The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

First, there is birth. With no control, one becomes a person amongst people. Some kind of family or at least situation firms its grip around you and you are quickly, sometimes cursorily, clasped with certain holds: assigned a gender, a name, a class or caste or race, taken in by or held out from a nation or a religion. Anjum, first among many characters who populate Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is given all of these things at her birth: she is named Aftab, called a boy, a CASTE, an Indian citizen, a Muslim. Long-awaited and beloved, Anjum’s mother nonetheless finds her genitalia ambiguous to the point of terrifying, and doesn’t put up a fight some years later when Anjum finds her way to the house of hijras who live nearby, takes up residence there, gives herself a new name, a new gender, and, in some ways, declares herself resident of a new country.

The countries we are citizens of or secede from, war for or against, create or imagine—these are central among the manifold subjects of Roy’s second novel. Sometimes these “countries” are as small as a family, as diffuse as a religion that crisscrosses borders, as tendentious, aching, and nested as the split siblings of India, Pakistan, Kashmir, as personal as gender, or love, or the self. Profuse with characters, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness includes everyone from an alcoholic Intelligence Bureau station head; an abandoned child taken in by Anjum who grows up to become a fashion designer; a once-Hindu jack-of-all-trades who re-christens himself Saddam Hussain; to a Kashmiri militant freedom fighter named Musa, and his love and lover Tilo, a wayward, dark-skinned woman who in some ways summons up Roy herself, reminding me of what she wrote in her 1998 essay “The End of Imagination,” “It's this: If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag.”

Even with Tilo's independence as sure as Roy’s, she is less actively political than many of the characters in Ministry. Among characters who hunger strike, risk harassment or worse through their performance of gender, secret messages across borders, endure torture, and pontificate on national television news programs, Tilo functions more as an observer than a participant, more as a lover than a fighter, searching, perhaps, more for community than for comrades. At first this narrative decision irked me—why was Musa, a man, the central activist and warrior, instead of Tilo?—before somewhere, imperceptibly, ceasing to matter to me. With the utter multitudinousness of her story, overflowing with characters, plot threads, settings, politics, contradictions, emotions, what was Roy trying to suggest if not that anyone can be who they wish to be, make of themselves what they wish to make of themselves, pledge themselves to whom and what they would...or not? Simultaneously, Roy shows again and again the ways in which the state and state-controlled society limit each being’s ability to thrive in the way they envision for themselves. Maybe in a different world, Tilo would have been a different character. Maybe in a different world, she’d have been exactly the same. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a reminder that all is connected, each part of ourselves with each part of the world around us, and that the desires to simplify, segregate, stratify, label, and control are often destructive of what is richest in our world and ourselves. Tilo, and all the other characters alongside her, are unpredictable and vital: reminders of what it means to be human, an animal resident of earth.

I loved this novel for not telling one story, for not being about one thing, for not being streamlined or simple. While it is absolutely about self, collective, and country, it is also about motherhood, memory, death, modern and historic Indian politics, capitalism and socialism, gender, religion, and joy. Inarguably serious and often painful, the book also made me laugh aloud, and flop back to stare up at the sky with my hand on my beating heart.