The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness By Arundhati Roy Reviewed: Controversial, Brilliant And Unmissable

If today’s India feels too complex to narrate, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness shows how to hold multitudes without losing mercy. It solves the “how do you tell a shattered story?” problem by slowly becoming everybody.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness braids the lives of the excluded—hijras, orphans, activists, “half-widows,” and wanderers—into an intimate epic where love and loss refuse to be silenced by state power, communal violence, or time itself.

Evidence snapshot:

Roy’s Delhi opens with the ecological catastrophe of vanishing vultures (linked to the veterinary drug diclofenac), a real crisis documented in peer-reviewed science researches by PubMed, Royal Society and PMC, and later met by government bans.
The Kashmir chapters echo documented facts: thousands injured by pellet shotguns and thousands of enforced disappearances since 1989.
Critical reception: longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2017) and widely reviewed by The Guardian and The New York Times.

Best for readers of polyphonic literary fiction who want India’s recent history rendered through unforgettable people; book-club deep divers; students of gender, media, and South Asian politics. Not for readers who need linear plots or a single protagonist; those expecting a direct sequel to The God of Small Things.

Introduction

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) is a sweeping, multilayered novel that blends personal stories with the political and social upheavals of contemporary India. Moving from the narrow lanes of Old Delhi to the conflicted landscapes of Kashmir, the book follows unforgettable characters like Anjum, a transgender woman who builds a sanctuary in a graveyard, and Tilo, whose life becomes intertwined with rebellion and resistance.

With its poetic prose, sharp critique of caste, gender, religion, and nationalism, Roy’s second novel after her Booker Prize–winning The God of Small Things challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths while finding hope in acts of love, resilience, and solidarity. Both haunting and beautiful, it is as much a story of fractured identities as it is of the human spirit’s search for belonging.

A sprawling work of literary fiction that arrives two decades after Roy’s Booker-winning debut, the novel revisits the subcontinent with a broader canvas—Old Delhi, Gujarat, and Kashmir—collaging reportage, satire, and lyric fragments. (LiveMint Lifestyle)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness succeeds as a humane, insurgent novel-of-voices; its purpose isn’t to tidy India’s contradictions but to hold them—through a hijra founding a guesthouse in a graveyard, a Kashmiri couple separated by war, a media star compromised by power, and an architect who writes, “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody.”

1. Background

Roy’s story-world sits atop verifiable ruptures: the vulture die-off driven by diclofenac in the 1990s–2000s (annual declines modeled at catastrophic rates until the 2006 veterinary ban and later packaging restrictions). (PMC,

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’s communal-violence memory includes Gujarat 2002 (≈1,000 dead, mostly Muslims), and its long second movement inhabits Kashmir, where 8,000–10,000 enforced disappearances are reported by APDP and mass pellet injuries have been recorded since 2010.

Equally crucial is transgender recognition: India’s 2011 census first counted “other” gender (≈487,803 persons), and the NALSA (2014) Supreme Court judgment recognized hijras as a “third gender.”

These aren’t background “facts” pasted in; they are the air the characters breathe.

2. Summary of the Book

Plot Overview

The novel opens with a question that doubles as an omen: “Where do old birds go to die?”—a Delhi without vultures, their absence traced to diclofenac, the painkiller that poisoned carrion and collapsed an ancient ecology.

From this sky without custodians, Roy steps into Old Delhi’s lanes to the life of Aftab, born intersex to Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali. Drawn to the music of the Khwabgah, Aftab becomes Anjum, claiming girlhood and then womanhood among a gharana of hijras. The novel’s first miracle is Anjum’s sentence of self-definition: “I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil (a gathering, a salon).”

Anjum’s life refuses neatness. She rescues a little girl, Zainab, on the Jama Masjid steps, and for a time the community is a net that holds. Then a pilgrimage to Gujarat collides with reprisal violence; Anjum survives but returns haunted, the riot moving inside her. The city’s indifference, combined with the bureaucratic violence of documents and carelessness, leads her to a cemetery where she begins building—plank by plank, cloth by cloth—the Jannat Guest House (“Jannat” meaning paradise), a threshold between the living and the dead. It becomes a commons; “free classes” arrive, strays wander in, and a reputation for stubborn hospitality grows.

