I read Roy’s The God of Small Things in college because my roommate Esther read it for a class and said it was great. It is. I taught it in the first iteration of World Literature and was overwhelmed with how much I had forgotten or perhaps not noticed twenty years before. When Ministry of Utmost Happiness came out I was determined to teach it in the second iteration.
Like The God of Small Things this novel is polyphonic and non-linear, weaving multiple narratives, perspectives, places, and times. But rather than focusing on a single family, Ministry spans many families from a mother who cannot handle having an intersex child to a group of hijras (an Indian word roughly equal to transgender) living in sublime squalor to the militant intimacy of martyrs. The narrative moves between Kashmir, Kabul, all over Delhi, and all across the last 70 years of Indian history.
In a book like this, with so much happening and so many references, it can be difficult to moor yourself. I was constantly googling references, which turned into a guide for my students, but it was worth it the way Shakespeare is worth it. Roy is writing across several traditions, not just the Western tradition which is where Shakespeare gets the lions’ share of his references, so there is no way to master it all. There are references to the Indian poet Tagore, the painter Jamini Roy, Russian poet Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, and Leonard Cohen. There is also the last twenty years of Roy’s journalism including her searching essay “Walking Among the Comrades” about India’s Operation Green Hunt, a military campaign against Communist resistance.
Just reading this book, and following its dizzying array of intertexts, is a master class in the violent legacy of colonization and partition—the division of British India in 1947 into India and Pakistan on largely religious lines: Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan. In Roy’s writing these divisions exist not just in the way that people navigate the Line of Control, a border that might change in dangerous and unannounced ways, but also internally, in their bodies. This is articulated at the very beginning of the book by a hijra named Nimmo:
“No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you—what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war—outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”
In spite of the terror and the pain vibrant, loving communities emerge. The book starts where it ends: in the graveyard home of Anjum, a Muslim Hijira, which becomes a makeshift settlement of outcasts, animals, and children. And this book stays with you because it mixes pain and hope:
“That story had always stayed with Musa—perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.”
