Centre Reflecting The Margins

A number of such people can come together in a fragile alliance on the margins even if the margin is in the centre, in a graveyard in Delhi. This republic will have ones from all the world of nature, all the strange and estranged, trying to keep the sky from falling down on our heads. That is clearly the writer’s duty and Arundhati Roy will do it in any genre, any forum, whatever you may call it. This is true political stuff, this is pure history, this is the  nineteenth century Russian novel in an abridged form written in the spirit of American individualism—you still wont get the story, wont know who is related to whom and how, wont remember what happened to various strands of action and threads of opinion, but you would have had an epic but unique vision of a nation still in the making, one that aims to force you to say that she may not have the answers, she may not even know how to tell a story, but she does raise questions.

The first question that was raised was whether I would have read through the novel if it had been written by someone else and my answer is that I may have read through it with greater interest if it had been written by someone else, because I would have been impressed that a major publisher had had the sense to accept this novel. For most problably I would have had to read it in manuscript form or as a self-published novel because no major publisher would have accepted this seemingly abandoned piece of work, where the writer seems to have decided to cut the umbilical cord and send the novel and its characters off into the world in an attempt at telling the truth to an unseeing world because after all it is the truth and should work. Don’t take me wrong, this is a novel that displays skill and has many stories and a gesture at plot but I am certain that if it had not come from the computer of Arundhathi Roy and from an agent who certified that it was she who had actually put it together, this manuscript would have been circulating among friends of the writer. But I am glad that it is published, it is out there, interrogating what we have made of our country, telling us to face her truth, the truth, and/or tell ours.

Is it a novel? This is the second question that has already been asked of Arundhati’s second.  Arundhati Roy answers that in the first three pages of her book. The epigraph talks of the disappearance of sparrows and the genocide of the vultures. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning, dead of a chemical given to cattle to relax their muscles and ease their pain and make them better milk-producing machines, which made their flesh fatal to the vultures.  In the very first chapter, we are introduced to Anjum of the graveyard, who is ‘a mehfil … a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing.’  Everybody and everything, anybody and anything is invited into this parliament of nobodies. Anjum was born Aftab, with a body that was both masculine and feminine, When his father finally finds this out, he plans to have a surgery to make Aftab fully masculine, but Aftab has feminine dreams and finds his way into the Khwabgah. After operations to bring out the feminine and pills to feminize the rest, Anjum has a patched together body and a voice of ‘rasping quality, which sometimes sounded like two voices quarrelling with each other instead of one.’ This is the novel then, transform and transformed, patchily put together, and with a rasping voice. Do you sympathize? Do you empathize? Are you moved? Each one of us will have our own answers but who cannot applaud the finding of life, the founding of a colony for the living wounded among the dead by a transgendered person? However, the question is whether the world out there is a living breathing space for humanity or is it a place that wastes all? How great is our duniya?

Arundhati Roy finds the answers at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, where the worlds of India come to demonstrate, to remonstrate, to showcase our differences and dissatisfactions. The agent here is Tilo, a gutsy activist who had trained to be an architect. Her story includes that of three men who fall in love with her in college. Through her lovers we see how the world of India is constructed and contested. This is a work about contemporary India seen through the history of Delhi, the centre reflecting the happenings on the margins. This is a book that is sucked into the quicksands of Kashmir and never really comes out of it though it ends with the graveyard in Delhi. Roy has Tilo write a poem that is all form and gives us her own dilemma that she has tried to resolve in this work:

How to tell a shattered story?By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tries to do precisely that. It offers you a shattered narrative, in a shattered form, in a language that is as prosaic as Roy can achieve, making her non-fictional works seem better written. For all the craft, or because of all the craft, this is a chaotic read but at the end, it is the formal ending that makes you wonder about form! Till then, you go along with Roy, who wants us to think of every wrong that the nation state has engendered, every wrong that we have been part of and party to in our various ways. Am I glad I read it? Yes, absolutely.

G.J.V. Prasad is Professor, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature & Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Director, Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, Chairperson, IACLALS, Delhi.