Code: 22414:Paper 207:Contemporary Literatures in English

Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English ,

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

Vachchhalata Joshi

Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com

Roll no.19

Topic : ThirdGender Identity in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness 

Submitted to: 

Department of English,MKBU

Arundhati Roy

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Suzanna Arundhati Roy

born 24 November 1961

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author, political activist, and essayist known for her powerful writing on a range of social and political issues. She was born on November 24, 1961, in Shillong, Meghalaya, India. Roy is best known for her debut novel "The God of Small Things," which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and became an international bestseller.

Roy's writing often explores themes of social justice, inequality, and human rights abuses, with a particular focus on the marginalised and oppressed. In addition to her literary works, she has been involved in various political and social causes, including environmental activism, anti-globalization protests, and campaigns for the rights of indigenous people and other marginalised communities.

Roy has authored several books, including “The God of Small Things" "Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy," and "Broken Republic: Three Essays." She has also received numerous awards and honours for her writing and activism, including the Sydney Peace Prize, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Brief Summary Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize winning author of The God of Small Things (1997), wrote The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), her second fiction, twenty years after her debut with the former.

The novel weaves together stories of people navigating some of the darkest episodes of Modern Indian history, from land reform that dispossessed poor farmers to the 2002 Godhra train burning and Kashmir insurgency. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching story and a decisive demonstration. One follows Anjum, a trans-woman, struggling to make a life for herself in Delhi. The world she conjures is often brutal. Psychoanalysis, the Freudian theory, is dealt with in this novel. The story begins and ends in the graveyard. It possesses the strong voice of the LGBT community in Modern India.

The long-awaited second novel of Arundhati Roy was published as anticipated in the middle of fictional enthusiasm. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness had been loved and disgusted, praised and criticised with vigour and graphics. The Ministry of Utmost happiness seemed to be broadly agreed by reviewers and critics as “a riotous carnival” (Aitkenhead, 2017), “a hulking, sprawling story” (Sehgal, 2017), “large and labyrinthine” with “a shaggy structure and polemical bent”. Whether these traits were regarded as strengths or defects lies in the difference between reader responses. As the guide for the stories, Roy gets criticised when people are disturbed by the widespread plotting, cast, temporal and geographical expansion of the Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Mendes & Lau, 2019). Akbar (2017) finds it as “diffuse, unfocused & everything and anything at once”. In an interview, however, Roy explained that the supposed impartiality of the novel is a storytelling device meant to empower the allegedly precise construction and form that the novel is anticipated to adapt to: Fundamentally, I think what I mean is that there is a danger of fiction becoming domesticated, you know, of too much of a product that must be quickly described, catalogued, put on a particular shelf, and everybody has to know what the theme is. And, to me, I wanted to blow that open (Goodman & Shaikh, 2017).

The opening lines of the Ministry of Utmost Happiness showed how Roy was genuinely worried with sentiments and impact materials of the heart in her portrayals of bigotry, violence, and disgraceful lack of regard for humanity. She relentlessly depicted “joy in the saddest places” (Aitkenhead, 2017). Roy framed romantic love among her characters as poignant in both her novels, placing them in the midst of what might be harassed and strictly prohibited. She casts honestly in and of love as snatched happiness in the otherwise dreadful scenery of injustice, waste and sorrow, brief and transitory times of translucent beauty (Mendes & Lau 2019). Roy's love stories in both Velutha and Ammu in The God of Small Things and Tilottama and Musa in The Ministry of Ultimate Happiness are undoubtedly like those in which lovers found themselves in vulnerable social and political circumstances and were likely to perish. In reality, both heroes unfortunately died young, a cost to their loves, but also a blow to their purposes.

Hijras are isolated from society, deprived of their basic rights and forced to lead a life without self-respect even in a post-globalised position. They are subjugated by male, female and even by hijras within the society. The word hijra is derived from the Persian word hiz which means ineffective and incompetent. The alternative words for hijra are hijada, hijra, hijrah, and it is pronounced as “heejra” or “hijra”. The word hijra refers to ‘eunuchs’ or ‘third gender’ in India and some South Asian countries. Though they have combined gender identities, they adopted feminine gender roles and adorned themselves with feminine attires. The famous feminist of Indian writing in English Das (1982) in the poem “The Dance of the Eunuchs” portrayed the objectification of the eunuchs who adopted women identity and thus they were defined by the normative rules. Das (1982) mentioned that, “It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came to dance, wide skirts going round and round They danced and They danced, oh, they danced till they bled”

