The subaltern saga continues: Politics of silence and poetics of articulation in arundhati roy’s the ministry of utmost happiness

In more ways than one, Arundhati Roy’s latest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness continues the subaltern saga initiated in her debut novel The God of Small Things. Velutha, the titular “god of small things,” was permanently silenced for trespassing on the upper-caste social spaces and violating its moral codes. In the forty years’ interregnum between the fictional times of the two novels, the religious and sexual minorities too have joined the dalits in experiencing discrimination and ill-treatment and are required to constantly contend with outmoded moral codes, caste-based discrimination, and majoritarian violence. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness offers a mind-numbing account of how almost all its major characters experience silence for reasons beyond their control—birth, sexual orientation, social/cultural impositions, and so on—but finally learn to break it in their own individual ways. In the process, they achieve a limited realization of their true selves and learn to manage the fear, hypocrisy, and negativity imposed on them. This paper charts their passage from passivity to autonomy and concludes that they offer, as a collective, a way out of the morass Indian society is now embroiled in.