The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

The man who attains celebrity status during his hunger strike at Jantar Mantar is a symbol of the impasse contemporary India is facing. He has “tapped into a rich seam, a reservoir of public anger” (106) with his protest against corruption in the Indian government; in the summer he stages his strike, feelings are running especially high because so many poor people in Delhi and its surroundings have been displaced as the city attempts to modernize. In the eyes of many, the man therefore comes to represent hope for India’s future—so much so that he temporarily succeeds in uniting people of different beliefs and backgrounds in a kind of “happy meadow in which everybody, including the most corrupt, could graze” (106).

The problem, as the above passage suggests, is that the old man’s protest does little to disturb the status quo. In fact, it isn’t intended to, at least by the time the man becomes famous. A “team of young professionals”—emblems of India’s upper-middle class—take over the “management” (106) of the protest and the old man’s image, effectively stripping it of any substance and making it primarily about the thrill of protesting:

The relatively well-off among the old man’s fans, who had been blessed with life’s material needs, but had never experienced the adrenaline rush, the taste of the righteous anger that came with participating in a mass protest, arrived in cars and on motorcycles, waving national flags and singing patriotic songs (108).

Meanwhile, the old man himself begins to air views that appeal to Hindu nationalists, a group of whom eventually take over the entire demonstration. The old man’s protest provides his followers with an apparent glimpse of a utopian society, while remaining indebted to wealth, bigotry, etc. His appearance underscores this tension, with features that ought to suggest youth and hope for the future (e.g. a “gummy Farex-Baby smile”) appearing on an old and dying body.

Shiraz Cinema is a symbol of Indian imperialism in Kashmir. In fact, this was why it was initially shut down by the “Allah Tigers”—a group of Muslim Kashmiri separatists who held that cinema halls were un-Islamic and “vehicles of India’s cultural aggression” (177). Although The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has limited sympathy for this kind of fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, the existence of a movie theater in Kashmir does speak to the extent to which India has adopted and promulgated Western culture. Ironically, however, the theater takes on a much clearer and more violent imperialist function after the Tigers close it; the Indian Army seizes the theater and turns it into an “interrogation center” where they detain and often torture those suspected of being insurgents. The theater therefore both illustrates the relationship between cultural imperialism and military imperialism while also demonstrating the dangers of extremism; by shutting the Shiraz Cinema down, the separatists created a much more serious problem than the one they had faced to begin with.

Jannat Guest House and Funeral Parlor is the most important symbol in the novel. It begins as a shack Anjum builds for herself while living in the old Muslim cemetery, but slowly expands in both size and function; she builds additional rooms around the graves of deceased relatives, works out how to install amenities like electricity and a bathhouse, decorates in bright colors, and takes in tenants including Imam Ziauddin and Saddam Hussain. Together with these two occupants, she eventually transforms part of the house into a funeral parlor for those whom other cemeteries reject. By the end of the novel, Jannat Guest House is also home to Tilo and Miss Jebeen the Second.

The house’s significance, then, lies partly in its inclusivity; people of all religions, ethnicities, genders, castes, etc. are welcome there, making it a safe haven for anyone marginalized or dispossessed by mainstream Indian society. In this sense, it serves as an idealized form of India itself, or a depiction of what India could be in the future if it stopped trying to enforce a single, rigid national identity and instead learned to find meaning in its complex, diverse history and peoples.

At the same time, Jannat Guest House’s proximity to death is significant. In part, it serves as a reminder of how tenuous the existences of people like Anjum and Saddam Hussain are. It also, however, points to the house’s role as a symbol of paradise (which is, in fact, the meaning of “Jannat” itself). In this sense, it’s not so much a vision of what India could be as it is a glimpse of a timeless utopia that exists outside the physical world and history—that is, a glimpse of paradise in a spiritual sense.

Although they both occur in connection with real places in the novel, the terms “Duniya” and “Jannat” also function as a motif through which Roy explores questions of happiness, life, and death. “Duniya” originally appears as the term the novel’s Hijras use to refer to life outside the Khwabgah; the term simply means “world.” “Jannat,” meanwhile, is the name Anjum gives to her house in the cemetery and translates as “paradise.” The two words therefore function to some extent as opposites in the novel, with places like Jannat Guest House and the Khwabgah existing as utopian bubbles outside the horrors and violence of the real world (Indian society as a whole).

Like life and death, however, the terms aren’t entirely the opposites they at first seem. In Revathy’s letter, for instance, Roy plays with an idea that has recurred throughout the novel: that places like the Khwabgah are necessary for those who can’t live in the world as it is. Revathy claims something similar, saying she “cannot live outside” her home in the forest, but in her case, “paradise” is just as violent and frightening as the world outside; Revathy is a Maoist guerrilla fighter fighting against the government forces that are “burning killing raping poor people” (431) in the jungle region of Dandakaranya. Amrik Singh also blurs the lines between paradise and reality by claiming the nickname “Jannat Express” and joking that by killing Kashmiri militants, he is merely “facilitat[ing] [their] journey” (342) to heaven.

