The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Introduction :
This blog is part of a Flipped Learning activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad for the study of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in the course on Contemporary Indian Fiction. Following the worksheet-based methodology, the blog integrates video lectures, AI-assisted textual analysis, mind mapping, and multimedia synthesis to explore the novel’s fragmented narrative structure, political urgency, and ethical vision.
Drawing on Prof. Barad’s concept of the “shattered story,” the blog examines how Roy’s non-linear form mirrors trauma and marginalization, with particular focus on Anjum, Saddam Hussain, and Tilo. It also analyzes the cost of modernization, the contrast between Dunya and Jannat, and key symbols such as the graveyard as a space of inclusive living and the dung beetle as a figure of resilience. The blog ultimately argues that Roy redefines paradise not as a distant afterlife, but as a fragile, human-made space of survival and coexistence within a violent modern world.
PHASE 1: PRE-CLASS TASK (CORE E-CONTENT)
Video: 1
Characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Focus on Anjum & Jannat)
This video lecture analyzes the complex character construction and narrative design of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, emphasizing how personal lives intersect with political history. The novel is divided into five parts, each unfolding different geographical, emotional, and ideological spaces in India. Characters appear fragmented and dispersed, and their significance becomes clear only through repeated readings, reflecting the novel’s non-linear and layered structure.
Narrative Complexity and Structure
The novel resists a single protagonist. Characters move between central and marginal positions, mirroring how society treats individuals differently depending on political and social contexts. Their lives intersect unpredictably, reinforcing the idea that history is made up of accidental encounters rather than linear progress.
The novel opens with magic realism, set in a graveyard, where imagery blurs the boundary between the human and the non-human (tree, body, spirit). This establishes the core thematic concern of liminality—between life and death, belonging and exclusion.
Anjum (formerly Aftab): Identity and Transformation
Anjum is one of the most significant characters in the novel and embodies Roy’s challenge to rigid gender, social, and religious binaries.
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Birth and Gender Ambiguity: Born as Aftab with intersex characteristics, Anjum’s birth shocks her mother, Jahanara Begum, whose psychological distress reflects society’s fear of gender nonconformity.
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Third Gender Representation: Roy offers a deeply empathetic portrayal of hijras, moving beyond stereotypes and mockery to reveal their emotional depth, vulnerability, and resilience.
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Language and Identity: The novel emphasizes the lack of adequate language to describe third-gender identities, showing how linguistic binaries imprison individuals by denying recognition.
Anjum’s transition is not merely biological or social—it is existential and political, questioning who is allowed to live with dignity.
Qawwali Quagga and Hijra Community
Qawwali Quagga serves as a space of relative acceptance for hijras. The lecture highlights:
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The karana system, which structures hijra community life.
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The historical role of hijras during the Mughal era as caretakers and trusted figures.
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The systematic erasure of hijra history in modern nationalist narratives.
This setting contrasts sharply with mainstream society, exposing selective inclusion and historical amnesia.
Jannat: The Graveyard as Liminal Space
After surviving the trauma of the 2002 Gujarat riots, Anjum withdraws from conventional society and settles in a graveyard named Jannat.
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The graveyard symbolizes a space where life and death coexist.
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It becomes a refuge for the marginalized—Muslims, hijras, abandoned children—forming an alternative community.
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The construction of the Jannat Guesthouse around graves reflects Roy’s vision of secular coexistence built on loss, memory, and survival.
Jannat represents a counter-world where rejected lives find belonging.
Symbolism and Motifs
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Tree and Graveyard: Endurance, transformation, and rooted survival.
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Birds and Death: Invisible lives and unnoticed deaths of the marginalized.
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Language: Both a prison and a potential tool for liberation.
Key Themes Explored in the Lecture
1. The Nature of Paradise
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The novel paradoxically juxtaposes Jannat (paradise) with a graveyard named Jannat, symbolizing the intertwined relationship between life, death, and happiness.
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Death is necessary for paradise, but it is also painful and feared, highlighting a paradox where people aspire for heaven but resist death.
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The idea of creating paradise on earth is central, emphasizing secular happiness and harmonious coexistence rather than a purely spiritual afterlife.
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The protests at Jantar Mantar symbolize this hope, where demonstrators from diverse backgrounds proclaim “another world is possible.”
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The setting includes a vibrant ecosystem with humans, animals, and plants living together, symbolizing a secular, inclusive paradise.
2. Ambiguity and Diversity
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The novel highlights internal and external tensions arising from diverse identities, beliefs, and practices.
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The character Anjum, an intersex person, symbolizes ambiguity in gender and identity.
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Living with diversity is portrayed as complex and sometimes uncomfortable, illustrated through cultural differences such as food habits and religious practices (e.g., vegetarian vs. non-vegetarian food, different religious prasads).
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The societal challenge is to embrace difference rather than destroy it.
