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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
One may agree or disagree with her views on national policies, dams and rivers but her writing is beyond doubt one of the finest we have in India.
This was a terribly difficult book to read as well as review. I waited for an entire week to see how long it will take me to be "disillusioned" by Roy's fantastic writing to actually judge the book with as much objectivity as possible. But looks like that is not happening, so here it goes.
This book is FANTASTIC. It's also one of those books that take your breath away with writing that is unforgettable. Here's an example.
“Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.”
And that's just one line from this 438 paged book. Roy writes with such stark compassion and gentleness, her words feel more like feathers. I wish there was a more convincing and appropriate figure of speech to describe her.
The book takes place all across India, starting with Delhi, where Anjum, a hijra (a term used to refer to various gender non-conforming people in India) starts living with others like her in Khawbgah (literally meaning the house of dreams), making them her new family. She later on leaves the place, and settles in a graveyard, carrying her entire closet with her (a great metaphor there). Throughout this Roy also explores the various fault lines in India, like the partition, the Gujrat Riots, and the emergency. then in 2011, Anjum (who by now has built a modest house inside the graveyard for all the rejects of society) goes to a hunger strike by Anna Hazare, a social activist, and fights for a child abandoned in the streets. I'll digress here just to point out how the baby is introduced:
"She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival... She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in her first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile."
We then cut to the woman who stole away the child- Tilo, who is a quiet, lonely, mysterious woman living all alone. From here she becomes the centre of the story, and it's all about her and the three men who fall in love with her- a Kashmiri freedom fighter, a corrupt journalist, and a government officer. Roy takes an awful amount of time with exposition after exposition, explaining the dire situation the kashmiris are in, and what the freedom struggle means to them. In India, to state such thoughts would be seditious. But Roy's writing is unapologetic. She leaves no space for public opinion, and makes a pretty clear stance on the issue, although I must say that a bit of nuance could have been appreciated.
This is where most people would take offence, either at the overwhelming political commentary or the stagnation of the plot, and I agree on the latter at least. The plot moves slightly further every 5 pages or so, and honestly speaking it would require a reader a lot of patience to get through this.
But once you do, you would be rewarded with a beautiful crossover between the two plotlines. Anjum's house is now a guesthouse, and all kinds of downtrodden people inhibit- dalits, dogs used for experiments, smuggled birds, hijras, you name it. There is a brilliant love story of almost cinematic brilliance in the middle as well, between Tilo and one of her lovers (probably remnants of Roy working as a screenplay writer in her early career). And of course, the story begins and ends in a graveyard, which I found as a brilliant way of both beginning and ending a story.
Right from the point where the story begins with Anjum ("She lived in a graveyard like a tree"), Roy's work seems phenomenal. But it loses stream quickly. Getting used to the sudden shift in the story, when all the focus is shifted to Tilo takes some time, and it certainly doesn't help that the entire beginning of the Tilo arc is filled with political commentary and loads of exposition. But once you get used to it, it's unputdownable. I remember once reading a 177 pages in one setting, which might not seem a lot to binge readers, but with writing as heavy as this, is a wonder.
Two things that I was pretty sure of was this:
1. Roy is clearly trying to write a story while connecting various political events in the history of India- from partition to the unfortunate victory of the BJP leader Narandra Modi. And that is where the work bogs down. It sometimes feels like the plot is being used merely to touch upon them so Roy can comment on them. The characters in this case feel secondary, only there as an excuse for Roy to comment on.
2. The entire plot is also almost a homage to all sorts of minorities in our country- the poor, the lower caste, different. And that is brilliant utilized. The book's dedication page says "To, the Unconsoled" and it's so fitting. Anjum turning a graveyard into a house for such kinds of people is heart-touching. Her insights into the hijra community are also handled with great sensitivity. The raw scenes of struggle and the huamn connections these people create because of the misery they are subjected to made me cry at the end. I have never read anything so gentle and soft before.
And finally, let me talk about Tilo. She is a mixed bag. I would say that the most boring parts of the book are directly concerned with her, but she also is so inherently important to the Kashmir narrative that she is pretty much unavoidable. But I do think that the entire character arc of Tilo was basically her turning into an actual, engaging character we can root for. And the mesmerizing love story in the middle that I talked about earlier is easily one of the most unforgettable parts of the book, even though it ends with gruesome consequences. Here are a few quotes about her:
“She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.”
