review of the ministry of utmost happiness

The novel starts off in old Delhi with Anjum, a hijra, along with a colorful cast of characters. It’s had a mixed reception and I can see why. After the trauma of Kashmir, Tilo settles into Anjum’s graveyard compound, now a shantytown for various lovable outcasts.He narrowed his blindgreen eyes and asked in a slygreen whisper…Īrundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness(Knopf), published 20 years after her first beloved debut, The God of Small Things, was perhaps one of the most anticipated novels of 2017. Victimized women can also form healing bonds among themselves.

But women can use their bodies as weapons too, as when Anjum wins a public argument with a politician by going into a courtesan’s dance, swirling her hips and clapping her hands–“aggressive sexuality aimed at humiliating” the bashful man. She acerbically captures the cruel ironies of a city like Delhi, where dead paupers lie in “air-conditioned splendor” in the morgue, despite never having “experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.” She has a keen sympathy for women in dangerous spaces, whose bodies are used as shields, sacrifices and good-luck charms. Roy’s rich and knowing narration wings across the landscape, traversing caste, religion and gender divides. There may be terrible bloodshed in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, but it is undeniably good literature. There’s too much blood for good literature.” It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. “I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about,” she writes in her notebook. Thanks to a sometimes-requited romance with a Kashmiri insurgent, she becomes an observer of, and even a participant in, the conflict there. The other pivotal woman in this novel is Tilo, a nonconformist architect with a personality like smoke: quiet, diffuse, bewitching. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. As one hijra puts it, “normal” people get upset about “price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war–outside things that settle down eventually. She and her fellow hijras live separately from what they see as the real world. The first is Anjum, an Old Delhi hijra (a word used in Urdu and other languages to describe trans women and other gender identities) who spends the first part of her adulthood living in a hijra boardinghouse before setting up camp solo, in a graveyard. Although the plot spans 50 years, leading up to the present day, and encompasses a vast cast, it orbits around two women in particular.

Review of the ministry of utmost happiness