Motherhood is a major motif in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, where it helps illuminate both the novel’s personal and societal concerns. Motherhood is a charged issue for most of the novel’s characters, though not necessarily for the same reasons: Anjum’s mother Jahanara, for instance, feels “terrified of her own baby” when she discovers that Anjum is intersex, Miss Udaya’s Jebeen’s biological mother Revathy is revolted by and considers killing her newborn because she was the product of rape, and Tilo aborts a baby out of fear that she will disappoint a child in the same way that her own mother disappointed her. The only major character who desires motherhood in a straightforward way is Anjum, but her biological inability to bear a child and (later) her traumatic experiences in Gujarat thwart this desire for much of the novel.

To understand why motherhood is so complex an issue in Roy’s novel, it’s helpful to bear in mind that Indian nationalism has often described the country as a mother goddess in the Hindu tradition. Most of the novel’s characters, however, aren’t part of this tradition, and are in fact often persecuted by it; Anjum, for instance, is made to chant “Victory to Mother India! Salute the Mother!” (67) by the rioters who nearly kill her. Motherhood, then, is as complicated an identity for characters like Anjum and Tilo as “Indian” is. Nevertheless, the two women’s eventual adoption of Miss Jebeen the Second, as well as the unconventional roles they each play in parenting her, is a sign that it may be possible to define motherhood (and Indian nationality) in less rigid and more inclusive ways.

Bodies and the waste they produce are a recurring image in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In some instances, this is simply a reflection of the prevailing cultural context in which the story unfolds. India’s caste system relegates the disposal of waste and dead bodies to Dalits; now known officially as “Scheduled Castes,” Dalits are at the bottom of the caste pyramid and are considered unclean themselves. In Roy’s novel, Saddam Hussain is a member of this caste, and the difficulties of his position are further exacerbated by the fact that his family disposes of dead cows—a sacred animal in Hinduism.

Partly because of this cultural context, Roy often uses waste as a way of symbolizing resistance to the status quo. In some cases, the subversion is obvious, as when Dalits protest their status by bombarding the home of a government official with cow carcasses. Elsewhere, the significance is subtler; for instance, when Delhi attempts to ban its “surplus people,” they respond by asking, “Where shall we go? […] You can kill us, but we won’t move” (102)—the implication being that their bodies would remain in place as a problem to be dealt with.

Human waste is subversive, then, not only because of its relationship to the caste system, but also, more broadly, because it hampers the government’s efforts to modernize and standardize the country by eliminating anything that is “surplus.” In this sense, it bears a relationship to the characters Roy’s novel primarily follows, since they also thwart attempts to control or categorize them. This helps explain the significance of one of the final passages in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness:

Anjum sat [Miss Udaya Jebeen] down under a street light. With her eyes fixed on her mother she peed, and then lifted her bottom to marvel at the night sky and the stars and the one-thousand-year-old city reflected in the puddle she had made (444).

The point here isn’t so much to disrespect or mock the “thousand-year-old city” by depicting it in a puddle of urine, but rather to suggest that the city and country’s future lie in what has historically been considered unclean and unimportant—that is, people like Udaya Jebeen herself.

Bodily imagery also serves as the clearest example of a broader motif involving inner turmoil and division. Roy’s depiction of internal organs is especially significant in this respect. Here, for instance, is Roy’s account of Musa’s experiences while training as a guerrilla fighter:

At night, fed up with the regime of silence, his organs murmured to each other in the language of night crickets. His spleen contacted his kidney. His pancreas whispered across the silent void to his lungs […] Are you still there? (352).

The kind of alienation from oneself Roy describes here is an extreme form of the inner strife she explores throughout the novel; in this and similar passages, characters are so divided and traumatized that even the different organs inside them seem incapable of working in tandem with one another. One of the major themes in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness involve characters and countries learning to live with these schisms.

The show, which takes place in the Red Fort itself, presents a narrative designed to celebrate India’s illustrious past and inspire national pride. It appears periodically throughout The Ministry of Utmost Happiness:

The Sound and Light Show was an old-government-approved version […] of the history of [Delhi’s] Red Fort and the emperors who had ruled from it for more than two hundred years—from Shah Jahan, who built it, to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal, who was sent into exile by the British after the failed uprising of 1857 (54).

Ustad Kulsoom Bi takes her charges there to underscore the Hijras’ historical prominence, and Musa—posing as a guide taking a group of Kashmiri orphans to Delhi—meets Tilo there at one point. At the very end of the novel, however, the new Hindu nationalist government overhauls the Sound and Light Show, virtually eliminating any reference to the years the country spent under Muslim rule. In this way, the show symbolizes the impermanence of even the most official and widely accepted stories and illustrates the ways in which stories are continually rewritten to further various agendas. 

Animals in general figure heavily in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, but the vultures that used to live in Delhi’s Muslim cemetery hold significance. As Roy explains in the novel’s prologue, these vultures were an unintended casualty of modernization, having died out as a result of ingesting diclofenac—a medication used to increase milk production and meet the growing demand for dairy products. In this way, the vultures symbolize and foreshadow all the other groups whose existence is threatened by the social and economic changes underway in contemporary India.