“They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.”
In conclusion, this books has flaws. A lot of them. But in my case at least, it is all overshadowed by brilliant storytelling and writing. You might say, as I have seen a lot of reviewers comment, that it feels like a bunch of stories strung together, but I think Roy does a pretty neat job of stringing them together convincingly. And it's not like Roy is not aware of how shattered the story is. The last few pages of the book has a poem:
How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
I recommend this to everyone who wants good writing and engaging characters, who are also interested in political debates that this book raises.
This book is FANTASTIC. It's also one of those books that take your breath away with writing that is unforgettable. Here's an example.
“Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.”
And that's just one line from this 438 paged book. Roy writes with such stark compassion and gentleness, her words feel more like feathers. I wish there was a more convincing and appropriate figure of speech to describe her.
The book takes place all across India, starting with Delhi, where Anjum, a hijra (a term used to refer to various gender non-conforming people in India) starts living with others like her in Khawbgah (literally meaning the house of dreams), making them her new family. She later on leaves the place, and settles in a graveyard, carrying her entire closet with her (a great metaphor there). Throughout this Roy also explores the various fault lines in India, like the partition, the Gujrat Riots, and the emergency. then in 2011, Anjum (who by now has built a modest house inside the graveyard for all the rejects of society) goes to a hunger strike by Anna Hazare, a social activist, and fights for a child abandoned in the streets. I'll digress here just to point out how the baby is introduced:
"She appeared quite suddenly, a little after midnight. No angels sang, no wise men brought gifts. But a million stars rose in the east to herald her arrival... She was wide awake, but perfectly quiet, unusual for someone so tiny. Perhaps, in her first short months of her life, she had already learned that tears, her tears at least, were futile."
We then cut to the woman who stole away the child- Tilo, who is a quiet, lonely, mysterious woman living all alone. From here she becomes the centre of the story, and it's all about her and the three men who fall in love with her- a Kashmiri freedom fighter, a corrupt journalist, and a government officer. Roy takes an awful amount of time with exposition after exposition, explaining the dire situation the kashmiris are in, and what the freedom struggle means to them. In India, to state such thoughts would be seditious. But Roy's writing is unapologetic. She leaves no space for public opinion, and makes a pretty clear stance on the issue, although I must say that a bit of nuance could have been appreciated.
This is where most people would take offence, either at the overwhelming political commentary or the stagnation of the plot, and I agree on the latter at least. The plot moves slightly further every 5 pages or so, and honestly speaking it would require a reader a lot of patience to get through this.
But once you do, you would be rewarded with a beautiful crossover between the two plotlines. Anjum's house is now a guesthouse, and all kinds of downtrodden people inhibit- dalits, dogs used for experiments, smuggled birds, hijras, you name it. There is a brilliant love story of almost cinematic brilliance in the middle as well, between Tilo and one of her lovers (probably remnants of Roy working as a screenplay writer in her early career). And of course, the story begins and ends in a graveyard, which I found as a brilliant way of both beginning and ending a story.
Right from the point where the story begins with Anjum ("She lived in a graveyard like a tree"), Roy's work seems phenomenal. But it loses stream quickly. Getting used to the sudden shift in the story, when all the focus is shifted to Tilo takes some time, and it certainly doesn't help that the entire beginning of the Tilo arc is filled with political commentary and loads of exposition. But once you get used to it, it's unputdownable. I remember once reading a 177 pages in one setting, which might not seem a lot to binge readers, but with writing as heavy as this, is a wonder.
Two things that I was pretty sure of was this:
1. Roy is clearly trying to write a story while connecting various political events in the history of India- from partition to the unfortunate victory of the BJP leader Narandra Modi. And that is where the work bogs down. It sometimes feels like the plot is being used merely to touch upon them so Roy can comment on them. The characters in this case feel secondary, only there as an excuse for Roy to comment on.
2. The entire plot is also almost a homage to all sorts of minorities in our country- the poor, the lower caste, different. And that is brilliant utilized. The book's dedication page says "To, the Unconsoled" and it's so fitting. Anjum turning a graveyard into a house for such kinds of people is heart-touching. Her insights into the hijra community are also handled with great sensitivity. The raw scenes of struggle and the huamn connections these people create because of the misery they are subjected to made me cry at the end. I have never read anything so gentle and soft before.
