Thinking Activity
Welcome readers! This blog is written in response to the thinking activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir from Department of English, MKBU. As a Part of that, I will try to answer the questions assigned by sir from Arundhati Roy's novel 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.' That questions are ;
1. What is the symbolic significance of Vulture and Gui Kyom (Dung Beetle) in the novel?
2. How is the intertextual references to other writers in the novel connected with the central theme of the novel? [also mention the epigraphs in English & Hindi].
3. Instead of privileging the center stage, 'The Ministry of the Utmost Happiness' shifts the spotlight to the back alleys and hidden corners, granting agency to those typically relegated to the sidelines. Analyze how Roy's decision to center the periphery enriches our understanding of social, political, and existential realities often ignored by mainstream narratives.
Question 1 :- What is the symbolic significance of Vulture and Gui Kyom ( Dung Beetle) in the novel?
Answer :- In Arundhati Roy's novel 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' , Roy uses a references of Vultures and Gui Kyom to show us new ways of looking at the world. They represents deeper ideas and messages. Roy wants us to think differently about the world around us. she wants us to see things we might not normally notice and understand deeper truths about society and people. so, when we read about the references of Vultures and Gui Kyom in the novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, we are not only reading but rather it is about exploring bigger ideas and questions about life and society.
By incorporating the references of Vultures and Gui Kyom ( Dung Beetle), Arundhati Roy challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths and to expand their understanding of the world around them. We can say that Roy employs Vulture and Gui Kyom as vehicles for her message, inviting readers to explore realms of thought and experience that are often overlooked in traditional literature.
The novel is crammed with animals. Smelly old dog, Biroo; the fertile bitch, Comrade Laali and her litters; Payal, the scrawny white mare; two delightful kittens, Khanum and Agha and the rooster, Sultan, all play important roles. Finally, Guih Kyom, the dung beetle, introduced only on the last page, ‘lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell’. Ruling the roost, so to speak, are the vultures in the prologue. In the 1990s cattle were given Diclofenac to increase their milk production and when they died the white-backed scavengers or, waste removers, ingested the cow meat. The drug caused the ‘vultures’ necks to droop’ resulting in them ‘tumbling off their branches, dead’. Ethnic cleansing. Vulture genocide.
Arundhati Roy uses creatures to symbolise various aspects of Indian life, especially political ones. The dung beetle, characterised as unclean, untouchable, is able to drag 1,141 times its body weight of faecal matter. But is it possible that Guih Kyom is also a symbol for hope, a cleanser of the vast, chaotic, filthy, rancid democracy that is India?
It’s hard to decide whether The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is magic realism. In the first chapter, ‘Where do old birds go to die?’, it is unclear whether Anjum, one of the central characters, is still alive or whether she is now a tree. She has branches and leaves and can feel the ghostly talons of vultures but also sleeps on a carpet ‘between two graves at night’. There are also the preternaturally tall bulls. I think that Roy takes her characters to the edge of sanity, into a place where the Duniya, or real world, thins out into a transparent layer in which the laws of physics don’t quite work.
1. Vulture :- Arundhati Roy has penned her concern regarding innumberal issues that called for public attention. She emphatically asserts that the creatures and characters that populate her novel are not magical. All the images that appear are neither magical not metaphorical but true. The attention then moves to the latter half of the prologue. The unstained appetite of human has led to the extinction of the white backed vultures and sparrows. The vultures are natural scavengers and feed on dead flesh. However, as the prologue tells the vultures have died of diclofenac intoxication. The veterinary administration of diclofenac as a muscle relaxant in cows and buffaloes to enhance dairy production has led to the large scale death of white - ramped vultures.
The vultures populated Indian forests and helped in the process of sanitation by consuming the cases of dead animals. The vultures' death in the story shows a bigger idea about how nationalism can be harmful. It's like a warning about what happens when we focus too much on one national identity and ignore the value of different cultures. The author, Roy, uses this symbol to talk about her worries about how nationalism can limit people's freedom to think and create, and how it can erase the diversity that makes cultures unique. It's a strong way to start the book, making us think about the problems that come with blindly following one idea or story.
2. Gui Kyom ( Dung Beetle) :-
The novel ends with the image of Gui Kyom, the graveyard's resident dung beetle lying on his back with legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fall. The dung beetle feeds partly or exclusively on fasces and the posture of the beetle as described here is a tell - tale sign of a dead or dying insect. Gui Kyom is dead or dying but also wide awake and on duty, like a dung - eating, six -legged version of the Titan Atlas; filled with hope and conviction, the beetle thinks to himself, things will turn out all right in the end. They will, because they have to.
