A STUDY ON ARUNDHATI ROY'S " THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS " SUSHREE SMITA RAJ (original) (raw)
Related papers
The new subaltern in Arundhati Roy's "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness": Gendered spaces captured
International Journal of English Research, 2021
Arundhati Roy is an internationally acclaimed Indian female writer in contemporary times. After winning the Booker prize in 1997 for her debut novel "The God of Small Things", she got her renowned fame, and almost after 20 years she published "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness". Where she tried to depict all the castaways of the subcontinents under one roof. The novel is endured by hijras, political rebels, the poor, women who don't know their place, and abandoned baby girls; it seems to articulate a post-Colonial nation's history from the perspective of the marginalized. Anjum, a hijra, Saddam Hussain, a Dalit, Mulaqat Ali, a doctor of herbal medicine, and Tilottama, a maverick young woman, are among the main characters in the extensive narrative skills whose tales intertwine within the text. The storyline of the novel explores everybody and everything happening in the rapidly changing India, on the other way emphasis on gender issues, gender discrimination, caste equality, capitalization, and many things of socio-political issues considered. Thus, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is spontaneous and undoubtedly a paroxysm of the author's observation of the 'New Subaltern' who are victims of social and political injustice. Hence, this paper aims to rejuvenate Roy's depiction of the 'New Subaltern' in the present-day democratic Indian scenario through the post-colonial context.
Where Margins Intersect: A Study of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy exhibitsamazing ingenuity in crafting a literary dais for the people who exist on the fringes of the Indian society. After the remarkable success of her debut novel The God of Small Things(1997),Roy continued writing non-fictional works that were quite provocative and radicalin nature. She oftencontemplates onthe issues ofnational importance. She is a novelist, a feminist, a literary activist and an ardent environmentalist. Some of her non-fictional works include The End of Imagination(1998), The Cost of Living(1999), The Algebra of Infinite Justice(2002), Public Power in the Age of Empire(2004), Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy(2010), and Kashmir: The Case for Freedom(2011
Political overtones and Allusions in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Research Journal of Humanities & Soc Sciences , 2019
Published in 2017, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel of famous Indian author, and Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy. The novel can be seen to have two parts where the first half of the novel is a bildungsroman of Anjum (a hermaphrodite), set in the old city of Delhi while the second half is the story of Tilottama, Naga and Musa spanning Kashmir insurgency. The novel engages in many political and social incidents that have occurred in India and other parts of the world at the backdrop of its story. It is full of allusions to many political figures, political issues, events, and incidents that have occurred in the past few decades in India and around the world. The present paper attempts to examine the political overtones implicit in the novel by decoding and explaining a few significant allusions used in the novel.
Marxist Study of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
2020
In this study Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been probed in the light of Marxism. The elements of commodification and class consciousness have been interpreted and analyzed. The study further unveils the role of ideology to economically marginalize and outcast the labor class and vice versa. In this novel Roy demonstrates that when our working class is crushed by the cruel hands of capitalism it results in a very horrible form of revolt or revenge by the victims. By doing that, Roy delineates the characters who are forced to work like machines and a commodity for the interests of the capitalists. The characters who intend to raise voice against this capitalism become a prey to the ideological mechanism supporting the exploitative practices of capitalism. The study follows the parameters of qualitative research and the selected passages have been interpreted as textual evidences to examine Marx’s thoughts about Capitalism and the atrocities done by the capitalists.