3. The Cost of Modernization
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Set mainly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the novel critiques rapid modernization and its unequal impact on marginalized communities.
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Urban development projects (roads, dams, express highways) lead to land acquisition and displacement of poor villagers.
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Displaced communities lose traditional livelihoods, raising questions about sustainable development and equitable progress.
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Corruption and inequality are symbolized through contrasts such as luxury cars (e.g., Mercedes as a corruption symbol) versus displaced villagers.
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References are made to real-world land reform movements and protests against unjust land acquisition laws.
4. Boundaries Between Life and Death
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The novel blurs the conventional opposition between life and death, presenting them as interwoven aspects of existence.
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Death is frequent and multi-layered; individuals metaphorically “die” multiple times in their lives.
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Rituals like second burials emphasize that ceremonies often serve the emotional needs of the living.
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Life is compared to a multi-faceted diamond, representing perspectives beyond rigid binaries.
5. How and Why Stories Are Told
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The fragmented, non-linear narrative mirrors the fractured nature of contemporary Indian society.
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Stories appear through diverse forms—police files, advertisements, private journals—reflecting fragmented realities.
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This experimental structure aligns with themes of broken lives and disrupted histories.
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Storytelling is both a personal catharsis and a political act, challenging conventional narrative comfort.
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Writing is compared to a painful but necessary “birth” process, where authors must release difficult truths to survive.
6. Social Status in Contemporary India
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Social status intersects with regional, ethnic, and political identities, especially in regions like Kashmir and Bastar.
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Kashmiris’ ambiguous political and emotional status within India is highlighted.
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Capitalism redefines status through consumption (e.g., cars), often overriding caste or gender markers.
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The novel critiques the commodification of identity and social worth.
7. Corruption, Political Violence, and Capitalism
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The novel portrays marginalized groups like Kashmiris and Maoists with sympathy, while acknowledging internal corruption and violence.
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It critiques American-style capitalism and its influence on Indian society.
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The economic dependence on pilgrimage in Kashmir illustrates the intersection of religion, economy, and politics.
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Violence, corruption, and systemic oppression are shown as deeply interconnected.
8. Resilience and Hope
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Despite depicting suffering and conflict, the novel celebrates human resilience and hope.
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Characters demonstrate the capacity to recover from tragedy and envision better futures.
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The dung beetle symbolizes persistence of life even in hostile environments.
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The narrative suggests hope lies with new generations.
9. Gender Identity, Social Division, and Coexistence
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Anjum challenges binary gender norms and represents coexistence through difference.
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Acceptance of third-gender identities is portrayed as particularly difficult in society.
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The novel urges recognition of identities beyond rigid categories—gender, religion, ethnicity.
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It distinguishes between pluralistic societies and multicultural societies, advocating mutual respect.
10. Social Hierarchy vs. Social Inclusivity
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The narrative critiques social hierarchies by centering marginalized people and spaces.
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Marginalization is used as a narrative strategy to foreground social inclusivity and challenge dominant norms.
11. Religion and Power
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The novel critically examines the fusion of religion and political power.
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It argues for separation of religion and state to protect civic freedom and safety.
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Political leaders exploit religious symbolism to manipulate emotional loyalties.
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The Kashmir conflict exemplifies how religious extremism fuels violence and suppresses moderate practices.
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The text warns against escalating religious polarization.
Summary Table of Major Themes
Narrative Shifts and Structure
A major structural change occurs through the chapters titled “Landlord”, where narration shifts from third person to first person, voiced by Makhan Malik (Piglet). This shift introduces subjectivity, irony, and moral ambiguity, emphasizing how ordinary civilians become silent witnesses—and sometimes enablers—of political violence.
Another important narrative device is the sudden appearance and disappearance of a baby, which functions as a connective thread linking diverse characters and geographies. The baby embodies innocence trapped within political conflict and becomes a catalyst for uncovering hidden histories.
Tilottama (Tilo): The Moral and Structural Centre
Tilottama emerges as the novel’s emotional and ideological anchor. An architectural student and set designer, Tilo is often read as Roy’s alter ego. She connects multiple narrative strands—academia, activism, love, and resistance—without belonging fully to any one ideological group.
Tilo’s relationships with Musa, Nagaraja, and Hariharan reflect competing responses to injustice: armed resistance, journalistic mediation, and state collaboration. Her quiet defiance and emotional restraint contrast sharply with overt political violence, suggesting an alternative ethics of resistance grounded in witnessing, care, and memory.
Musa: Insurgency and Personal Grief
Musa’s transformation into a militant is portrayed through personal tragedy rather than abstract ideology. The killing of his wife Arifa and their daughter in a mistaken encounter by security forces becomes the emotional trigger for his radicalization.
Roy presents insurgency as a consequence of accumulated loss and humiliation, not fanaticism. While this humanizes Musa, the lecture critically notes the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of militancy and the relative absence of Kashmiri Pandit suffering, pointing to narrative selectivity in representing Kashmir’s trauma.
