The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The planes that flew into the tall buildings in America came as a boon to many in India too. The Poet-Prime Minister and several of his senior ministers were members of an old organization that had long believed that India was essentially a Hindu nation and that just as Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic Republic, India should declare itself a Hindu one. Some of its supporters and ideologues openly admired Hitler and compared the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. Now, suddenly, as hostility towards Muslims grew, it began to seem to the Organization that the whole world was on its side.

I read The God of Small Things when it came out, and as this was long before there was a Goodreads, I don't have a review or notes or supporting quotes but I do, strongly, remember this: I was thoroughly transported by Arundhati Roy's magical prose and ended that book in shameless tears. It has taken nearly twenty years for Roy to publish a second novel, but she has hardly been idle in all that time: As an activist and political essayist, Roy has written enough nonfiction to have been collected into five volumes; none of which I have read. Yet, it doesn't take much Googling around to see what issues have inspired Roy to write – anti-nuclear weapons, anti-globalisation, anti-American foreign policy, pro-environmentalism – and in particular, her focus seems to have been on Kashmiri independence (her views on which led to Roy being charged with sedition by her own government in 2010). The Ministry of Utmost Happiness gives space to all of these issues – with a particular focus on the Kashmiri fight for independence – so in a way, this felt more like an effort to put information into the official record than a straightforward literary exercise. And because of that, my reaction is mixed: This is a fine (and likely important) work of witnessing, but not a novel of transporting and magical prose; despite blood and death and broken bodies, I was never brought to tears. As a character (Tilo) in the book says:

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

After a later-day Prologue, Ministry opens upon a young mother, overjoyed by the birth of her first son. But examining his perfect little body, she discovers, to her horror, that tucked behind his boy-parts is a “small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part”. As this storyline develops and eventually leads to a home for Hijras – transgendered women who have a long history in Indian society (funny that I had never before made the connection to the legendary harem eunuchs) – I thought that I was reading one kind of book; a plotline I enjoyed very much last year in The Parcel. But halfway through Ministry, a second set of characters is introduced, and although everyone will come together in the end, the book becomes something different altogether.

If one has to choose, then give me a Hindu fundamentalist any day over a Muslim one. It's true we did – we do – some terrible things in Kashmir, but...I mean, what the Pakistan Army did in East Pakistan – now that was a clear case of genocide. Open and shut. When the Indian Army liberated Bangladesh, the good old Kashmiris called it – still call it – “The Fall of Dhaka”. They aren't very good at other people's pain. But then, who is? The Baloch, who are being buggered by Pakistan, don't care about Kashmiris. The Bangladeshis who we liberated are hunting down Hindus. The good old communists call Stalin's Gulag “a necessary part of revolution”. The Americans are currently lecturing the Vietnamese about human rights. What we have on our hands is a species problem. None of us is exempt.

In this second part, we are introduced to a casteless daughter of a Syrian Christian single-mother, S. Tilottama (“Tilo”; a character whose early biography mirrors Roy's own), who had met and befriended (and caused to fall in life-long love with her) three young men at college who would grow into professionals she could eventually call on when needed: Musa the Kashmiri militant who is, despite living mostly underground, Tilo's own true love; a Bengali intelligence agent, named Biplab Dasgupta, who will eventually come to sympathise with the insurgents; and Nagaraja Hariharan, a respected Tamil journalist who can provide Tilo cover. We also meet the Punjabi Sikh, Amrik Singh, who is a sadistic government agent and, briefly, the Telugu woman Revathy: a forest-dwelling Maoist who will become disillusioned by her own cause. I assume that the specificity of these ethnicities is to underline that India is no one monolithic culture (or religion), and this particular cast of characters allows for an examination of every issue that Roy has been writing about for the past twenty years. And based on this overview of the Indian political situation alone, it's easy to see what propels Roy to the “hysterics” her detractors have accused her of: Kashmir sits uneasily between India and Pakistan – two nuclear powers – and is claimed by each, leading to routine attacks and counterattacks; creeping global Islamophobia has justified the Indian government's attacks on its own Muslim population; a pivotal scene takes place during the 2002 Gujarat riots and Roy doesn't shy away from pointing out that the current Prime Minister of India (Narendra Modi, though unnamed in the book, and officially cleared of any wrongdoing) was at the time a local official known as “The Butcher of Gujarat”. From one character lamenting local soft drinks being put out of business by Coca-Cola to a farmer imagining what the view would be from his family's fields after the erection of a hydroelectric dam made a lake of their valley, it would seem that everything I've found through Googling Roy has made it into this book. Which just might make this more important to her than it is to me; more personal than universal. But still important.

These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.

As Tilo hints in that quote above, nothing much happens in this book, but everything happens in it. I was interested in all that I learned, but it doesn't really hang together as a novel. It's a valuable artefact, but the matter-of-fact stories of rape and murder and torture didn't move me. So ambivalent about this one. Still important.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves