The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy, Penguin; Rs.599, Pages 445 In her first novel after the God of Small Things (1997), which won the prestigious Booker Prize to global hosannas, Arundhati Roy, who switched to polemical non-fiction writing after her highly acclaimed debut novel — The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001), An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), Broken Republic (2011), Walking with the Comrades (2011) — returns to fiction with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a tour de force novel with a broad canvas stretched across contemporary Delhi and Kashmir. Curiously, this novel which highlights two burning issues of the times — gross inequalities of wealth between the elite and the underclass in allegedly socialist India, the unending Kashmir conflict as also the struggle of the rural tribal underclass to retain their lands and modus vivendi — has not attracted much attention in the media or academia. This is perhaps attributable to the revivalist winds of change blowing over the country when even to discuss these issues is to run the risk of being labelled anti-national. This sprawling narrative of Roy’s accumulated knowledge and experience, is peopled with numerous protagonists starting with Aftab, a transgender child born into the home of Mulaqat Ali, a hakim, and Jehanara Begum who live in the Jama Masjid ghetto of Delhi. While his parents love him regardless, because of the ragging and taunts of his schoolmates, at age 15 Aftab moves into Khwabagh, a colony of transgenders only a few hundred yards from where his/her family had lived for centuries. But Khwabagh is an altogether different universe in which she (renamed Anjum) is appreciated for who she is and transformed into Delhi’s most famous hijra. The thread which binds the thicket of detail in the book is the atrocities and iniquity that the Indian State visits on the poor and marginalised minorities, particularly the Muslim minority of the country, going well beyond the sin of omission. Having done precious little to enable and empower them, it won’t even let them get on with their difficult lives. Even as Anjum and Zainab — an abandoned new born whom she has literally picked off the street — are beginning to enjoy a measure of happiness in their squalid ghetto, the State intervenes with ruthless cruelty. While invited as transgenders often are, to perform at a wealthy man’s wedding, the revelry is rudely disrupted by the police and Anjum & Co are beaten up and made to run all the way home in pouring rain after Arif, their driver, has his knuckles and kneecaps smashed. This incident happens in 1976, at the height of the Emergency when Sanjay Gandhi’s goons visited a reign of terror on the population to enforce his diktat of forced sterilisation of poor males, mostly Muslims. Again in 2002 when Anjum is on a religious pilgrimage to Ajmer with Zakir Mian, an aged flower-seller of their slum, the duo fatally presses on to Ahmedabad, where they plunge headlong into the…