The Representation of Cultural Materialism in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
JJREISS, 2018
Cultural Materialism is a way of Marxist approach to Anthropological studies which is started from 1980's in by Marvin Harris. It defines the cultural similarities and difference in a social framework which is responsible for the cultural change. It intends three primary influences on cultural change which is the Infrastructure, Structure and Superstructure. Arundhati Roy, the first Indian to win the Booker Award for her debut work The God of Small Things (1997), describes the lives of Kerala people who were the captives of Communism and the caste system. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2018) is the political journey of India for the past twenty years. In this novel, Roy traces the hegemonical notion of Superstructure which is destructed the cultural harmony of the social framework. The paper aims at the subversion of power struggle not to become dominant group but escape from the exploitation of canonical societies. Cultural Materialism is a term coined by Marvin Harris in his text The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) which included three anthropological schools of thoughts that are Marxism materialism, cultural evolution and cultural ecology. It is a Marxist approach to Anthropological studies which highlights the material, behavioural and ethic process of human in socio-cultural evolution of the social structure. Anthropology denotes the study of human and human behaviours in relation to the society in the outlook of present and the past. As an expansion of Marxism, Cultural Materialism enlightens the similarities and differences as well as models for cultural change within a societal framework. The social construction is divided into three different levels: Infrastructure, Structure and Superstructure. Infrastructure is the "material realities" such as technological, economic and reproductive factor which denotes the demographic aspects of a society that mold and influence the other two aspects of culture. It is simply material in nature which consists of the technology (mode of production), population (mode of reproduction) and social practices by which the society fits in to its environment. It is also manipulated the society by modifying the amount of type of resources needed. The stability between population level and consumption of energy is balanced by modes of production and reproduction. Structure is the next important component of the socio-cultural systems which consists of the controlled patterns of social life among the members of the society. It maintains a secure relationship among the people and its constitutional groups and neighbouring societies. It includes the organizational aspects of culture such as kinship system, domestic economy and political economy. Superstructure is the last sector which contains the ideological and symbolic aspects of the society. Religion is one of the most important ideology and symbolic progressions includes Behavioural Superstructure (art, literature, rituals, games and hobbies) and Mental Superstructure (myths, philosophies and religion). Every writer involved on the problems of suffering people and the rebellious people, they described particular social issues in their literary texts either in fictional or non-fiction. One such author created a center of attention for all social issues both in fictional and non-fictional texts with lot of field works among the victims is Suzzanna Arundhati Roy (1961-still), the first Indian to win the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things (1997). She is also a peace activist and involved in Politics, Human Rights and Environmental Causes. Arundhati Roy's first novel The God of Small Things described the Casteism among the South Indians. Most of the characters are Syrian Christians who followed the caste system and suppressed the lower caste. The book brought name and fame for her. The recent second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) had a long gap of 20 years. Between these two novels she wrote a lot of essays on social and political issues. She is the spokesperson of Anti-globalization and Neo-colonialism in India. She is a strong critic of U.S Foreign policies like Nuclear weapon, War against Terrorism and Privatization. Reading the essays of Roy is like being blasted by a hot wind of anger. Roy raged against the broken world, against the poverty, war and horrific attacks of millions of minorities including Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Tribes and Adivasis, and the mechanization of the Multinational corporate companies.
Unheard Story of Small Things in Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Blue Ava Ford Publications, 2022
With The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) Arundhati Roy returns to fiction after twenty years of non-fiction and political journalism. With her long-awaited second novel, Roy also leaves behind the ambiguous status of the singlenovel author. Her works is certainly reflects bitter reality of society. She does not hesitate either to write or speak on any antisocial issue. Fantasy, fairy tale or romance is hardly found in her work rather she prefers to decipher the suffering of mankind. She highlights mostly about underprivileged and deprived section of the society: hijras, political rebels, the deserted baby girls, women who will not know their place in the main stream of the society, the poor,. This article aims to look at Unheard Story of Small Things in her present novel set within the narrative of Roy's experience with India's others.