Revathy (Ray) and the Letter: Gendered Violence and Testimony
The most devastating moment of Part Three is Revathy’s (Ray’s) long letter, placed near the novel’s end. The letter reveals her rape by police officers, the uncertainty surrounding the baby’s paternity, and her psychological disintegration.
This letter functions as:
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A counter-archive to official state narratives
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A testimony of gendered violence in conflict zones
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A reminder that women’s bodies become battlegrounds in political struggles
Unlike public protest or armed resistance, Revathy’s letter represents private suffering turned into political truth, making it one of the novel’s most powerful ethical interventions.
Human Rights, Security Forces, and Moral Collapse
The section exposes the brutality of security operations through characters like Captain America, whose cruelty reflects institutionalized violence rather than individual excess. The torture and killing of Jalal Khadri, a human rights lawyer, symbolizes the silencing of dissent.
At the same time, the psychological breakdown of Amrit Singh, a security officer who kills his family and himself, reveals how fear and paranoia consume perpetrators as well. Violence, Roy suggests, corrodes all sides.
Major Themes
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Kashmir as a human tragedy, not just a geopolitical issue
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Insurgency as grief-driven, not purely ideological
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Gendered violence as an invisible but central cost of conflict
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Fragmented narration mirroring fractured realities
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The baby as a symbol of fragile hope and shared responsibility
Conclusion
Part Three of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness intensifies the novel’s political urgency by intertwining love, loss, militancy, and testimony. Through Tilo’s quiet witnessing, Musa’s grief-fuelled insurgency, and Revathy’s harrowing letter, Roy exposes the deep human costs of nationalism and state power. The section challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about violence, memory, and complicity, while acknowledging the novel’s selective silences. It stands as one of the most emotionally and politically charged segments of the text.
4.
This video transcript presents a fragmented yet revealing social narrative, delivered in a conversational Hindi register, where political commentary, personal anecdotes, educational concerns, and cultural references intersect. Rather than following a linear argument, the video mirrors everyday public discourse in India—where politics, health, education, and personal suffering coexist and overlap. The ending of the discussion, in particular, emphasizes human resilience amid systemic instability.
Narrative Style and Overall Structure
The transcript is non-linear and episodic, shifting rapidly between topics such as elections, bureaucracy, education, health, and individual life stories. This fragmentation is not accidental; it reflects the chaotic texture of contemporary social reality, where people negotiate multiple pressures simultaneously—political uncertainty, economic stress, emotional trauma, and institutional fatigue.
The speaker moves fluidly between public issues (elections, governance, infrastructure) and private struggles (mental health, suicide, family tension), creating a collective portrait of lived experience rather than a formal political critique.
Key Themes Leading to the Ending
1. Political Fatigue and Administrative Overload
Throughout the transcript, references to elections, political figures, mutual transfers, and administrative inspections create a sense of bureaucratic exhaustion. The system appears omnipresent but inefficient, producing anxiety rather than stability.
Police duties, inspections, and political interference suggest a governance structure that is constantly active yet emotionally detached from citizens’ realities.
2. Social Stress and Invisible Suffering
The video repeatedly returns to stories of depression, suicide, violence, and emotional breakdown, often mentioned casually—indicating how normalized suffering has become. Discrimination (especially linguistic and caste-based) further deepens social alienation.
These moments prepare the ground for the ending, which does not resolve these problems but acknowledges their persistence.
3. Education as Pressure and Hope
References to 10th class results, inspections, exams, and training programs reflect how education functions both as a site of aspiration and anxiety. Measurement, evaluation, and performance dominate, yet learning continues—suggesting endurance rather than fulfillment.
4. Health, Science, and Everyday Survival
Discussions of migraines, vitamin E, depression, skin problems, and medical routines reinforce the idea that survival is continuous work. Health here is not idealized but managed, reflecting resilience through coping rather than cure.
The Ending: Resilience Without Resolution
The concluding tone of the transcript does not offer solutions or ideological closure. Instead, it presents resilience as continuation—people keep going despite confusion, broken systems, and emotional strain.
Key aspects of resilience in the ending include:
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Living with contradictions rather than resolving them
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Speaking despite fragmentation, even when coherence feels impossible
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Endurance through routine—education, work, health management, family life
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Cultural memory (songs, places, stories) as emotional sustenance
Resilience here is quiet and unspectacular, rooted in daily persistence rather than dramatic resistance.
Thematic Interpretation of Resilience
The ending suggests that resilience in contemporary society is not heroic but ordinary. People adapt to instability, normalize uncertainty, and continue functioning despite emotional and systemic overload. This form of resilience is both admirable and troubling—it enables survival but risks making injustice feel inevitable.
