The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A novel

I understand the spread of opinions from one to five stars for this book. I honestly believe that immersion in Indian life, history, politics and literature is a prerequisite for gaining utmost happiness from this incredible book. I am overwhelmed by Ms Roy's abilty to capture and describe the complex cast of characters in all their irascible and detailed idiosyncrasy - and yet find the essence of their deepest lives and thoughts. Second only to the multiple beings who populate her world is the background of Mother India herself - her cities and her countryside, particularly that of Jammu and Kashmir. On every page there is a story, sometimes a heartbreaking one, or a surprising love story, particularly in the section on endemic militancy. Every chapter creates or ties the threads of the multiple intertwined lives, all told in gorgeous fluid language that speaks to the soul. What a very rich country India is. What a fabulous author to color its story is Ms Roy.

This is an enjoyable read with very likeable characters. Arundhati Roy captures the feel, and mood of India and every page transports you into the middle of the action. My only reservation is that Arundhati covered almost the entire political and social narrative of India over the last 5 decades. A huge undertaking well executed but I felt a little at the expense of the characters who seemed to be there just to glue the other events together. Having said that it was a wonderful read.

“He narrowed his blindgreen eyes and asked in a slygreen whisper…” Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published 20 years after her first beloved debut, The God of Small Things, was perhaps one of the most anticipated novels of 2017. It’s had a mixed reception and I can see why. The novel starts off in old Delhi with Anjum, a hijra, along with a colorful cast of characters. One of my favorite things about the novel is how the city’s flora and fauna is as much a part of the story as the humans. “When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred, million years, that have been wiped out.” The old city’s centuries long Muslim culture and architecture is nostalgically laid out, and Roy’s ear for language and detail is often sublime: “a small tortoise…with a sprig of clover in one nostril.” I found Anjum compelling if tropeful - an elegant fierce outspoken Urdu poetry-quoting drag queen. It wasn’t obvious to me immediately that her companions and antagonists - and pretty much every other character in the book - are also symbols. They represent the many conflicts that routinely tear India apart and that have occupied Roy’s political, human rights, and environmental concerns and her nonfiction writing for the past 20 years: the Hindu-Muslim divide, the caste system, the Kashmir conflict, the Indo-Pak wars, the 1992 Gujarat massacre, the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, and of course the farmers and fishermen whose lands and livelihoods are variously taken over by capitalism and corruption and other horrors. The second half of the novel turns to the monstrous ongoing civil war tragedy that is Kashmir, following four college friends, a civil servant, a journalist, a Kashmiri activist, and the woman they all love. Again, the tropes and stereotypes abound: the quiet noble freedom fighter, the ambitious journalist, the suave diplomat, the mysterious beautiful woman who doesn’t have to say anything, has no past, but everyone falls anyway. “There was something unleashed about her, something uncalibrated and yet absolutely certain.” Despite this, I was wrecked by the account of the war in Kashmir. There is a scene when a boy is brought in after interrogation (i.e. torture, which is so graphically described at times that I wanted to throw up). “To refuse to show pain was a pact the boy had made with himself. It was a desolate act of defiance that he had conjured up in the teeth of absolute, abject defeat. And that made it majestic. Except that nobody noticed. He stayed very still, a broken bird, half sitting, half lying, propped up on one elbow, his breath shallow, his gaze directed inward, his expression giving nothing away.” Even with the overwriting, the melodrama, I don’t think I’ll ever forget this broken bird of a boy. I didn’t grow up in South Asia, and I’ve never been to Kashmir, but its beauty of landscape and people is legendary. I have long recognized the utter wonder in people’s voices when they speak of the region. And it seems as if there’s no way out now, no light at the end of the bloody tunnel. There are so many militant groups, so many broken families, so many displaced people of different religions, so many armies and guerrilla forces from India and Pakistan, so much sorrow, so much loss. No one wants to let go. No one will and everyone suffers for it. This is not a new story to South Asians (which might explain some of the grim subcontinental reviews of the book), but the novel outlines the longevity, continuity, complexity, and intensity of the conflict, and it is overwhelming and horrifying. That said, there are entire sections of the novel where semi-journalistic/semi-diary reports of violence, political intrigue, and human rights abuses in Kashmir are clumped together without context or explanation. This is a shame because these are real and important stories, but without tying them to characters we’ve grown to know or the places they inhabit, they end up feeling extraneous. I read these awkwardly written sections impatiently, trying to figure out how they tied in, and when they didn’t, waiting for the book to get back to the story. It felt like lazy writing, or lazy editing perhaps. The two halves of the novel are tied clumsily together with a plot point - a baby - that appears magical-realism style. Of course, in addition to connecting the two halves, this baby serves its political purpose, standing in for another conflict, this one from the vicious war the Indian government is waging against its own citizens - Maoist guerrillas in the jungle. “Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence.” If you don’t know much about modern Indian history and politics, Roy’s novel is an education, and an indictment of India Shining. Political figures are tarred and feathered, including the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, referred to as Gujarat ka Lalla. The country-wide violence, corruption, and discrimination seem bone deep, systematic, inevitable. Perhaps it’s as the novel itself says, “There’s too much blood for good literature.” But I have faith. Maybe now that Roy has painted the broad strokes in her second novel, her third might go more small things than utmost, deeper than wider. However, I have less faith in the future. If history is indeed a revelation of what’s to come as much as it is a study of the past, as The Ministry of Utmost Happiness claims, then “pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have…”