Roy turns the lens to a chorus at Jantar Mantar, Delhi’s protest axis: the hunger striker Dr. Azad Bhartiya, the soft-spoken Saddam Hussain (born Dayachand, renamed after watching a mobile-phone execution video), and scandal-hungry handlers who manufacture the nation’s daily drama.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’s media satire centers on **Nagaraj Hariharan—“Naga”—**a star anchor, and Biplab Dasgupta, an Intelligence Bureau officer who narrates part of the novel in a confessional register.

At the novel’s heart is Tilo (S. Tilottama), an architect whose presence magnetizes men and movements. In college she loved Musa Yeswi—a Kashmiri who will become a militant known as Commander Gulrez, then slip back into the mist of Azadi—and, later, Tilo briefly marries Naga, more as strategy than sentiment. The war remakes people into puzzles: Tilo’s diaries, photographs, and letters move like contraband, the book’s most famous line turning into her ars poetica: “How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody.”

The second long movement carries us north. In Kashmir, Musa becomes both man and rumor; his wife Arifa, their child Miss Jebeen the First, and the aperture of memory/loss structure chapters that read as dossier and lullaby at once. A small but searing vignette—“Once a baby’s name was made of dung. Miss Jebeen the First.”—tells us how violence names children and how children rename history.

Back in Delhi, Tilo finds an abandoned infant during a midnight tangle at Jantar Mantar and brings the child to Anjum’s cemetery haven. The child becomes Miss Jebeen the Second (later Udaya), binding the book’s halves: a hijra-run sanctuary and a conflict zone that exports grief to the capital. Around them gather the marginal and the tender: Saddam, Zainab (now grown), Comrade Revathy (a Maoist whose testimony scars the page), and Biplab, who has long loved Tilo in silence.

In the guesthouse, “Jannat,” the living practice a civic imagination: people cook, learn, repair radios, teach letters, share rumors of elections and encryptions. The novel’s final cadence is quiet but radical—an agreed space to go on living.

Through it all, Roy keeps placing a finger on the secular pulse: Anjum’s friend Nimmo delivers a gobsmacking monologue in the Khwabgah—“Indo–Pak is inside us. The war is inside us… We’re the ones it’s really meant for.” Another shard—“Need was a warehouse where ghosts were kept”—captures the economy of the city’s sorrow. And a tiny classroom note from the guesthouse—“The Room-Temperature World”—reminds us that even survival needs curriculum.

Setting

Old Delhi/Shahjahanabad: bazaars, lanes, mosques, cemeteries; an ecology ghosted by vultures.
Khwabgah: the hijra household where Anjum becomes herself; language as shelter.
Jantar Mantar: India’s protest commons, where the nation rehearses dissent.
Kashmir: mountains, orchards, security grids, files; a place where “shattered story” is not metaphor but method.

3. Analysis

3.1 Characters

Anjum (Aftab/Anjuman): Among the great figures of contemporary fiction. She is assertion and embrace: “I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil.” The sentence makes a life—she is not a single person but a gathering, a way of holding others.
Tilo: The book’s negative space—she invents the ethics of listening. Her line “How to tell a shattered story?…” doubles as Roy’s craft note.
Musa: A love who is also a dossier; his haunting mirrors Kashmir’s.
Naga and Biplab: Two faces of Delhi’s power-media complex; desire compromised by career.
Saddam Hussain (Dayachand): A witness renamed by a phone video; he carries India’s violent vernacular into the sanctuary.
Nimmo Gorakhpuri: Roy’s chorus; her speech—“Indo–Pak is inside us…”—turns geopolitics into cardiology.

Verdict: Every major figure is multi-valent and consequential; even walk-ons refract policy and place.

3.2 Writing Style and Structure

Roy tapes genres together: urban sketch, dossier, diary, parable, and the under-breath aside. She lets metaphors arrive from matter (vultures, diclofenac), institutions (files, courts), and chores (feeding, sweeping), so that politics becomes texture rather than thesis.

Pacing toggles between mosaic (Delhi) and sustained river (Kashmir), which some reviewers loved as “intimate epic,” while others called it a “patchwork” that tests patience.