Conclusion
This video transcript, though fragmented and seemingly disorganized, offers a valuable insight into lived social reality. Its ending emphasizes resilience as a lived condition—marked by endurance, adaptation, and emotional negotiation rather than transformation. By blending politics, education, health, and personal narratives, the transcript captures the texture of everyday survival in a complex socio-political environment. The absence of closure becomes its central message: life goes on, not because problems are solved, but because people persist.
5.
This video lecture offers a comprehensive thematic reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, highlighting the novel’s fragmented narrative structure, symbolic richness, and political urgency. The text is presented as a demanding but deeply rewarding work that mirrors the fractured realities of contemporary India through interconnected stories of marginalized individuals.
1. The Nature of Paradise: Jannat Reimagined
At the heart of the novel lies a profound redefinition of paradise (Jannat). Roy deliberately juxtaposes the idea of spiritual heaven with a graveyard named Jannat, collapsing the binary between life and death.
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Paradise is shown to exist alongside decay, suffering, and loss, not beyond them.
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While people long for heaven, they fear death—revealing the paradox at the core of religious desire.
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The novel rejects the idea of paradise as an afterlife reward and instead imagines it as a secular, earthly possibility.
The protests at Jantar Mantar, where voices from multiple marginalized groups gather under the slogan “another world is possible,” symbolize this hope for an inclusive, lived paradise built through coexistence rather than transcendence. The graveyard-turned-community space, inhabited by humans, animals, and plants, becomes a living metaphor for pluralistic harmony.
2. Ambiguity, Difference, and Diversity
Roy foregrounds ambiguity as an ethical stance. The character Anjum, an intersex person, embodies resistance to rigid binaries—gendered, religious, or cultural.
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Difference is shown as uncomfortable but necessary.
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Everyday practices—food habits, religious rituals, bodily identities—become sites of tension.
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Society’s failure lies not in diversity itself, but in its inability to tolerate difference.
The novel argues that coexistence does not mean sameness; it requires sustained negotiation with discomfort.
3. The Cost of Modernization and “Development”
Set against India’s late-20th- and early-21st-century transformations, the novel critiques modernization as an uneven process:
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Infrastructure projects (dams, highways, expressways) displace villagers and erase livelihoods.
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Development benefits the powerful while forcing the marginalized to bear its costs.
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Symbols such as the Mercedes car expose corruption and the moral emptiness of elite success.
Roy questions who development truly serves and whether progress without justice can ever be ethical.
4. Life and Death as Interwoven Realities
Life and death in the novel are not opposites but mutually constitutive:
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Characters experience multiple “deaths” through trauma, displacement, and loss.
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Rituals like second burials reveal that mourning practices comfort the living more than the dead.
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Life is compared to a diamond—multi-dimensional and resistant to simple binaries.
This vision destabilizes linear narratives of survival and redemption.
5. Storytelling as Political Resistance
The novel’s fragmented, non-linear structure—using police files, letters, advertisements, and diaries—mirrors broken lives and histories.
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Storytelling becomes a form of political witnessing.
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Writing is portrayed as painful but necessary, likened to a difficult birth.
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The narrative demands patience, refusing the comfort of neat resolution.
Roy suggests that in a fractured society, fragmented storytelling is the most honest form.
6. Social Status, Capitalism, and Identity
Traditional markers of identity—caste, gender, religion—are increasingly overridden by capitalist measures of worth.
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Consumption becomes the new status marker.
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Kashmiris, Adivasis, and other marginalized groups exist in a state of political and emotional ambiguity.
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Identity itself becomes commodified, stripped of ethical depth.
7. Religion, Power, and Violence
The novel strongly critiques the fusion of religion and state power:
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Religious symbolism is used by politicians to mobilize fear and loyalty.
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The Kashmir conflict exemplifies how extremism suppresses plural traditions.
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Roy warns that when religion becomes a political weapon, democracy and citizenship are endangered.
8. Resilience and Hope
Despite its bleak landscapes, the novel insists on resilience:
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Characters repeatedly rebuild life from ruins.
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The dung beetle, thriving in waste, symbolizes persistence against odds.
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Hope is not grand or heroic but fragile, everyday, and collective.
The future, the novel suggests, belongs to those who can imagine coexistence despite historical wounds.
Conclusion
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness emerges in this lecture as a radical reimagining of paradise, identity, and belonging. Roy dismantles binaries—life/death, purity/pollution, center/margin—and replaces them with a vision rooted in ambiguity, inclusivity, and ethical discomfort. Through marginalized lives and broken narratives, the novel challenges dominant ideologies of nationalism, development, and religious authority, while still affirming the possibility of hope. Paradise, Roy suggests, is not elsewhere—it must be made, painfully and imperfectly, here.
6.
