THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

Author: Arundhati Roy
Year: 2017
Publisher: Brombergs Bokförlag
Language: Swedish (translator Peter Samuelsson)

Now and again you come across a work of art that tests the limits of your cognitive abilities. Almost as if it nudged your centre of gravity or shifted your points of reference. In some cases, it is the topic that the artist examines that boggles your mind. At other times, it is a perspective offered that thus far had remained unrevealed. Yet every now and then, you encounter artwork, be it a musical piece, a poem, drama, painting, performance, or dance that by its sheer anatomy thrusts a new layer of consciousness onto your existence.    

Such provocative art will chip away with surgical precision at the joints in the fabric of your world-matrix where concepts meet; right at the edge between the familiar and the foreign, black and white, good and bad, heaven and earth. These are the points of our Weltanschauung where we as humans are already struggling and therefore easily provoked, angered, and frustrated when our conceptual compartments, chiselled with such painstaking meticulousness are challenged.

This might explain why Arundhati Roy’s second and most recent novel “Den yttersta lyckans ministerium” (“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”) became so controversial. Particularly in her native India. Her book-launches have been interrupted by violent protesters and her critics have burned effigies of her in the streets and attacked her rabidly in the media. The truth of the matter is that the novel methodically homes in on some of the most widely open wounds in the Hindu society: Kashmir, the Caste system, and the culture of toxic masculinity. To people who are unable or unwilling to take a step back and observe their world at a distance for a second, this will be painful.

The novel opens with a child being born in a dark room during a blackout and being presented to her mother as the long-coveted son she was hoping for. She calls him Aftab. At a closer inspection in better lighting the next morning she realises that Aftab is actually a hermaphrodite with both male and female genitalia. Neither boy nor girl. Or both. Right on the joint in the matrix.  

“In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things- carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments- had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him- Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.
Could you live outside of language?”  

Roy knows exactly what she is doing with her writing. By this intense prelude, she declares the purpose of her novel. Aftab goes on to grow up and decides to cast off the gender identity ascribed to him by his mother and embrace his female side. He becomes she. Aftab becomes Anjum.

In the second part, Roy breaks with the bustling capital and hurls the reader into the hotbed of political turmoil that is Kashmir. This part of the book pivots on another woman, Tilo, and the three men who all love her for different reasons and each with a love of a different kind. The three men come to represent the scattered identities of Indian citizens in the Kashmir conflict. Musa is the casteless soldier of the Muslim resistance and an active enemy to the Indian forces stationed in Kashmir. Biplab is the Indian intelligence officer and member of the highest caste. Naga is right in between, a journalist who is seemingly impartial and makes it look like he is holding the policy-makers responsible but who in reality is a useful idiot who runs the errands of the government, and knows about it.

Tilo is a mix of them all. Born of a high-caste mother and an untouchable father. A Kashmiri activist from Kerala far away from the northern provinces. She ends up marrying two of her three friends but never the one with whom she has the strongest bond.

What then unites a hermaphrodite prostitute from Shahjahanabad with a reluctant warrior from Kashmir? The former having violently broken with every premise of her middle-class existence to glissade into the bliss of resigned harmony. The latter evolving gradually through the mounting pressure of society until violence envelopes her in a climactic discharge of defiance and rebellion. One clue is in exclusion; the common experience of being a stranger in one’s own land, and the intimate acquaintance with being considered an outcast, a provocation, and a menace.

Roy brings them together at a graveyard where Anjum has created a makeshift asylum for unwanted Indian residents of all kinds. The same way the dead are being removed and deposited outside of the city walls, so are the living ejected from the community. They all gather in the same place, sharing the same site. The living, in Musa’s words, are after all “only dead people pretending to be alive.”  

In the hands of Arundhati Roy, musings such as these can only culminate in a literary masterpiece. I dare say that the main thing standing between Roy and the Nobel Prize in literature is her meagre production. Den yttersta lyckans ministerium is but her second work of fiction since her debut “The God of Small Things” almost 25 years ago. Her writing is gentle and sublime. The attention to detail is astounding. The strength is neither in the plot nor in the characters – the plot is almost non-existent and the characters, although manifold and diversified, incomplete – but rather in her unrelenting low-frequency pecking on the social fabric to which her characters are barely but inescapably connected and her ability to shine the light on the feeble threads that unite them. In this, her authorship reminds me of that of Doris Lessing (reviewed August 2020) and Virginia Woolf (reviewed September 2020). Similarly to theirs, Roy’s writing forces you to recognise that you are in fact largely ignorant of your world, as if it was poking you with a stick and pushing you against your will toward the precipice of wisdom. You do not necessarily have to love the art that does this to you. You may even hate it for tearing down a perfectly good illusion that has served you well for half a lifetime or more.

But you might have to acknowledge that the joints in your matrix are actually cracks ready to burst.