And finally, let me talk about Tilo. She is a mixed bag. I would say that the most boring parts of the book are directly concerned with her, but she also is so inherently important to the Kashmir narrative that she is pretty much unavoidable. But I do think that the entire character arc of Tilo was basically her turning into an actual, engaging character we can root for. And the mesmerizing love story in the middle that I talked about earlier is easily one of the most unforgettable parts of the book, even though it ends with gruesome consequences. Here are a few quotes about her:
“She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.”
“They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.”
In conclusion, this books has flaws. A lot of them. But in my case at least, it is all overshadowed by brilliant storytelling and writing. You might say, as I have seen a lot of reviewers comment, that it feels like a bunch of stories strung together, but I think Roy does a pretty neat job of stringing them together convincingly. And it's not like Roy is not aware of how shattered the story is. The last few pages of the book has a poem:
How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
I recommend this to everyone who wants good writing and engaging characters, who are also interested in political debates that this book raises.
Toppling under the weight of themes and journalism/opinion-masquerading-as-fiction, Ministry of Utmost Happiness proved to be a regrettable disappointment for me. It all begins beautifully: Roy takes me right into the gullies of Old Delhi and shows the world of Anjum, a hermaphrodite who is adopted by a community of intersex misfits, eking out a livelihood with compassion and resolute private dignity. With the prose reminiscent of her lyrical debut God Of Small Things, she patiently and convincingly constructs a Muslim social, bringing in Urdu couplets and evoking the lost glories of Mughal Delhi in the beautifully monikered Khwabgaah nestled within an indifferent, culturally defunct, bursting metropolis. Reminiscent of the reverence found in City of Djinns by Dalrymple, I was convincingly transported to this little settlement and rather surprised to see her give a convincing voice to the much reviled intersex and transgender community, whose now-century old abuse in India has followed from the everyday street to the occassional pen. Many moons ago, the late Khushwant Singh had penned an irreverent little biography to the city of Delhi and used a hermaphrodite character as an excuse to pen detailed sex scenes or offer crude metaphors to the grand old city’s lost soul. Roy’s elegiac reconstruction of a colony peopled by them and having an intersex character as a protagonist rehabilitates and restores, not to forget her equally convincing gestural capture of the secular Muslim reality that has an easy and informed appreciation of poetry, music, cuisine and architecture, something easily forgotten and brutally subverted in the current global fundamentalist narrative. Impressed by the opening pages of her new empathy project I was ready for her to bravely chart new territories only to watch her switch gears unannounced a quarter of a way in and make the book about the Kashmir situation.
Maybe it has to do with the two decade long gestation period of this book during which Roy transformed herself into a full-blown political dissident in India seen championing the cause of Maoists, indigenous tribes and Kashmiri separatists; while also crying fowl over mainstream Hindu nationalism, dehumanizing modernisation and barefaced corruption. Her need to insert all of these concerns sequentially in the Ministry tramples the barely sprouted sapling of Anjum’s world as we suddenly find ourselves inside the head of a cynical intelligence officer who is seen reminiscing the various levels of corruption he encountered first hand as the Indian Army’s and Indian Government’s attempts at controlling the insurgency in Kashmir were failing at all levels: logistical, ideological and humanitarian. From politicians and army personnel staging capture of terrorists and profiteering from the region’s collective misery unabashedly to (and here I was surprised) the separatists losing sight of their objectives to self-govern and the realities awaiting beyond the imagined independence, this controversial expose-of-sorts is peppered with not-so-subtle nicknames for the Prime Ministers and the pigheaded (in Roy’s opinion) policies authorized by the successive cabinets led by these ministers since the 1990s. Some of the indignation and political commentary is amateurish and completely off-the-point but my patience with Roy's humanism saw me through. Ultimately, by breathlessly giving us a polyphonic street-level reality, she is seen earnestly showing up the ridiculousness of all sides, the farce of it all, and the tragedy of how little purchase basic humanity at present has in this over-politicised region drowned under establishment-facilitated us-versus-them narrative. Who wouldn't sympathise at the dissolving of a picturesque terrain into a glorified army barracks of tanks, guns, barbed wire and dead bodies.
