takes on India’s poorer citizens makes them more likely to flock toward Hindu nationalism in an attempt to understand their suffering; this becomes especially clear in Chapter 3, when Gujarat ka Lalla’s forces turn the protests in Jantar Mantar to their own ends, distributing food to starving citizens while also spreading rumors about India’s Muslim populations. In a more abstract way, the increased bureaucracy that comes with economic and governmental growth also worsens anti-Muslim and anti-Kashmiri sentiment, since India’s historical diversity poses a threat to those determined to quantify, simplify, and account for everything.

All of this is yet another reason why Jannat Guest House is so symbolically important in the novel; as a place that blurs the lines between life and death, it exists outside of normal time, and therefore offers a refuge from the forward march of modernization. Still, it’s a precarious solution to the problems Roy has identified, and as the novel ends, it’s not entirely clear what India’s fate will be in the future.

Roy’s interest in the relationship between life and death overlaps with several other major themes in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: the uncertainty of the boundaries between the two is another form of the ambiguity the novel celebrates, and the idea of paradise is intertwined with ideas about death and the afterlife. Questions of life and death are also significant, with the novel frequently suggesting that the two are not the opposites readers might expect them to be.

This is evident in the chapters Roy devotes to Kashmir, where, as Musa puts it, “the dead will live forever; and the living are only dead people, pretending” (349). To some extent, the remark is simply a statement about the culture of martyrdom in the Kashmiri insurgency. Because the dead “live forever” as honored sacrifices to the cause of independence, death itself becomes something to aspire to—or, as Roy puts it, “dying [becomes] just another way of living” (320). There’s an element of sarcasm in this, since many of those remembered as martyrs (including Musa’s own daughter) weren’t militants and never chose their fate. Nevertheless, as Musa says, it’s not clear that life in Kashmir is truly preferable to death, or in fact truly “living” in the fullest sense of the word. This is partly because of the realities of living under an occupation; as Musa later notes, he and other militants have had to stifle some of their humanity to effectively combat a “single-minded” and “monolithic” (377) fighting force. On an even more basic level, however, Musa’s remarks point to the fact that the very existence of Kashmiris is a problem in the eyes of the Indian government. Simply living as a Kashmiri is a “crime” punishable by death; Musa even tells Tilo at one point that “[t]hese days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving” (273).

In fact, the entire concept of survival is a complex one in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Many of the characters who survive events that kill others (Anjum, Musa, Tilo, Saddam, etc.) are so traumatized and changed that they can be said to have died in a symbolic sense; during Anjum’s early months in the graveyard, for instance, Roy describes her as a “ravaged, feral specter, out-haunting every resident djinn and spirit” (67). The survivor’s guilt both she and Tilo experience is compounded by the fact that both women were allowed to survive by the very person or people who had killed their companions. As a Hijra, Anjum fears that every day she lives after the attack will count in her attackers’ favor: “Butcher’s Luck. That’s all she was. And the longer she lived, the more good luck she brought them” (67). Death, then, strikes Anjum as preferable to a life that is so intertwined with the violent deaths of others.

However, this blurring of the boundaries between life and death isn’t always traumatic in the novel. In fact, it’s part of what makes Jannat Guest House such a healing place for the novel’s characters. The fact that the house is at once overflowing with life (in addition to its human and animal residents, it features its own vegetable garden) and surrounded by death allows Tilo to feel that Musa will remain close to her even if he’s killed. The ambiguousness of the house’s location also comforts Anjum, perhaps because it allows her to imagine that she also exists somewhere between life and death. 

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness breaks many narrative conventions: It jumps backwards and forwards in time seemingly at random, it blends third and first-person storytelling, it drops major characters for hundreds of pages at a time, and it frequently makes use of documents ranging from police files to advertisements to private journals. This experimental structure is in and of itself an indication of how central the idea of storytelling is to the novel, since it implies that some kinds of stories can only be told in this fragmented and non-chronological way. These are the “shattered” stories Tilo alludes to in the last chapter: stories about people and things that are so broken that they can’t be made to fit into a typical, straightforward plot line.

Roy is interested in the way stories evolve with the teller or the audience. In some cases, these changes relate to the problem of trying to tell a “shattered” story. Roy notes, for instance, that each visitor to Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed’s shrine comes up with their own version of the man’s life, and that Sarmad himself in some sense sanctions this: “Sarmad’s spirit permitted those who came to him to take his story and turn it into whatever they needed it to be” (14). Storytelling can offer comfort to people who are lost or traumatized by allowing them to find themselves and their struggles in the story’s characters, and thus experience some sense of order and purpose. This is certainly what happens when Anjum edits her “Flyover Story” to make it fit for Zainab’s ears, deliberately overlooking the fact that she was hurrying across the flyover because the police had broken up a party she and her fellow Hijras were working at: “In order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person” (18).

In other instances, however, “rewriting” a story is more problematic. For instance, Roy repeatedly draws attention to the ways in which victims of disasters, wars, etc. need to package their stories in particular ways to draw attention to their plight. Here, for example, is Roy’s account of the experiences of the “Mothers of the Disappeared”:

They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the International supermarkets of grief, along with other victims of other wars in other countries. They had wept publicly and often, and nothing had come of it (119).

Roy’s reference to “supermarkets” is especially significant, because it points to the fact that even stories have become a commodity in India’s new economy. Worse still, those in power often have influence not over what stories are told but how they are told and can use that influence to persecute the vulnerable. In this way, after Gujarat ka Lalla's rise to power, the moment in the Sound and Light show that Ustad Kulsoom Bi took so much pride in is simply erased:

Centuries of Muslim rule would be stripped of poetry, music and architecture and collapsed into the sound of the clash of swords and a bloodcurdling war cry that lasted only a little longer than the husky giggle that Ustad Kulsoom Bi had hung her hopes on. The remaining time would be taken up by the story of Hindu glory. As always, history would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past (407).

As the last sentence in this passage hints, the effects of this kind of rewriting can be dangerous and even violent. For this very reason, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness advises readers not to put too much stock in stories (or, at least, in only one story). As Tilo puts it: “If you like you can change every inch of me. I’m just a story” (263). In a world of mass media and diverse opinions, it can be difficult to pin down the true version of stories; in fact, the novel itself demonstrates this by depicting the night of Tilo’s arrest from three widely differing perspectives. This is not necessarily a problem, Roy suggests, since stories serve functions beyond simply telling the truth (for instance, affirming a person’s sense of identity). What is dangerous, however, is when someone sanctions one “official” story at the exclusion of all other versions and variations.