Paradise Between Dunya and Jannat: Modernity, Violence, and Resilience in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Across the lectures, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness presents paradise not as a distant afterlife (Jannat) but as a fragile, contested possibility within the lived world (Dunya). Arundhati Roy deliberately collapses the binary between heaven and earth, exposing how both are shaped by violence, exclusion, and power. The graveyard named Jannat becomes the novel’s most powerful paradox: a space of death that nevertheless shelters life, community, and coexistence. This inversion questions ideological promises of martyrdom, nationalism, and religious salvation, suggesting that imagined paradises often demand real suffering.
Modernization intensifies this conflict. Development projects—roads, dams, expressways—promise progress but instead turn the Dunya into a site of dispossession, particularly for the poor, tribal communities, and political minorities. The lectures repeatedly emphasize that modernization functions as a violent myth: while it claims to improve life, it destroys land, livelihoods, and social bonds. Symbols such as luxury cars, militarized spaces, and the disappearance of cinemas in Kashmir reveal how capitalist modernity erases shared cultural worlds and replaces them with surveillance, control, and inequality.
The opposition between Dunya and Jannat also exposes how religion and nationalism collaborate with modern power. Paradise is weaponized—through martyrdom, Bharat Mata imagery, and ideological sacrifice—to justify violence in the present world. Roy dismantles these narratives by showing that there is no pure paradise untouched by blood, whether religious or political. Even heaven is imagined through structures of domination.
Yet, crucially, the novel does not end in despair. Resilience emerges not through grand revolutions but through minor, ethical acts of care and coexistence. The shared graveyard-home, non-biological motherhood, marginalized bodies forming communities, and even symbols like the dung beetle and vultures point to survival within ruin. Paradise, the lectures suggest, is not transcendence from the world but resistance within it—a fragile, secular hope created by those excluded from official histories.
In this way, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness redefines paradise as an ongoing, imperfect struggle: not a promised Jannat beyond death, but a humane reimagining of Dunya forged through resilience, ambiguity, and shared vulnerability.
PHASE 2
“How to Tell a Shattered Story by Slowly Becoming Everything”:
Narrative Fragmentation and Trauma in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness deliberately rejects linear, chronological storytelling. As Prof. Dilip Barad explains, the novel is fragmented because its characters are themselves shattered by history, violence, and exclusion. Roy’s narrative strategy follows the principle she articulates within the text itself: “How to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everything.” The novel does not attempt to repair broken lives through orderly narration; instead, it allows form to mirror trauma. The non-linear structure becomes an ethical response to fractured subjectivities, where stories emerge in pieces, overlap across geographies, and connect through fragile human links rather than causal sequence.
Fragmentation as a Formal Expression of Trauma
Trauma resists linear memory. Survivors do not remember events in neat chronological order; experiences return as fragments, repetitions, silences, and sudden intrusions. Roy translates this psychological reality into narrative form. The novel shifts abruptly between Old Delhi, Gujarat, Kashmir, forests of Bastar, and protest spaces like Jantar Mantar. Characters move in and out of narrative focus, refusing the stability of a single protagonist. As highlighted in the lectures, this structure reflects “broken lives and disrupted histories”, where no character can claim a complete or authoritative story.
The use of mixed narrative forms—letters, police files, advertisements, testimonies, first-person confessions—further emphasizes fragmentation. These forms resemble archives of trauma rather than a conventional novelistic plot. Storytelling becomes a political act of witnessing, not resolution.
From Khwabgah to Jannat: Spatial Non-Linearity and Survival
One of the clearest examples of non-linear narrative reflecting trauma is the movement from Khwabgah (Old Delhi) to the graveyard named Jannat. Khwabgah initially appears as a space of fragile belonging for hijras, structured through kinship systems like the karana. However, it exists precariously within a hostile social order. After the trauma of the 2002 Gujarat riots, Anjum experiences a psychological rupture. She does not “progress” forward in life; instead, she withdraws from normative society altogether.
Her relocation to Jannat is not a linear journey of recovery but a sideways movement into liminality. The graveyard collapses the boundary between life and death, reflecting Anjum’s own condition as someone socially declared “dead” yet biologically alive. As the lectures emphasize, Jannat becomes a counter-world where the marginalized—hijras, Muslims, abandoned children, political outcasts—reassemble life from ruins. The narrative shift from Khwabgah to Jannat thus enacts trauma spatially: survival does not mean return to normalcy but invention of an alternative structure of living.
Non-Chronology and the Ethics of Connection: Anjum, Tilo, and the Baby
Roy’s shattered narrative slowly “becomes everything” through unexpected connections, most powerfully symbolized by the found baby that links Anjum’s world to Tilo’s Kashmir narrative. Tilo’s story appears structurally distinct—set within the militarized trauma of Kashmir, insurgency, surveillance, and state violence. Her chapters shift voice and tone, especially in Part Three, where first-person narration (“Landlord”) intensifies moral ambiguity.
The baby, whose origins are tied to Revathy’s sexual violence by police, crosses these narrative worlds. It moves from Kashmir’s unspeakable trauma into Jannat’s fragile community. This connection is not revealed through linear exposition but through delayed recognition, mirroring how trauma itself is often understood only retrospectively. The baby embodies innocence trapped inside political violence, functioning as a living archive of suffering that no single narrative strand can contain.
