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“[S]titched Together by Threads of Light”: Perturbatory Narration, Queer Necropolitics as Biopower, and Transversality in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English

Abstract

This chapter explores Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It argues that Roy’s novel works transversally, moving across various subject positions different from her own, as a means of expressing her political solidarities with the plights of India’s constructed ‘others.’ The chapter engages the book’s challenging form, proposing that Roy’s vexation with the novel as a genre and her prolificness as a non-fiction writer have led her to create a ‘perturbatory narration’ querying truth and fiction, especially regarding the conflicted Valley of Kashmir. The article also queers the prominent notion of necropolitics, showing how the transversal community of misfits at the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services challenge the contours of Indian nationalism. Lastly, the novel’s embrace of a three-way form of motherhood beyond bloodlines is interpreted as a hopeful gesture toward India’s more just and more socially diverse future.

This chapter is affiliated to the Research Project ‘Bodies in Transit 2’ (Ref. FFI2017-84555-C2-1-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the European Regional Development Fund, and the Spanish Research Agency. I also wish to acknowledge the kind mentoring of Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir, whose sharp reading of Roy’s novel and generous guidance on Kashmir scholarship have been highly instrumental to my own analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pranav Jani argues that ‘[w]hile Roy’s writings offer a devastating and powerful critique of modernity and help to rally the forces of the Left whenever they appear, they offer no alternative to that modernity’ (2010, 230), yet despite this pessimism he also positions The God of Small Things against Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as the single contemporary Anglophone Indian text that can decenter Rushdie’s bourgeois cosmopolitanism. For other sources on Roy’s first novel, see Ranjan Ghosh and Antonia Navarro Tejero (2009), Amitabh Roy (2005), Alex Tickell (2007), and Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal (2012).

  2. 2.

    For a small selection of Ministry reviews, see Joan Acocella (2017), Jeremy Seabrook (2017), Terry Hong (2017), Francine Prose (2017), Donna Seaman (2017), and Eleanor Birne (2017).

  3. 3.

    Roy is self-confessedly vexed by being labeled a ‘writer-activist.’ In her essay ‘The Ladies Have Feelings, So … Shall We Leave It to the Experts?’ she writes: ‘Now, I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist’ (2019, 111). Her ensuing theory explains that political writers pick sides, whereas writers are not supposed to stick to one single political agenda but should prize sophistication and a plurality of viewpoints. Roy playfully intimates: ‘I’m all for discretion, prudence, tentativeness, subtlety, ambiguity, complexity. I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time’ (2019, 112). What she means is that she likes the complexity afforded by fiction but she also has political allegiances, something that comes across strongly in Ministry and that creates synergies between her literary and political writings.

  4. 4.

    Roy deploys popular narratives of hijra identity and of hijras’ position in South Asian history, which are orally shared by hijras for collective self-empowerment in the face of contemporary precarity. As Jennifer Ung Loh observes, ‘[b]y maintaining that they enjoyed a position of privilege “in the past” or “in history”, hijras make a comparison with their relatively low respect in modern society. […] Using narratives and developing an association with historical figures is an ongoing “mythmaking” process’ (2014, 29). The novel reflects this by reclaiming hijras as figures of trust in Mughal India’s Islamic court, where they were allowed in the women-only zenanas due to their sexual status as eunuchs. As Roy’s character Ustad Kulsoom Bi exclaims, following a brief mention of a eunuch’s laughter in the historical archive: ‘That is our ancestry, our history, our story. We were never commoners, you see, we were members of the staff of the Royal Palace’ (2017, 51). Hijras’ status in Mughal India is explored in scholarship by Ina Goel (2016) and Adnan Hossain (2012). Ministry also maps hijras’ ‘special place of love and respect in Hindu mythology’ (2017, 51). Hindu God Ram turned to his followers on the outskirts of Ayodhya, telling all the men and women to return to their homes; when he finally revisited the same spot, he found the hijras had been waiting ‘faithfully for him at the edge of the forest for the whole fourteen years’ (2017, 51). Ung Loh recalls that ‘[a]s a result, Rāma is touched by their devotion and he blesses them, saying they will rule the world in the “future”’ (2014, 32). The Ram story is also recorded by Serena Nanda (1986) and Gayatri Reddy (2003). Curiously, this story demonstrating the hijras’ ‘love and respect’ in Hinduism is told as a joke on them in Kushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990, 376). Singh’s is one of the first major modern Indian novels in English to give prominence to a hijra character, yet Bhagmati’s hijra subjectivity is always channeled through the diegetic narrator’s cisgender and supposedly heterosexual perspective, being often the object of ridicule, while also being a key figure of solidarity. I must thank Shital Pravinchandra for directing me to Singh’s work.

  5. 5.

    As Alessandra Diehl et al. observe, ‘in India, the Supreme Court has ruled out homosexuality as a crime […] and has given legal recognition to the third gender and stated that people of the third gender have equal rights to education, jobs and social benefits’ (2017, 391); in addition, they note how ‘the Supreme Court of India in April 2014 recognised the ‘third gender’ status of hijras and other transgender groups’ (2017, 393). So hijras have been legally recognized as a third gender and apportioned equality in Indian law, even if, in the practicalities of their daily lives, they are still the objects of routine social discrimination.

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Carbajal, A.F. (2022). “[S]titched Together by Threads of Light”: Perturbatory Narration, Queer Necropolitics as Biopower, and Transversality in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In: Dwivedi, O.P. (eds) Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_9

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