When Arundhati Roy returned to fiction twenty years after The God of Small Things, expectations were monumental. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness does not seek to satisfy them in a conventional way — instead, it splinters the novel form itself. The result is a dense, polyphonic narrative that moves from the narrow lanes of Old Delhi to the war-torn valleys of Kashmir, weaving together the broken lives of people living on the margins.
At the heart of the story is Anjum, born intersex, who grows up in a world that does not know where to place her. Her journey from childhood to becoming the matriarch of a graveyard-turned-haven — the Jannat Guest House — becomes a quiet metaphor for survival and reinvention. Roy places Anjum alongside a constellation of other characters: Tilo, Musa, Saddam, and others whose stories drift in and out like overlapping waves of history and heartbreak.
The novel refuses linearity; instead, it reads like a long lament for a country perpetually at war with itself. Roy’s prose oscillates between poetry and reportage — intimate one moment, furious the next. The political undercurrents are unmistakable: the Gujarat riots, caste violence, and the insurgency in Kashmir form the novel’s living backdrop. Through them, Roy asks what becomes of love, justice, and dignity in a nation built on exclusions.
Some readers may find the structure disorienting — the narrative jumps, the profusion of voices, and the blend of realism with allegory can feel overwhelming. But that chaos is deliberate. Roy mirrors the disorder of India itself, where personal sorrow and political tragedy constantly intersect.
Ultimately, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not just a novel — it is an act of witness. It mourns, it resists, and it insists on tenderness amid ruin. Roy’s return to fiction reaffirms her belief that storytelling can still be a form of protest — and that happiness, however fleeting, often blooms in the most unexpected places.
A courageous, uneven, but deeply compassionate novel — sprawling in scope, lyrical in spirit, and unafraid to speak truth to power.