This novel is about the marginalized people in modern India--people living on the periphery--the transgenders, Dalits (untouchables), Muslims, Kashmiris, people not included in the rising capitalist India. Aftab, who later changes his name to Anjum, is born to Muslim family in old Delhi. His mother notices that there is something not quite right with him, he has both the male and female body parts. Despite family’s best effort Anjum moves out of the house and starts living with other transgenders, called Hijras in Urdu-Hindi. There is a lot of symbolism in the novel how Anjum as a Hijra and as a Muslim is treated by the society at large, and how she perceives herself. Who is she, what is she, and maybe why? In most countries, including India, people have struggled to deal with transgenders. In this novel, Arundhati Roy, tries to show that it is not just transgenders, there are many different types of people who have uncertain role and relation with modern India. Muslim in general but especially muslims in Kashmir are one of those people.The novel describes the riots in Gujarat, and the violence in Kashmir. Musa, a Kashmiri, who is going to college in Delhi, due to a tragedy, in which his wife and daughter are killed, turns to extremism and becomes a Kashmiri separatist. The Chamars, Dalits, or Untouchables are another example of historic outcastes in the society like transgenders. Saddam Hussein, not his real name, who belongs to Dalit caste, is attacked with his father by Hindu extremists, and his father is murdered. There is similar pattern when it comes to his predicament, like Anjum a Hijra, Musa a Kashmiri Muslim, modern India does not quite know how to deal with him. Tilo is another such person, from South India, born out of wedlock, she is searching for destiny. Musa and her have close relationship, she even helps him out with insurgency in Kashmir. All these outcastes eventually start living in a graveyard together. It is in this graveyard, all of them rejected and scarred by the society, come together, share each other’s pain, and find some peace and sense of community. It is a beautifully written novel. It gives this hope that despite shortcomings of India democracy, there is room for protests and debate. All different kinds of protesters who gather at the Jantar Mantar is one example of that. Muslims, Dalits, Hijras, gas leak victims from Bhopal, Earthquake victims, and many other kind of protesters, they all gather there, with hope that they will be heard. Maybe a time will come when they will be.

This is beautifully-written and tightly-plotted, but sort of weird in its politics. It is all about the very seamy side of what is going on in Kashmir--which the author wants to turn into a kind of parable. However all sides in the conflict seem to be distasteful, so she is hard-pressed to find a way for the characters to represent the moral high ground. And the book, for all that's good about it, never gets over that hurdle.

