The precarious lives of India’s Others: The creativity of precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

ABSTRACT

This article traces the agency of Arundhati Roy’s precariat in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. In her novel, Roy focuses on how those in the most precarious of social positions manage to retain a toehold within the system by defiant creativity, lateral thinking and alternative living. Roy’s precariat reacts not with a desperate clutching at the assumed securities of social life, but counter-intuitively, audaciously taking on more precarity, thus seizing the prerogative of choice. Through the lens of precarity as creative agency, the reading advanced in this article is inspired by the writer and activist’s refusal to depict India’s Others – the poor, “apostates”, foreigners and third-gender individuals – abjectly or as victims. The article argues that, by writing a cast of characters who rejoice in their precarity and overtly celebrate how creative these minorities groups have become in their conditions of acute precarity, Roy risks compromising her indictments of India’s social injustices.

KEYWORDS:

• Arundhati Roy
• India
• precarity
• Othering
• Indian writing in English

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Similarly, Nayar (2017) notes about the success of The God of Small Things in India that it “was, indisputably, within the elite English-speaking classes” (47).

2. In the introduction to her non-fiction book Field Notes on Democracy, Roy indicts the current Prime Minister of India for this calculated attack: “In February 2002, following the burning of a train coach in which fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide against Muslims in the state” (2009a, 12).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Cristina Mendes

Ana Cristina Mendes is assistant professor in English studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon. Her areas of specialization are postcolonial and migration studies, with an emphasis on the cultural industries and exchanges in the global cultural marketplace. Her publications include the book Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics (2011), co-edited with Lisa Lau.

Lisa Lau

Lisa Lau is a lecturer at Keele University, specializing in postcolonial theory and literature of the Indian subcontinent, investigating issues of representation, identity politics, diaspora and gender. She developed re-orientalism theory, has been developing re-orientalism discourse in collaboration with Ana Mendes and published the volume Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014).