By turns making me aghast and updating me of the failures of various counter-insurgency missions, while Roy was busy using Ministry as a cathartic literary experiment for her newly evolved apathetic political soul, I became nervous how this narrative will attach itself into Anjum’s Jannat. She eventually did jump the shark by taking a detour into the land of no return by hatching a love triangle of sorts between the intelligence officer and a left-wing journalist who is herself in love with a political activist.
She gave me no reason as a reader to care for these new characters who are lost or have begun new lives in disguise and whose names and sketches are repeatedly used by her as a Trojan horse to document the unaccountable disappearances resulting from atrocities committed by both the Establishment (vesting the Army with powers and Acts) and the terrorist organisations in Kashmir or similar such grievances. We have a section, reminiscent of Roberto Bolano’s bigger fictional outputs 2666 and Savage Detectives (or closer home, Jaspreet Singh’s Helium with his grievance for the 1984 Sikh genocide), where an exasperated literary author is seen matter-of-factly documenting the disappearances as a response. She left me with the same sigh as Bolano and Singh did: in perverse times like we live in now, where the genocides accrue and a well-oiled machinery of denial, information suppression and amnesia is present to restructure national memory, niche art like literary fiction and festival films remain the only document for the disenfranchised: the minorities, the lost, the dead. We live in times where the truly informed are few and powerless, the majority are blinded, enslaved or distracted, and the puppet-masters of today continue to revise our yesterdays.
Such gargantuan themes of national amnesia and historical revisionism are undeniably pertinent but have become a background score that now (for me) add little of emotion or tone to the fiction designed around them. I thought that a premise of an underground society where the contemporary Indian society’s rejects forming their own world and their own heaven could insert some hope but with Roy also resorting to self-righteous journalistic hectoring, this remained unrealised. Roy was too busy chronicling the disorder earnestly to give a taste of its effect. Pages upon pages of descriptive transcriptions given from either a distance of retrospect or recollection did not help the cause with the novel reducing into an anaemic plod as the three shape-shifting individuals wafted through the various darknesses of a violently modernising India, never quite becoming full blooded characters to root for. And for me, this is where Ministry.. fails as a novel. Everyone finds themselves conveniently at Anjum’s altar eventually, but I was past caring by then as I had read the complete latter half of the book with the emotional investment I’d accord to a clinical guideline.
I sorely missed the playful and poetic Roy of initial pages where with a witty turn of phrase she managed to evoke tragedies, melancholies and prejudices that went centuries deep. I sincerely hope that the political activist in her hasn’t stifled the gifted storyteller in her. Given that she has now expelled Ministry from her system, her next literary project will hopefully see her able to give us more flesh-and-blood characters who spend more time living through than commenting upon the mega-narrative of their country’s politics and sociology.
Maybe it has to do with the two decade long gestation period of this book during which Roy transformed herself into a full-blown political dissident in India seen championing the cause of Maoists, indigenous tribes and Kashmiri separatists; while also crying fowl over mainstream Hindu nationalism, dehumanizing modernisation and barefaced corruption. Her need to insert all of these concerns sequentially in the Ministry tramples the barely sprouted sapling of Anjum’s world as we suddenly find ourselves inside the head of a cynical intelligence officer who is seen reminiscing the various levels of corruption he encountered first hand as the Indian Army’s and Indian Government’s attempts at controlling the insurgency in Kashmir were failing at all levels: logistical, ideological and humanitarian. From politicians and army personnel staging capture of terrorists and profiteering from the region’s collective misery unabashedly to (and here I was surprised) the separatists losing sight of their objectives to self-govern and the realities awaiting beyond the imagined independence, this controversial expose-of-sorts is peppered with not-so-subtle nicknames for the Prime Ministers and the pigheaded (in Roy’s opinion) policies authorized by the successive cabinets led by these ministers since the 1990s. Some of the indignation and political commentary is amateurish and completely off-the-point but my patience with Roy's humanism saw me through. Ultimately, by breathlessly giving us a polyphonic street-level reality, she is seen earnestly showing up the ridiculousness of all sides, the farce of it all, and the tragedy of how little purchase basic humanity at present has in this over-politicised region drowned under establishment-facilitated us-versus-them narrative. Who wouldn't sympathise at the dissolving of a picturesque terrain into a glorified army barracks of tanks, guns, barbed wire and dead bodies.