I loved the book but it took Tillottama's story to make it a little bit closer to the heart. -- the first half is compelling, but she does not really get under Anjum's skin or the others either the way she does with Tilo. guess she needs to live it to get us to feel it? Someone had compared to Rohinton Mistry and said she was lacking, but they miss the point -- I cannot for the life of me ever pick up a Mistry book for a re-read. Sure, he brings his characters to life the way no one else can, but the unrelenting misery with no hope in sight is not real either. She captures in a very real way the essence of India, the resilience of life and how it goes on and how people find hope and living happiness in unimaginable circumstances. I would only have said, skip the political diatribes, but knowing that is closer to her heart, and agreeing with every one of her observations, I cannot dock a star for the way those asides interfere with the narrative. If you liked the movie Slumdog Millionaire, you will enjoy this book.

This was such a hard book to follow, as the story lines were disjointed and characters hard to distinguish. Roy's writing style has moments of greatness, with beautiful imagery. But much of the writing can be described as the Book of Lists: Some examples: "So, in addition to checkposts, bunkers, weapons, grenades, landmines, Casspirs, concertina wire, soldiers, insurgents, counter-insurgents, spikes......" " words of war into the ears of doctors and engineers, students and laborers, tailors and carpenters, weavers and farmers, shepherds, cooks and bards." The book is filled with long run-on sentences that are in many cases just lists of items to describe the scene. It gets old, and boring. We get it! - the plot of war torn Kashmir. The plot, however, is refreshing and in order to follow the book, I did a little research on the MANY places mentioned throughout the novel. In the end, the many characters finally find some closure. This book could have been better edited, allowing the reader some glimpse of how the characters are connected. I fear many readers will give up early.

I loved The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's first novel, and I fully expected to love this one, her second, that was written twenty years after the first. I was disappointed to realize that I didn't. It was not because the writing was not beautiful. Of course it was beautiful. Roy's prose is poetic and musical. It flows, one sentence leading with the inevitably of rushing water into the next. It was not because there were no sympathetic characters. Indeed, the pages are filled with so many sympathetic characters that at times it is hard to focus. Every single one of these sympathetic characters is at the center of a tragic story. There is so much unrelenting tragedy in this book that I began to feel overwhelmed and oppressed by it. And I think my main problem with the book is related to that. The overarching tragedy here that touches every character's life and becomes the theme of some of them is Kashmir. Bleeding Kashmir. That bit of territory that Pakistan and India have fought over virtually continuously since partition. The appalling atrocities suffered by all sides in the conflict - Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus - pile up unendingly. Most of the action of Roy's novel takes place after 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards and the resulting violence that wracked the country afterward. She tells her story primarily through the lives of two characters. The first is Anjum, born Aftab. At birth, the child was a true hermaphrodite, with both male and female sex organs. Raised by her family as a boy, she nevertheless always identified as female and when she had the opportunity to leave home, she became a part of a thriving transgender community in Delhi. The second primary character is Tilo, a former architecture student. In college, she was a part of a group of four friends who continue to be connected in later life. One of them, Musa, was her sometime lover, a Kashmiri freedom fighter. She later marries another of the friends but continues to travel to Kashmir to visit Musa, who is in constant danger and must live his life on the run. If the story had maintained the focus on these two lives, I would have found it easier to follow and to empathize with, but the introduction of so many minor characters kept leading me on unwanted detours away from the two heroines of the tale and at times - particularly in the middle of the book - I felt that there was no glue holding it all together and it threatened to fly off into its constituent parts. In describing one of her characters who kept notes, diaries, and memos, Roy wrote: "She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest." That would almost serve as a description of her book. The strongest part of the book for me was the ending where the writer did manage to bring her various "scraps of stories" together into a well-orchestrated and even hopeful conclusion. It was an ending worth waiting for.