Through this link, Roy demonstrates that shattered stories cannot be told in isolation. Trauma travels—across bodies, regions, and identities. The narrative becomes whole not by resolving trauma but by allowing fragments to coexist.
Kashmir and Narrative Disruption
The Kashmir sections intensify fragmentation through shifts in narrative voice and form. Musa’s insurgency is narrated as grief rather than ideology, while Revathy’s letter emerges as a raw testimonial archive of gendered violence. These sections refuse closure or moral comfort. As the lectures note, the narrative is selective and uncomfortable, forcing readers to confront silences, complicities, and ethical unease.
Here, non-linearity reflects political trauma: Kashmir cannot be narrated as a coherent national story. It exists instead as interrupted testimony, where violence corrodes both victims and perpetrators. The psychological breakdown of figures like Amrit Singh further reveals how trauma destabilizes even those who wield power.
Becoming Everything: From Fragment to Collective Meaning
By the novel’s end, Roy does not gather fragments into a neat synthesis. Instead, she allows them to coexist within shared spaces like Jannat and Jantar Mantar. Protesters, animals, plants, children, and broken adults inhabit the same narrative field. This is where the novel “slowly becomes everything”—not through totalization, but through ethical accumulation.
The fragmented narrative thus reflects a deeper truth articulated across the lectures: paradise cannot be linear, pure, or complete. Like trauma, it must be assembled imperfectly, from leftovers, waste, memory, and care. Resilience emerges not as heroic transformation but as persistence—living with contradiction, telling stories despite fracture.
Conclusion
Arundhati Roy’s non-linear narrative structure in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not an experimental flourish but a moral necessity. By refusing chronology, coherence, and closure, Roy aligns narrative form with traumatized lives. The movement from Khwabgah to Jannat, the delayed connection between Anjum and Tilo through the baby, and the fractured testimonies of Kashmir all demonstrate how shattered lives demand shattered storytelling. In slowly becoming everything, the novel does not heal trauma—but it honors it, insisting that broken stories still deserve to be told, held, and shared.
Activity B: Mapping the Conflict (Mind Mapping with NotebookLM)
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In Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the characters Anjum, Saddam Hussain, and Tilo are linked through their shared status as outcasts, their experiences with state and communal violence, and their ultimate gathering in a "place of falling people" to create a chosen family.
The Individual Backgrounds
• Anjum (The Graveyard): Born Aftab, she is a Hijra (intersex/transgender) who lived for decades in the Khwabgah (House of Dreams). After surviving the 2002 Gujarat massacre, where she witnessed the horrific deaths of Muslims like Zakir Mian, she was unable to return to her old life. Seeking peace, she moved into a dilapidated graveyard behind a government hospital, where she built a home and funeral service named Jannat Guest House.
• Saddam Hussain (The Mortuary/Cow Violence): Originally a Chamar (Untouchable) named Dayachand, he changed his name after witnessing a video of the Iraqi leader's execution, admiring his dignity in death. His life was defined by the lynching of his father in 2002 by a mob "protecting" a dead cow carcass his father was legally transporting. Before moving into the graveyard, Saddam worked at the government hospital mortuary next to Anjum's home, where he performed autopsies that upper-caste doctors refused to touch.
• Tilo (Kashmir/Architecture): S. Tilottama is an architectural student and freelance designer who lived in a state of "reckless aloneness". Her life is inextricably tied to Kashmir through her love for the militant commander Musa Yeswi and her documentation of the horrors of the Indian occupation. She eventually "kidnaps" (rescues) a baby girl, Udaya (Miss Jebeen the Second), left on a pavement at Jantar Mantar during a protest.
The Connections Between the Characters
The primary connection between these three is the Jannat Guest House, the sanctuary Anjum created in the graveyard.
• Saddam and Anjum: Saddam was Anjum's second permanent guest. He became her right-hand man, assisting with the funeral services and managing the graveyard's "zoo" of injured animals. Their connection is solidified into family when Saddam marries Zainab, the girl Anjum found at the Jama Masjid and raised as her daughter.
• Tilo and Saddam/Anjum: Tilo encounters Saddam and Anjum at Jantar Mantar on the night she finds the baby. Fearing the police, she follows the advice of Dr. Azad Bhartiya and seeks refuge with Anjum. Saddam rescues Tilo and the baby by picking them up in a municipal garbage truck (the only vehicle police won't stop) and transporting them to the graveyard.
• A Shared Philosophy of Survival: All three characters inhabit the "other world" (the Duniya of outcasts). Anjum explains to Saddam that they are "falling people" who must hold onto each other to survive a world that refuses to acknowledge their existence.