The reader gets to know that when Anjum’s mother discovered that Anjum was a Hijra (Eunuch), she kept that as a secret and named her Aftab -a male’s name. She was in panic as “Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby.” (Roy, 2017, p. 8). The lack of dichotomous gender distinctions affects her mother, and in that way, she starts the process of Othering her own daughter. We can say that in her family Anjum/Aftab is The Other because of having this “in-between” characteristic. In addition, when her father acknowledged the secret, “he embarked on the cultural project of inculcating manliness in Aftab.” (p. 17) Her family tried to suppress her female identity, and in this sense, they try to colonise her body and her sexuality. Assumi (2018) observed that, “The in-between identity of Anjum and her patched together body depicts the cultural conflict of the colonised countries after colonisation.”

A person’s identity is defined by his body and sexual identity is a society which is a repressive and negative force. Therefore, power relation occurs, and it is centralised by a group of people and it includes the hierarchical divisions based on social, political, and economic practices and institutions. Roy portrayed the polarisation of gender and race regarding the identity of hijras who are treated as inferior, untouchable and marginalised in Indian society.

“The world was ordered by gender divisions with gender giving meaning to social divisions”

Gender is related to the social divisions of class, race, disability, and sexuality. Hijra community is divided and segregated in society for the differences of sexuality. They are treated and discriminated against as third gender in India and the recent word for hijra is transgender to the people of the world.

Anjum considered herself mentally and internally disturbed, while some wanted her to step into the traditional system. Anjum had a body that crossed the usual boundaries between male and female. The tale of Anjum highlighted the challenges of life in a culture characterised by an idealist explanation of gender. The understanding of self in children started with the sex-related categorization of self as male or female. It was also observed that some forms of activity were linked to a single sex and were considered to be stable. Such a gender-based differentiation reinforces sexual inequalities according to feminist theorists.

India is a multiracial and multicultural country where the concepts of gender, class and caste create a sense of discrimination among different categories of people. The gender identity impacts on hijras’ lives; they do not get gender recognition, employment, proper housing, and health-care services properly. They face discrimination and inequality so harsh that they feel that they are inferior.

In the novel, The Khwabgah was Anjum’s place of liberation and self expression, “Once she became a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, Anjum was finally able to dress in the clothes she longed to wear...” (p. 25). Outside, in the Duniya (World), her double voice “frightened other people'' (p. 28) and even members of the Government “...like everyone else, they feared being cursed by a Hijra.” (p. 67). People alienated her because of something superficial, or lack of information, or myths, and Anjum had to fight against gender hierarchies, accept gendered norms and, in that way, be part of the anti-colonial resistance. She set her emotional instincts free and remained in the Khwabgah for thirty years. One day, she found a baby girl who was abandoned or lost. Anjum took her to Khwabgah and named her Zainab. After some time, she encountered a massacre in Gujrat that was the outcome of the Godhra train attack. She got a traumatic shock from that incident and decided to leave Khwabgah. She took refuge in a local cemetery and transformed it into a guest house and named it ‘Jannat Guest House’. She also started funeral services for poor, isolated and subjugated people of the society.

Conclusion

Hijras belong to lower classes and poorer castes who experience marginalized economic structure. Though Anjum faced many adverse situations in mainstream social spaces, she tried to accommodate herself in the changing world. It is important that people should come forward to eradicate discrimination and economic hardship that these transgenders go through. This paper explored that hijras are human beings, and they have rights to live with dignity. Being a trans woman comes with sufferings in the present community. The world needs to change. Gender does not matter when it comes to a heart of acceptance. Accepting everyone as they are, is what we need. Change in gender creates no difference in the emotions, pains, sufferings, care, love and anger in a person. When society fails to understand this, voicing out and protests happen. Feminists arose when women were marginalized. Similarly, in the present world, the transgender community needs an up-rise after all the hardships they underwent.

Work cited:

Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017.

Suleman, Danish, and Dr Ab Rahman. "Transgender issues in Indian society from the viewpoint of Arundhati Roy’s novel, the ministry of utmost happiness." Suleman, D., & binti Ab Rahman, F.(2020). Transgender Issues in Indian Society from the Viewpoint of Arundhati Roy’s Novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. South Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 1.3 (2020): 159-172.

Words : 2034