Thus the dead, the dirty, the abhorred become the lively conditions for hope and flourishing in the novel. The Symbol of Gui Kyom linked with Anjum. So, that is how this novel - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ends hopefully as Udaya Jebeen - second is seen as the hope for everyone. Gui Kyom, the Dung beetle reflects hope for the earth's preservation.
Question 2 :- How is the intertextual references to other writers in the novel connected with the central theme of the novel? [also mention the epigraphs in English & Hindi].
Answer :- Arundhati Roy's novel 'The Ministry of utmost Happiness' , the use of epigraphs that provide the '' external skeleton'' of the structure, as it were. The novel is divided into twelve chapters of varying lengths, unevenly distributed into six sections, each introduced by a short epigraph. The six quoted authors were all poets or writers who held strong, dissident political views, who rebelled against persecution, who refused submission and compromise. Tormented by institutional violence , censored, imprisoned, some were killed. Others were discriminated against for their skin color, and / or their sexual orientation and gender 'indeterminacy'. All were resolutely insubordinate.
1. "I mean , it's all a matter of your heart.'' - Nazim Hikmet
[ यानी सारा मामला दिल का है... नाज़िम हिकमत]
The first epigraph (“I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart”) was taken from Nâzim
Hikmet’s poem “On the Matter of Romeo and Juliet”. Read in the context of Hikmet’s poem, it finds an echo in Roy’s playful paragraph about the links between
Romeo and Juliet and the Arabo-Persian story of Laila and Majnun in which she circuitously introduces the first of her two heroines by differing the mention of her name and personal history.
Anjum plays with words, gliding from Anjuman to mehfil (from administrative gathering to artistic recital), insisting on the refusal of exclusion and discrimination: “Everyone’s invited”. In Anjum’s cemetery, those who are most welcome are those who are shunned and rebuked everywhere else. Cemeteries in India are ghettoized spaces ungraciously conceded to the minorities, to the Muslims and Christians who bury their dead instead of cremating them. Ironically, Anjum’s cemetery, open to the unwanted, becomes a symbol of the diverse, inclusive, secular nation that India used to claim to be.
2. " In what language does the rain fall/ on tormented cities? - Pablo Neruda
[बारिश किस भाषा में गिरती है/ यातनाग्रस्त शहरों के ऊपर ? - पाब्लो नेरुदा]
The second epigraph Arundhati Roy quoted Pablo Neruda, another exiled poet. Roy chose to quote from Neruda’s last book, Libro de las Preguntas (The Book of Questions), published posthumously in 1974. It is considered a children’s book, but many of the questions asked, whether they be poetic, philosophical, whimsical, or humorous, can be as intriguing and profound as any in the Book of Job. There are a number of ''tormented cities'' in the India depicted by Arundhati Roy, and her constant attention to, and interest in, the sheer number and variety of Indian languages are also echoed here.
The very first page can be read on one level as a humorous ecological fable about the dangers of “progress” and the collateral damage of globalization and American style consumerism, but the vultures are also given tragic dignity as the lost “custodians of the dead.'' with whose ghosts Anjum “confer[s]” The vultures, killed by the very carcasses they were supposed to pick and clean, provide a metaphor of the paradoxical treatment of Untouchable cow skinners at the hands of Hindu lynch mobs.
3. Death flies in, thin bureaucrat, from the plains'', a fit frame for the third ''section''. - Agha Shahid Ali
[मौत एक छरहरी नौकरशाह है, मैदानों से उड़कर आती हुई - आग़ा शाहिद अली]
The third epigraph quotes the first line of one of Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmiri
poems, “Death flies in, thin bureaucrat, from the plains”, a fit frame for the third
State. “section”, narrated by “The Landlord”, a cold and somewhat cynical servant of the
Agha Shahid Ali left Kashmir for the USA as a young man, but suffered, from afar,
all the anguish and sorrow of the devastation visited on his homeland. His poems, and especially the collection Roy quotes from, entitled The Country Without a Post Office, have been a source of inspiration and solace for many a Kashmiri, and Ali certainly is present as a tutelary voice in the books the Kashmiris have written since his death in 2001, either explicitly, in quotations and epigraphs, or implicitly, as in Roy’s novel, when she describes mourners at a funeral fleeing from shooting soldiers, leaving behind the dead and wounded: “And shoes. Thousands of shoes”.
4. Then, as she had already died four or five times, the apartment had remained available for a drama more serious than her own death. - Jean Genet
["क्योंकि वह पहले चार या पाँच बार मर चुकी थी, अपार्टमेंट उसकी मृत्यु से भी ज़्यादा गंभीर किसी नाटक के लिए उपलब्ध था। - ज्याँ जेने"]
The fourth epigraph is by Jean Genet, whose novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (written while its author was serving a prison sentence in Fresnes, in 1942) is quoted three times in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Many links do exist between the two literary universes. The events of Genet’s life, and his books, give him a place of choice among the “Unconsoled” and the “Indeterminate”, and the paradoxical co-existence of the languages of eroticism and religion in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.