In her latest fiction The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy presents a narrative that includes the political history of India, spanning the last three or four decades, based on which she critiques contemporary India. The topography of the novel includes widely different cultural, economic, social and political events from across the Indian subcontinent. Roy presents the often neglected aspects of Indian national identity, finally evolving an alternative ideology involving the downtrodden and the marginalized. The image of India that Roy constructs in the novel is in striking contrast with the popular image of the nation as a stable democracy with harmonious territorial unity, which practices religious neutrality.The paper argues that the fictional space of the novel transforms memory and personal histories to a critique of the obscured and repressed aspects of contemporary India, historizing the novel, and presenting an essentially anti-authoritative, egalitarian ideology. Modernist and postmodernist theories have introduced innovative techniques that influenced the thematic approaches to representing history in fiction, incessantly recreating history, rendering the genre trans-disciplinary. In India a number of writers from Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand to Salman Rushdie have attempted to present various stages of national history in their novels. The latest addition to the list is Arundhati Roy, a brilliant polemicist, public intellectual and political philosopher of contemporary India. When fiction and history blend together in the Indian context, facilitated by the dominant ideology of the novelist-historian, it leads to the invention of multiple images of the nation manifesting as a strong zeitgeist, historicizing the fictional work. The pioneering new historicist critic Stephen
Paradigm of Subversion in Arundhati Roys Ministry of Utmost Happiness
IJILLH , 2019
Arundhati Roy's novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an unconventional one. The experiment in fiction writing she adopts in her first novel, The God of Small Things continues in her second novel also. Roy adopts various styles of narration and forms in The Ministry. Roy makes the novel into a documentary with cinematic overturns rather than a fine work of fiction through various means. Cannons of fiction writing and styles are subjected to subversion in the novel. In the Ministry she tries to keep away from the styles of Salmon Rushdie and William Faulkner, the authors she is always alleged to have affinities. Though her style is unconventional, she is empathetic in her narration of various social issues simmering in contemporary India. The genesis of a second novel after the tectonic first one through a gap of twenty years is worth intriguing. Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a paradigm of style and fictional cannons in its many ways. An architect by training and a creative genius by temperament, Roy is more an activist than a fiction writer and the intervening period between her first and second novel is filled with many controversial essays concerning various social issues with local and global ramifications. She juxtaposes reality and fiction in a cinematic zealousness.
35 | Page "Study of Social Activism in Arundhati Roy's Work."
Indian English Literature written during the pre-independence period and post-independence period is the representation of its periods, where more or less the writers penned down the social issues in their writings. Writers of every genre are the representatives of their age. Some worth mentioning authors of the contemporary period to be mentioned here like Salman Rushdie, Kamala Markandaya, Arundhati Roy, Mulk Raj Anad, Anita Desai, Manju Kapoor and many more of the contemporary literature who represents the age through their specific works. Their writing deals with the major issues of the society of every age. That is why the literature of earlier times cast a new picture of socio-political thought to the modern itself. Today our society faces tremendous problem under the influence of politics and power, which makes the innocent people its ladder to climb and to have the ripe fruit of development, and this issue directly or indirectly pepped out in the writings of the contemporary writers too. In this paper an attempt will be made to study the same in the writings of the Booker award winner, Arundhati Roy, for her debut novel "The God of Small Things". The study will critically analyze the major issues of the contemporary society upheld by the author to make her readers aware of the same, whereas it will also seek out the answer for it"s the power of the capitalist or the discourse of the dominating rule over our country that still persists in the form of socio political issues. The study will take into account her all short stories, essays, interviews etc. besides the novel that makes her more to be an activist rather than a mere novelist.
Narrating a Fragmented Nation: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Published nearly 20 years after the award-winning debut novel, God of Small Things, Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness seeks to articulate a postcolonial nation's history from the perspective of the marginalized. Anjum, a hijra, Saddam Hussain, a Dalit, and Tilottama, a maverick young woman are among the main characters in this sprawling narrative whose tales intertwine to capture the failure of the secular democratic nation state. Although Anjum's family history begins with the Partition and its impact on the Muslims in Delhi, the prime historical focus of the novel is post-Emergency. This essay proposes that the novel's sprawling form is a deliberate aesthetic choice which reflects the author's engagement with the challenges of telling a national narrative from the perspective of multiple minoritarian perspectives.