• Kashmir as a Binding Thread: While Tilo is the direct link to the Kashmiri struggle, the graveyard itself becomes a resting place for Kashmiri Hijras and martyrs whom the world has rejected, answering the questions of Imam Ziauddin about who would bathe and bury "their" people.
By the end of the narrative, the three have transformed the graveyard from a place of death into the "Ministry of Utmost Happiness," where they provide education, shelter, and dignity for those who have been "shattered" by history.
Redefining “Jannat” in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Paradise as a Space for the Living Dead
Arundhati Roy radically redefines the idea of Jannat (Paradise) in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Instead of imagining paradise as a spiritual reward after death, Roy locates it within a graveyard, transforming it into a living space for those whom society has already declared dead—socially, politically, or emotionally. Through fragmented lives and intersecting stories, Jannat becomes a refuge for the marginalized, the traumatized, and the discarded.
Anjum: From Social Death to Living Paradise
Anjum’s journey is central to this redefinition. Born as Aftab and later embracing her hijra identity, Anjum experiences social death early in life—through gender nonconformity, religious marginalization, and communal violence (especially the Gujarat riots). After withdrawing from mainstream society, she settles in a graveyard named Jannat.
Here, Jannat is not a place of endings but of continuation. By founding the Jannat Guest House, Anjum transforms the graveyard into a space where hijras, abandoned children, Muslims, Dalits, and political outcasts can live with dignity. Paradise, thus, is not purity or peace—it is survival with care.
From Khwabgah to Jannat: Shift in the Idea of Belonging
The movement from Khwabgah (the hijra community house in Old Delhi) to Jannat marks a shift from conditional belonging to radical inclusivity. Khwabgah offers protection but remains socially invisible and regulated. Jannat, in contrast, exists outside the logic of the nation-state, religion, and legality.
Jannat welcomes those who no longer fit anywhere:
hijras
riot survivors
abandoned children
political dissidents
the emotionally broken
Thus, paradise becomes a counter-world, built not on ideals but on shared wounds.
Tilo, Kashmir, and the Found Baby: Paradise as Connection
Tilo’s story, shaped by Kashmir’s violence, surveillance, and loss, seems geographically and narratively distant from Anjum’s world. Yet the found baby connects these shattered lives. The baby—born out of gendered violence and political brutality—travels from Kashmir to Jannat.
Paradise here means shared responsibility, not salvation.
Other Marginal Figures and the Ethics of Jannat
Supporting characters reinforce this redefinition:
Saddam Hussain (Dalit convert) embodies caste trauma and chosen identity.
Dr. Azad Bhartiya resists capitalism and state terror through his body.
Musa Yeswi represents grief-driven insurgency.
Protesters at Jantar Mantar echo Jannat’s logic—temporary communities of the excluded.
Across these stories, Roy shows that the “living dead” are those erased by:
nationalism
capitalism
- religious fundamentalism
- state violence
- Jannat gathers them without demanding ideological purity.
Jannat as Paradise-in-Ruins
Unlike traditional paradise:
Jannat includes animals, waste, decay, and death.
Vultures, graves, and ruins coexist with children, food, and care.
This aligns with Roy’s larger philosophy: paradise must be made within Dunya (the world), not promised beyond it.
Conclusion: Paradise as Ethical Survival
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Jannat is not heaven after death but a fragile, human-made space where the rejected can live. It is a paradise for those who have already died symbolic deaths—through caste, gender, religion, war, or ideology.
Roy redefines Jannat as:
- a shelter, not a reward
- coexistence, not purity
- care, not power
Ultimately, Jannat is paradise for the living dead, proving that even among ruins, life can still be assembled—imperfectly, painfully, and collectively.
Activity C: Automated Timeline & Character Arcs (Auto-mode with Comet)
I. Anjum’s Journey: From Aftab to the Graveyard
• Birth and Discovery: Aftab is born on a cold January night in Shahjahanabad, the walled city of Delhi. The next morning, his mother, Jahanara Begum, discovers he has both male and "unformed" female parts.
• Childhood and Music: At age five, Aftab begins school and shows a prodigious gift for music, eventually training under Ustad Hameed Khan. However, by age nine, severe teasing from other children—calling him "He-She"—leads him to stop attending school.
• The Sexologist’s Diagnosis: Aftab’s father, Mulaqat Ali, takes him to a sexologist, Dr. Ghulam Nabi, who identifies Aftab as a rare hermaphrodite and warns of persistent "Hijra tendencies" (Fitrat).
• Migration to Khwabgah: Fascinated by a woman named Bombay Silk, Aftab begins following her and eventually moves into Khwabgah (The House of Dreams) at age fifteen, leaving the "Duniya" (the ordinary world) to be initiated as Anjum under Ustad Kulsoom Bi.
• Gender Realignment Surgery: In her early twenties, Anjum undergoes surgery by Dr. Mukhtar to remove her male parts and enhance her female ones; while she loses the ability to achieve orgasm, the surgery lifts a mental "fog".
