The Ministry of Upmost Happiness

“I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens, there’s lots to write about. This can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.

Q1. Why is it not sophisticated?
Q2. What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?”

― The Ministry of Upmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy

If good literature is sophisticated, bloodless and limited in scope — “the little bit two inches wide of ivory” — then Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Upmost Happiness does not fulfil its own criteria.

However, while The Ministry of Upmost Happiness might not be sophisticated in the restrained, elitist sense of the term, it can hardly be accused of lacking complexity. Defying overly simplistic distinctions between fiction, fable, history and poetry, it acts as a rallying cry for the marginalised, giving voice to their stories and grievances in a polyphonic chorus.

It is a book in which everything happens, in a dizzying narrative that frequently pulls us away from characters and events just as we are beginning to trace their significance. After the captivating introduction to the world of the hijra and to the vivid, intersex Anjum in the opening chapter, we are whisked away from her company for most of the remainder of the book — there is too much else left to see. Furthermore, the novel is steeped in the bloody legacy of historic communal tensions, and the non-linear structure only further emphases their destructive contemporary repercussions.