The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Study Guide

Arundhati Roy is an internationally known peace activist and Booker Prize winning author. Born to a Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father in in South India, Roy grew up in Kerala and left the city for Delhi to study architecture. Early in her career, Roy wrote for television and films, screenwriting the movie In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, in which she also starred. In 1992, Roy began writing The God of Small Things, which was published in 1996 and sold almost immediately in 18 countries. The novel won the Booker prize, and Roy used the prize money and much of the royalties from the book to fund activist causes. Indeed, Roy has been an activist for most of her life, and is particularly involved in anti-globalization and anti-nuclear work. She is extremely critical of the U.S.’s imperial involvement in other nations.

Roy first announced that she was writing another novel in 2007, shortly before massive protests in Kashmir for independence. The demonstrations drew 500,000 to the streets of Srinagar on August 18, 2008, in response to the Indian government’s decision to use 99 acres of land in the Kashmir valley for temporary facilities for Hindu pilgrims to the majority-Muslim region. Kashmiri citizens were upset at their land being used for this without their consent, which inspired the protest. Roy publicly supported the protestors and the Kashmiri fight for independence in an interview with The Times of India in 2008, and again in 2010 at a conference called “Azadi: The Only Way.” For her speech at the convention, Roy was charged with sedition, although she only served one day in jail. The bulk of the plot in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has to do with characters involved on both sides of the Kashmiri fight for independence. Roy is heavily critical of those on the Indian government’s side, and this comes through in her portrayal of the conflict in the novel.

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie is another contemporary novel about the Kashmir conflict, in which Shalimar, the central character, joins various Jihadist groups to get the training he needs to kill all those he feels have wronged him. Among these people is a U.S. counter-terrorism diplomat to the region who falls in love with Boonyi, Shalimar’s fiancé, and begins an affair with her. The story exemplifies the ways in which foreign intervention in Kashmir contributes to the violence in the region, and more subtly treats the themes of corruption and capitalism that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness addresses. Similarly, “The Silence is the Loudest Sound,” an opinion essay by Arundhati Roy published in The New York Times, addresses the Indian government’s decision to suspend certain citizens’ rights in Kashmir in order to make military occupation of the region easier. In her collection of essays, My Seditious Heart—over a thousand pages long—Roy writes about the Gujarat massacre, in which hundreds of Muslim pilgrims were killed by Hindu extremists. In the novel, Anjum survives an attack that is a loosely veiled rendering of this massacre.