The narrative originality of Genet’s novel, the constant slipperiness and fluidity of literary genres and of points of view, the constant efforts to find new narrative techniques that rebel against classifications, and defy rounded, conclusive interpretations, cannot but have inspired Roy, who was attempting to create the same kind of effects, and striving to eschew simplification and achieve complexity. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, comedy, political satire, elegy, tragedy, poetry, realism, magic realism, parody, all happily co-habit. Points of view shift and vary.
5. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. - James Baldwin.
["और वे मेरी बात पर सिर्फ़ इस वजह से यक़ीन नहीं करते थे की वे जानते थे कि मैंने जो कुछ कहा था वह सच था। - जेम्स बाल्डविन"]
The fifth epigraph is quoted from James Baldwin’s essay entitled “Down at the cross. Letter from a Region in my Mind”, which offers a set of reflections on race relations in the USA. Read in the light of caste relations in India, many of those reflections also seem perfectly relevant. She denounces similar denials in India, regretting that even for left-leaning intellectuals and prominent scholars, “caste is at best a topic, a subheading, quite often just a footnote”, adding bitterly that such attitudes sometimes come “from a place of such rarefied privilege that caste has not been stumbled upon, not even in the dark, and therefore it is presumed to have been eradicated, like smallpox”.
Roy chose to quote Baldwin and not, for instance, Martin Luther King, who was very much influenced by Gandhi’s example; but she is no fan of Gandhi’s. Arundhati Roy highlights that that casteism and racism are “indeed comparable” as both scorn and target other people because of their ancestry, their birth and blood, their alleged tainting impurity. It connects the mere act of riding a horse is considered an honor to which Dalits must not aspire. A young Dalit who was beaten to death because he dared to ride a horse in Gujarat.
6. Then there was the changing of the seasons. 'This is also a Journey,' M said, 'and they can't take it away from us.' - Nadezhda Mandelstam
["फिर मौसमों में परिवर्तन हुआ। 'यह भी एक यात्रा है,' एम ने कहा, 'और इसे वे हमसे छीन नहीं सकते।' - नादेज्दा मान्देल्स्ताम"]
The final epigraph used by Roy is a quotation from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s first
volume of memoirs, Hope Against Hope, in which Osip Mandelstam’s widow narrates his
tragic fate. Nadezhda Mandelstam played a crucial role for Osip’s literary legacy as she
was the one who memorised his unpublished poems and then smuggled them out of the
USSR for publication. It is easy to see how the descriptions, in this memoir, of human suffering under oppression could find instant comprehension and sympathy with Roy; the reader recalls her cold rage and bitter graveyard humour when suggesting the extremities of
torture in the Shiraz cinema, and when depicting the martyred bodies of shattered youths, like the “broken bird” who refused to show pain.
And yet Arundhati Roy retains the idea of “hope against hope”, hope in the face of impossible odds.
Question 3 :- Instead of privileging the center stage, 'The Ministry of the Utmost Happiness' shifts the spotlight to the back alleys and hidden corners, granting agency to those typically relegated to the sidelines. Analyze how Roy's decision to center the periphery enriches our understanding of social, political, and existential realities often ignored by mainstream narratives.
Answer :- Arundhati Roy's book - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness does something different from typical stories. Instead of focusing on the main characters in the spotlight, it pays attention to the people usually pushed to the sidelines- those in the back alleys and hidden corners of society. By doing these, Roy gives these characters a voice and importance. This shifts helps us to see a different perspective on social, political and existential issues that are often overlooked in mainstream stories. Arundhati Roy shifting the spotlight to the periphery, and enriches our understanding of society and humanity by giving voice to those who are often silenced and overlooked.
Depiction of Social execution in 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' :-
Arundhati Roy that primarily deals with the socio-political issues of modern Indian society. The narrative features everybody and is about everybody who has been neglected, suppressed, and socially excluded by the powerful classes. The novel mainly features the transgender community, women, children, tribal population, Kashmiris, Dalits, etc. and talks about how they face multiple forms of suppression and oppression and how they have been socially, politically, geographically, and economically excluded. Roy becomes their savior and gives them a space to make their demonstrations and demands heard and addressed. She has tried to create an environment for these disadvantaged people.
