Interrogating the Plurality of ‘Azadi’ vis-à-vis the Monolithic ‘Independence’ of Nation-State: A (Political) Reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

Arundhati Roy’s second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) addresses many of the issues and concerns we tend to associate with her writings—the violence of nation-states, majoritarian intolerance over the minorities, the denial and violation of human rights and the struggle to restore those basic rights as well as the quest for identities, both personal and national. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy uses all these themes through a plurality of discourses which in turn interrogate the nature of different versions of azadi/freedom. These versions include the quest for identity of a transgender born in a Muslim family, the freedom of a woman to choose between lovers and ideals as well as the complex dynamics of insurgency in Kashmir where the word ‘azadi’ is used both as a slogan and a goal. In a work clearly meant to subvert the government’s promotion of “one nation, one religion, one language” agendum, Roy valorises the plurality of cultures, religions and languages and demands the real freedom which involves “azadi from poverty, from hunger, from caste, from patriarchy, and from repression”. The present paper tries to interrogate the ways in which the author celebrates the plurality of discourses vis-à-vis the nation-state’s promotion of a single, accepted version of Independence. At the same time, the paper also tries to probe if the author’s political perspective interferes with the exhilaration of possibilities offered by the genre of fiction and limits the scope of the work merely to a tool of political instrument. The paper gives a further political dip and interrogates if Roy’s attempts to subvert the monolithic version of “truth” becomes trapped in the quagmire of her own version of truth which can also be viewed as biased and therefore may be challenged and contested.