The Bottom-Up View of a Nation- State: The Case of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine the problematic of representing a postcolonial Indian nation in dangerous transition, as presented in Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The novel is read as a compelling narrative of a specific historical moment, when the democratic nation- state is rapidly replicating the political mechanisms of colonial authoritarianism, unabatedly crushing the lives and aspirations of the marginal sections of society. The novel, on the one hand captures the mood of intellectual apprehension felt by the liberal minded populace of the nation, at having to witness the transition of representative democracy into a totalitarian order, and on the other exhibits the extremely challenging task of representing the interconnected nature of various marginal identities in contemporary India, by combining politics, history, poetry and myth. The distinguishing point of view of “bare lives” and the daunting task of expressing private experiences that are deeply embedded in public catastrophe, is examined in this paper. It also attempts to locate some of the topical debates of nationalism in relation to democracy and the aspirations of those whose voices fail to get documented on the national registers or the map of India. The aesthetic manoeuvrings of the text against the globalised notions of Indian English Writing and modern Anglophone fiction will also be examined here.