74 pages • 2 hours read
Arundhati RoyThe Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Nativity”
A baby has been abandoned in downtown Delhi:
She lay in a pool of light, under a column of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blue-black, sleek as a baby seal’s. She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in those first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile (100).
Before continuing the baby’s story, the narrator describes the changes that have been taking place in the city. In an effort to modernize, Delhi has outlawed begging and “surplus people” (102)—poor residents who can’t afford the price hikes that come with modernization. Neighborhoods, villages, and forests are being torn down, and people are being displaced. Although the “people (who counted as people)” (103) are pleased with the new luxuries life in Delhi affords, the city is in crisis, and crowds of protesters of various types have gathered at an old observatory (Jantar Mantar) in downtown Delhi. One man in particular—a hunger striker who has “announced a fast to the death to realize his dream of a corruption-free India” (105)—has attracted the attention of the media and mobilized public support behind him, although his image will eventually be coopted by Hindu nationalists led by Gujarat ka Lalla—the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the anti-Muslim riots. Other residents of the square include a woman protesting the seizure of land by a petrochemical company, a “bare-torsoed man, with yellow limes stuck all over his body with superglue” (111), and a man whose job it is to charge access to the square’s “glittering public toilet with float glass mirrors and a shiny granite floor” (115).
Curious about the protests, Anjum, Saddam Hussain, Ustad Hameed, and a Hijra named Ishrat have also come to Jantar Mantar and are there when a group of women from Kashmir (the “Mothers of the Disappeared”) spot the baby. Word of the child spreads throughout the gathered crowds, and a debate arises about what to do. When Anjum learns what’s happening, she argues against turning the baby over the police, promising to raise her herself. She gets into an argument with an accountant questioning her right to be in the square, and by the time the crowd settles down, a mysterious woman has taken the baby and left.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Dr. Azad Bhartiya”
The narrator introduces Dr. Azad Bhartiya—another protester and the last person to have seen the baby. Although Bhartiya isn’t technically a doctor (his PhD is “pending”) he carries a sign listing his credentials as well as an explanation of all the thing he is protesting with his hunger fast:
I am against the Capitalist Empire, plus against US Capitalism, Indian and American State Terrorism/ All Kinds of Nuclear Weapons and Crime, plus against the Bad Education System/ Corruption/ Violence/ Environmental Degradation and All Other Evils. Also I am against Unemployment (130).
In addition, he carries a bag full of booklets for distribution, which the narrator excerpts. In these, Bhartiya explains that he has been fasting in Jantar Mantar for 11 years, staying alive by eating a single, light meal every few days. He talks at some length about the dogs he claims are still occupying rooms in a luxury hotel after having been brought to the country by a visiting American president. He also says that the American government is monitoring him and is responsible for the car that recently hit him while he was sleeping on the pavement. While talking about the treatment he received for his injuries, he mentions a “very good lady” (135) named S. Tilottama who visits him and has signed his cast.
Bhartiya is questioned and beaten by the police following the baby’s disappearance, but he refuses to cooperate with them. Later on, however, they will zero in on the name S. Tilottama, who publishes Bhartiya’s pamphlets.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Slow-Goose Chase”
Saddam Hussain and Ishrat ride Saddam’s horse, a white mare named Payal, through the city in pursuit of an autorickshaw. They pass through wealthy neighborhoods where “[e]ven the yellow light that poured from the tall street lights look[s] encashable—columns of liquid gold” (139). From there, they pass by hospitals, markets, and construction before finally arriving at a “barred iron gate painted a dull shade of lavender” (141). Here, a woman emerges from the rickshaw and goes inside a house; looking up at a second floor window, Saddam and Ishrat make eye contact with her, and she “incline[s] her head and kisse[s] the stolen goods she [holds] in her arms” (142). Saddam Hussein leaves a business card for the woman in “S. Tilottama’s” mailbox, and the woman herself rocks the baby to sleep.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Some Questions for Later”
The narrator wonders what if anything the baby will remember of the earliest days of her life: “Would her body remember the feel of dry leaves on the forest floor, or the hot-metal touch of the barrel of her mother’s gun that had been held to her forehead with the safety catch off?” (143).
Chapters 3-6 Analysis
Perhaps more than any individual character, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel about the tensions within contemporary India—not just between different social groups, but also between the government’s determination to modernize and the people who are shut out of their country’s supposed progress. In these chapters, Roy therefore takes a step back to explore society at large, focusing on the “summer of [Delhi’s] renewal” (103)—an attempt to remodel the city into a Western-style metropolis. India’s upper-middle classes welcome the city’s globalization and commercialization, “look[ing] out of their car windows and [seeing] only the new apartment they [plan] to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that [is] still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed” (104). However, for those who already live on the margins of society—beggars, rural farmers, etc.—the changes threaten their very existence; Delhi attempts to evict all its “surplus people” (102), and dispossesses those in the surrounding countryside in order to make room for new factories, malls, etc.
Meanwhile, resistance to these changes is passionate but ineffectual. The protesters who gather in Jantar Mantar are in many cases themselves tainted by the forces of modernization they’re ostensibly speaking out against. This is particularly true of the “old-man baby”—a hunger striker protesting governmental corruption and “scams” of various kinds, who quickly becomes little more than a pawn of the country’s upper middle-class: “Industrialists who had been exposed in the scams donated money to his Movement and applauded the old man’s unwavering commitment to non-violence” (108)—presumably because it makes it less likely that the people the industrialists are exploiting will violently resist. Meanwhile, the media exploits the old man’s protests in order to turn a profit, making it that much harder to distinguish between the man’s own views and the image that has been constructed around him.
This in turn is one of the ways in which Roy suggests that modernization is exacerbating India’s preexisting divisions along ethnic, religious, and caste lines; India’s people sense that they are being cheated, but because even the resistance to oppression seems corrupt, they end up turning to various forms of extremism. In this case, for instance, the old man’s protest eventually gives way to demonstrations of Hindu nationalism:
[Gujarat ka Lalla’s] army of belligerent janissaries flooded Jantar Mantar. They overwhelmed the old man with boisterous declarations of support. Their flags were bigger, their songs louder from anyone else’s. They set up counters and distributed free food to the poor […] Within days they had pulled off a palace coup. The young professionals who had worked so hard to make the old man famous were deposed before they, or even he, understood what had happened. The Happy Meadow fell. And nobody realized (108-09).
Although these events are still in the future as of the period that Roy is concerned with, the tensions that enable them are already present within the protests themselves. For instance, Roy spends some time describing a group of Muslim Kashmiri women who have come to Jantar Mantar to raise awareness of their sons’ disappearance in the ongoing Kashmiri insurgency. Almost immediately, however, they find themselves being treated as aggressors rather than victims, often by people who have a vested interest in preventing the protesters from presenting a united front:
The women were heckled and threatened at their roadside press conference in the afternoon and eventually the police had had to intervene and throw a cordon around the Mothers. ‘Muslim Terrorists do not deserve Human Rights!’ Shouted Gujarat ka Lalla’s undercover janissaries (119).
The description of the “Mothers of the Disappeared” lays the groundwork for the next several chapters of the novel, which involve the struggle for Kashmiri independence. In fact, Chapters 3 through 6 serve a broadly transitional purpose in the novel, with Saddam Hussain and Ishrat’s “slow-goose chase” quite literally taking the reader on a journey from Anjum to Tilo (who will be at the center of Chapters 7, 8, and 9). Just as significantly, Roy also introduces readers to the baby who will later be known as Miss Jebeen the Second, and hints that she will be a redemptive force in the novel by comparing her arrival to Jesus’s birth: “She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival” (99).