By turns making me aghast and updating me of the failures of various counter-insurgency missions, while Roy was busy using Ministry as a cathartic literary experiment for her newly evolved apathetic political soul, I became nervous how this narrative will attach itself into Anjum’s Jannat. She eventually did jump the shark by taking a detour into the land of no return by hatching a love triangle of sorts between the intelligence officer and a left-wing journalist who is herself in love with a political activist.
She gave me no reason as a reader to care for these new characters who are lost or have begun new lives in disguise and whose names and sketches are repeatedly used by her as a Trojan horse to document the unaccountable disappearances resulting from atrocities committed by both the Establishment (vesting the Army with powers and Acts) and the terrorist organisations in Kashmir or similar such grievances. We have a section, reminiscent of Roberto Bolano’s bigger fictional outputs 2666 and Savage Detectives (or closer home, Jaspreet Singh’s Helium with his grievance for the 1984 Sikh genocide), where an exasperated literary author is seen matter-of-factly documenting the disappearances as a response. She left me with the same sigh as Bolano and Singh did: in perverse times like we live in now, where the genocides accrue and a well-oiled machinery of denial, information suppression and amnesia is present to restructure national memory, niche art like literary fiction and festival films remain the only document for the disenfranchised: the minorities, the lost, the dead. We live in times where the truly informed are few and powerless, the majority are blinded, enslaved or distracted, and the puppet-masters of today continue to revise our yesterdays.
Such gargantuan themes of national amnesia and historical revisionism are undeniably pertinent but have become a background score that now (for me) add little of emotion or tone to the fiction designed around them. I thought that a premise of an underground society where the contemporary Indian society’s rejects forming their own world and their own heaven could insert some hope but with Roy also resorting to self-righteous journalistic hectoring, this remained unrealised. Roy was too busy chronicling the disorder earnestly to give a taste of its effect. Pages upon pages of descriptive transcriptions given from either a distance of retrospect or recollection did not help the cause with the novel reducing into an anaemic plod as the three shape-shifting individuals wafted through the various darknesses of a violently modernising India, never quite becoming full blooded characters to root for. And for me, this is where Ministry.. fails as a novel. Everyone finds themselves conveniently at Anjum’s altar eventually, but I was past caring by then as I had read the complete latter half of the book with the emotional investment I’d accord to a clinical guideline.
I sorely missed the playful and poetic Roy of initial pages where with a witty turn of phrase she managed to evoke tragedies, melancholies and prejudices that went centuries deep. I sincerely hope that the political activist in her hasn’t stifled the gifted storyteller in her. Given that she has now expelled Ministry from her system, her next literary project will hopefully see her able to give us more flesh-and-blood characters who spend more time living through than commenting upon the mega-narrative of their country’s politics and sociology.
this book is soooo goood. You gotta read. Arundhati Roy is a GENIUS. The first great novel about the technology age IMO.
I read The God of small things last year (and loved it), so I only had to wait one year to read The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. After reading an extract of the book, I put it on my "to read" list, and was lucky to win a copy just before my holidays.
For The first part of the book, Anjum's story, I found I could not put the book down. After the story switched to First person with Biplab, an intelligence officer, I was a little lost. At some point the horror of the events in Kashmir (which I new very little about) became too much, so I took a break to read a funny book.
All in all, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a powerful book, where the author's life and activism appears in between the fiction. This is a crazy story with a cast of bonkers characters, not always easy to follow, because the time line goes backward and forward.
If you're looking for an easy, entertaining holiday read, that is not it, but it's a book you won't forget.
For The first part of the book, Anjum's story, I found I could not put the book down. After the story switched to First person with Biplab, an intelligence officer, I was a little lost. At some point the horror of the events in Kashmir (which I new very little about) became too much, so I took a break to read a funny book.
All in all, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a powerful book, where the author's life and activism appears in between the fiction. This is a crazy story with a cast of bonkers characters, not always easy to follow, because the time line goes backward and forward.
If you're looking for an easy, entertaining holiday read, that is not it, but it's a book you won't forget.
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I didn't like this book. Took forever to get into it and once in, I lost interest. Very disappointing.
Seemed kinda bloated and overly ambitious. There were some well-written passages but the whole thing didn't hold together all that well for me.
Lots of beautiful prose, but had to give up . Too much work to read.