The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Graveyard and the People Who Live There

Anjum was born Aftab, a Muslim boy in Old Delhi, recognized from early childhood as a hijra — a member of India’s traditional third-gender community. The novel follows her from childhood through a life of extraordinary vicissitude: the years in a hijra household, the violence of the 2002 Gujarat riots in which she is nearly killed, her return to Delhi and her eventual decision to leave the hijra household and build a home — Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services — in a graveyard on the edge of the city. The graveyard becomes a community. Other people who have nowhere else to go arrive and stay: the outcast, the grieving, the politically disappeared, the merely eccentric.

Roy uses Anjum and the graveyard to establish the novel’s central spatial argument: that the spaces outside official society — the graveyard, the margins, the literally unbuilt land — are where the people that official society has expelled congregate, and that these communities develop their own forms of love, solidarity, and order that official society cannot account for. The graveyard is Anjum’s invention, but it is also Roy’s formal solution to the problem of how to write about a country whose political crises produce so many kinds of exclusion simultaneously. She builds a space that can hold them all.

Kashmir and the Problem of Political Fiction

The novel’s second narrative thread follows Tilo — an architect, a woman of complicated origin, a person of deliberate opacity — and her entanglement with three men: Musa, the Kashmiri separatist she loves; Naga, the journalist she marries; and Biplab, the intelligence officer who observes them both. This thread takes Roy into Kashmir — into the armed conflict between Indian security forces and independence movements that has produced decades of disappearances, torture, and civilian death — and it is here that the novel is most directly political and most formally uneven.

Roy’s journalism about Kashmir — collected in essays like ‘Azadi’ — is among the most sustained and serious political writing about the conflict by any Indian author. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the Kashmir material sometimes reads as the novel’s conscience rather than its body: passages of documented horror that carry the weight of Roy’s reporting but that are not fully integrated into the fictional texture of Tilo’s story. This is not a failure of intelligence but a formal problem that Roy was perhaps aware of: how do you write fiction about an ongoing atrocity whose scale and specificity make the techniques of literary transformation feel inadequate?

The Formal Argument of Fragmentation

The novel’s structure — fragmented, non-linear, polyphonic, moving between characters and time periods without the tight architecture of The God of Small Things — is its own argument about Roy’s subject. The God of Small Things was a novel about a single family and a single catastrophe; its dual-timeline structure was calibrated to reveal a single secret. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is about a country and its multiple simultaneous catastrophes, and Roy has chosen a form that reflects that multiplicity. The fragmentation is not a weakness but a position: the claim that the India it is trying to portray cannot be contained in a single coherent narrative, that the formal tidiness of the first novel would be a lie about the second novel’s subject.

The cost of this choice is real. The novel is less controlled, less formally perfect, less devastating in the ways that The God of Small Things is devastating. But it is more ambitious in scope, more honest about the scale of what it is trying to hold, and more willing to be imperfect in the service of comprehensiveness. Roy waited twenty years to write her second novel, and what she wrote is not a repetition of the first book’s achievements but an attempt to do something harder: to take the political intelligence that always underlay The God of Small Things and bring it fully to the surface, without the protective distance of family myth and narrative precision. The result is imperfect and essential — the work of a writer for whom adequate form for the subject has not yet been found, and who is honest enough to show the finding failing.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A novel that is less perfect and more necessary than its predecessor: Roy’s attempt to hold contemporary India — in all its political violence, structural exclusion, and stubborn persistence of love — inside a single work of serious fiction.