1. Anjum :- Transgender people are classified as a third gender and termed neither men nor women. They have been facing social exclusion and alienation and also identity crises for a long time because they can't define themselves in conventional male or female terms. They are dismissed by their families as well as by society. They are marginalized everywhere and are forced to live the life of an “other”. They are restricted both in education and in public spaces, and because of certain limitations, they choose to live a life of seclusion. They are oppressed people, and as a result, face legal, social, and economic challenges. They don't have good access to education, health care, or public spaces. These people do not fit into society's standards because they have been deprived of their social rights. They still have an identity crisis in this stereotypical culture which is centered on the stereotypical relationship between men and women. They are unable to accommodate themselves, and their families to are turned away by society. They are deprived of psychological, physical, and political freedom almost everywhere. The issue of gender discrimination in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is depicted by Roy through the character of Anjum, who is born as Aftab, but soon is discovered to have Hijra tendencies, and after many surgeries become Anjum, leaves her home and begins to live with the Hijra community in the Khwabgah (house of dreams).
After discovering that her child (Anjum) was not a normal boy, Anjum’s mother even tried to hide it from her husband. The child’s sexual identity shocks and terrifies the mother. She began reacting quite differently and became very disappointed as they had been impatiently waiting for the son to be born, but to her surprise, it was not a ‘normal’ baby. She wasn’t able to make her eyes and heart believe what has happened to her. “There, in the abyss, spinning through the darkness, everything she had been sure of until then, every single thing, from the smallest to the biggest, ceased to make sense to her.
At home too Aftab was hated and excluded just because he was born like this. He began to attend music classes and there faced the burnt of teasing and mocking by his mates once they discovered a little difference in him and them.
“He’s a She. He’s not a He or a She. He’s a He and a She. She-He, He-She Hee! Hee! Hee!”
He possessed a body that blurred the lines between male and female. The tale of Aftab highlights the difficulties of living in a culture dominated by essentialist gender explanations. Aftab, a woman trapped in a man's body, accepts his/her female identity in the hopes of realizing his/her true self.
According to Judith Butler,
''People need not regard gender to be passively determined but “it is a process of constructing ourselves”
2. Dalits :- Another major character Saddam Hussain who is born Dayachand, and becomes Anjum’s first guest at Jannat Guest House. He is born into a low- caste, Dalit family, but after his father is mercilessly murdered by an unruly mob for being suspected of killing a cow, converts to Islam. He faces alienation and exclusion in society on the base of his caste. A social structure like this doesn’t allow him to have his voice heard freely and fairly. He can be termed as the representation of a subaltern in the novel.
3. Musa Yeswi :- Another major character of the novel is Musa Yeswi, a Kashmiri, who turns to militancy after his wife, Arifa, and his daughter, Miss Jabeen, are killed by the security forces. He is the representation of the Kashmiris being put to the margins and being silenced and forced to leave their homes and the life of peace to become rebels. Musa then goes underground and dies there for the cause of Kashmir. He is the representation of the subaltern Kashmiris.
4. S. Tillotama ( Tillo) :- Another socially oppressed character in the name of Tillotama, called Tilo, who some readers believe is the representation of Roy herself. The life story of Tilo is told in narrative form. Roy emphasises the internal struggles of transgender persons in Anjum's narrative and paints a picture of an environment filled with turmoil in Tilo's life. Through Tilo's life, the miserable existence of the Kashmiri people is intricately portrayed. Her search for Kashmiri activist Musa gets her into trouble.
She has witnessed the brutal treatment of citizens by military officers. They shave her head to interview her when she survives it. It's a comment on how the government implements and justifies its gender-based policies. She vows to never let her hair grow long again in an effort to get back at him. Her existence in the world of fiction challenges some assumptions about the roles that men and women play in the public and private spheres. As she broke free from the constraints of family life and transitioned from the private to the public sector as an activist, her social and political identity began to take shape.
5. Kashmiri Conflict :- Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" delves into the complex Kashmir conflict through various characters and narratives. In the novel, Kashmir isn't just a physical location but a symbol of conflict, loss, and longing. Through the experiences of characters like Tilo, Musa, and others, Roy explores the human toll of the conflict, depicting the struggles, aspirations, and traumas faced by Kashmiris. She portrays the brutality of military occupation, the emotional turmoil of families torn apart, and the resilience of individuals amidst ongoing violence and political instability. Through her vivid storytelling, Roy brings attention to the Kashmir conflict, urging readers to confront the realities.
Conclusion :- To Conclude, Arundhati Roy's novel 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' it can be said that the novel depicts the voices of the subaltern people and depicts people who are socially and politically excluded by the powerful classes, upper castes, the state forces of the modern society. Arundhati Roy on one hand narrates the stories of the victims of social exclusion and on another provides them space to express their say independently. She again looks to be very much concerned about ‘The Unconsoled’ as she had been previously in her other writings and also in her talks.
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