3.3 Themes and Symbolism

Naming & Self-Making: Anjum’s declaration re-names self as community.
Nation & Intimacy: Nimmo’s line—“The war is inside us”—collapses borders into bodies.
Ecology & Memory: The vulture crisis literalizes how a “modern” drug can erase an ancient sanitation network.
Archives of Pain: “Need was a warehouse where ghosts were kept” compresses displacement economics into one bleak metaphor.
Sanctuary as Practice: The graveyard guesthouse becomes a civic classroom (“The Room-Temperature World”).

World-building: Real places made strange—Khwabgah, Jannat Guest House, Jantar Mantar, Srinagar choked by checkpoints—fused with dossier-like inserts.
Dialogue: Slips between Urdu/Hindustani cadences and clipped memos; jokes and grief in the same breath.
Conventions: Defies realist “centered hero” expectations; closer to a polyphonic social novel (think Midnight’s Children meets a human-rights archive).
Recommend to: Readers of Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Kamila Shamsie, and fans of activist-lyric fiction who want The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to unsettle and console at once. (Yes, keyword intentional.)

4. Evaluation

Strengths (pleasant surprises):

A once-in-a-decade character (Anjum); a living, breathing Delhi; a Kashmir rendered with restraint and rage; a prose line that can be both documentary and lullaby.
Passages that pierce and stay: “How to tell a shattered story? …”; “Indo–Pak is inside us.”

Weaknesses (fair warnings):

The structural switch mid-book can feel like a new novel; dossiers may feel didactic if you expect conventional plot. (Guardian called it “a patchwork of narratives”.)

Impact (how it hits): I read with my chest. By the time Miss Jebeen the Second sleeps in Jannat, Delhi’s air felt briefly breathable. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness does what institutions fail to do: house the unhouseable.

Comparison with similar works:

Compared to The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness widens outward (nation) rather than inward (family).
If A Fine Balance anatomizes the Emergency, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness anatomizes the liberalization-to-present era.

Reception & Criticism:

Man Booker longlist (2017); National Book Critics Circle finalist (2018).
Reviews ranged from rapture to restlessness: NYT (Kakutani) praised its ambitious canvas; Guardian noted its risky patchwork.

Notable extras readers value:

The first edition cover art is by Mayank Austen Soofi—a Delhi chronicler whose photographs rhyme with the text’s city-love.

5. Personal insight with contemporary educational relevance

Reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as a study text clarifies how literature can teach across disciplines:

Environmental science: The vulture collapse shows externalities of pharmacology; models predicted 80–99% annual declines at peak exposure before policy curbs. Classroom use: policy trail from Nature/PLoS papers to India’s ban and 2015 single-dose packaging restriction. (PMC,
Gender & law: From hijra gharanas to NALSA (2014), a throughline of legal recognition meets lived precarity; baseline stats (Census 2011: ~487,803 “other” gender) enable policy assignments.
Conflict studies & media literacy: Kashmir’s pellet injuries (~6,000+ injured with hundreds of eye injuries reported in 2016–17) turn abstract “crowd control” into long-term disability—pair Roy’s chapters with Amnesty’s report and long-form features.

Use the novel to practice multimodal annotation: map scenes to sources; ask what fiction can hold that reports can’t, and vice versa.

6.Quotable lines / passages

“Where do old birds go to die?”
“I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil (a gathering, a salon).”
“The Room-Temperature World.” (a tiny chalked syllabus of survival)
“How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody.”
“Indo–Pak is inside us. The war is inside us.”
“Need was a warehouse where ghosts were kept.”
“Jannat Guest House (Paradise)” as a living commons—classes and care.
“A baby’s name was made of dung. Miss Jebeen the First.”
“Everything was changing.” (Tilo’s matter-of-fact refrain)
“Memory was a public event in that place.” (on Kashmir’s archive-of-absence)

7. Conclusion

If you want a single-thread thriller, this isn’t it. But if you want a luminous, polyphonic ledger of love and survival, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will reward re-reading.

It’s best for readers who savor language, who can live with ellipses, and who understand that the map of a nation is illegible without its margins. In the long afterglow, what remains is a graveyard that becomes a school, a school that becomes a city, and a city that—briefly—becomes utmost happiness.

Recommendation: Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction, South Asian studies, human-rights journalism, and anyone drawn to novels that teach you how to look.