arundhati roy book the ministry of utmost happiness

Building on both Sara Ahmed’s The Pursuit of Happiness (2010) and Angela Jones’s claim that “queer futurity is not just about crafting prescriptions for a utopian society… but making life more bearable in the present, because in doing so we create the potential for a better future” (2013, 2), this chapter uses queer theory to illuminate representations of a resistant present and the potential for a radical future in Roy’s most recent novel. Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Studies 18 (1): 100–112, 2018), and offered no extended engagement with queer theory. Writing in the Necropolis: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Romancing the Other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Despite being one of India’s most prominent literary works to center a hijra character, scholarship on the novel to date has primarily focused on issues of class (Lau and Mendes. While Filippo Menozzi reads this rejection of the narrative of linear progress, as indicative of Roy’s complex relationship with realism (2018, 28), I argue that Anjum’s insistence on an alternative present can best be understood as an articulation of queer futurity, whose moment of titular happiness is expressly tied to various forms of queer kinship, expressed not as an ultimate goal but in the novel’s, and our, present.

In a moment of mistranslation and cultural misunderstanding, however, Anjum instead states: “e’ve come from there…from the other world” (113–114). When Anjum, the hijra main character of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) attends an anti-corruption protest in New Delhi, she encounters a set of activist filmmakers asking attendees to create a message of optimism by stating “another world is possible” on camera.

Arundhati roy book the ministry of utmost happiness