• Finding Zainab: At approximately age forty-three, Anjum finds a three-year-old girl named Zainab crying on the steps of Jama Masjid and raises her as her own daughter in the Khwabgah.
• Trauma in Gujarat: In February 2002, Anjum and her friend Zakir Mian travel to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where they are caught in the 2002 Gujarat riots. Zakir Mian is murdered by a mob, and Anjum survives only because the killers believe killing a Hijra brings bad luck; she feigns death among a pile of corpses.
• Exodus to the Graveyard: Returning to Delhi shattered, Anjum finds she can no longer live in the Khwabgah and moves into a dilapidated graveyard at age forty-six. She eventually builds a home around her family's graves, naming it Jannat Guest House.
II. Saddam Hussain’s Journey: From Witness to Meeting Anjum
• Birth as Dayachand: He is born as Dayachand in the village of Badshahpur, Haryana, into a family of Chamars (leatherworkers).
• Witnessing the Lynching: In November 2002 (Dussehra), Dayachand witnesses his father and three others being intercepted by a police officer, Sehrawat, while transporting a dead cow. When they cannot pay an extortionate bribe, the officer falsely accuses them of "cow-slaughter" and hands them over to a lynch mob that bludgeons them to death while Dayachand hides in the crowd.
• Exile to Delhi: After his mother dies a few months later, Dayachand drops out of school and flees to Delhi, working brutal jobs such as a truck cleaner and sewage worker.
• Renaming to Saddam Hussain: While passing a TV showroom, he sees a video of the execution of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain; he is so impressed by the man's dignity in the face of death that he converts to Islam and adopts the name Saddam Hussain to gain strength for his planned revenge against Officer Sehrawat.
• The Stainless-Steel Tree Incident: Saddam briefly works for Sangeeta Madam at a security agency under his birth name, Dayachand, guarding a stainless-steel Banyan tree exhibit; the sun's reflection singes his eyes, forcing him to wear sunglasses permanently.
• Meeting Anjum: Saddam initially encounters Anjum while working at the government hospital mortuary next to the graveyard, where he handles bodies upper-caste doctors refuse to touch.
• Joining Jannat Guest House: On the morning after Bakr-Eid, Saddam arrives at the graveyard with a battered white mare named Payal and becomes Anjum’s second permanent guest. He later solidifies his place in this chosen family by marrying Zainab, Anjum's daughter.
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy critiques the cost of modernization by exposing how the external world—Dunya, the realm of material progress, nationalism, capitalism, and state power—systematically excludes, fragments, and dehumanizes vulnerable lives. Modern India’s promise of development is shown to be built on violence, erasure, and social stratification, leaving characters internally displaced even when physically present within the nation. Against this harsh external reality, Roy foregrounds the inner worlds of her characters, where memory, trauma, belief, and survival operate beyond the logic of productivity and success imposed by modernization.
The Dung Beetle emerges as a quiet but powerful symbol of resilience within this context. Living off waste and decay, the beetle represents those marginalized communities who survive on what modern society discards—humanly, culturally, and materially. Rather than symbolizing degradation, the beetle transforms refuse into continuity, suggesting an alternative ethic of survival that resists capitalist notions of worth and purity. It mirrors Roy’s characters, who endure by reworking pain, exclusion, and loss into fragile but persistent forms of life.
Similarly, the graveyard—particularly Anjum’s Jannat Guest House—functions as a radical counter-space to Dunya. Traditionally associated with death and abandonment, the graveyard becomes a site of inclusive living, sheltering hijras, Dalits, Muslims, abandoned children, and political outcasts. Unlike the modern city governed by surveillance, borders, and exclusion, the graveyard allows coexistence without hierarchy, identity policing, or nationalist loyalty. By locating hope among the dead rather than the living institutions of the nation, Roy suggests that genuine community and ethical belonging can only exist outside the violent structures of modernity.
Together, the symbols of the Dung Beetle and the graveyard challenge the illusion of progress promoted by Dunya. They assert that survival, dignity, and coexistence emerge not from modernization’s grand narratives, but from marginal spaces where life persists quietly, inclusively, and against all odds.
Work Cited :
DoE-MKBU. Part 1 | Khwabgah | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy. YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, YouTube, https://youtu.be/-29vE53apGs
DoE-MKBU. Part 2 | Jantar Mantar | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy. YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, YouTube, https://youtu.be/gr1z1AEXPBU.
DoE-MKBU. Symbols and Motifs | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBOqLB487U. .
DoE-MKBU. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Part 3 Discussion). YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, YouTube, https://youtu.be/cIKH_89rML0.
DoE-MKBU. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — Full Lecture/Analysis. YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, YouTube, https://youtu.be/5NYSTUTBoSs.
DoE-MKBU. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Symbols, Motifs, and Themes. YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, YouTube, https://youtu.be/VH5EULOFP4g.
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