Minimal Lives of a Republic in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) places lives conventionally relegated to the margins of the nation at the centre of its fictional world. Moving across Delhi, Kashmir, Gujarat, Kerala and central India, the novel brings together transgender identities, religious minorities, Dalits, political dissenters, displaced people, abandoned children and individuals affected by different forms of social and political vulnerability. This paper examines these figures as the “minimal lives” of the republic: not lives that are inherently insignificant, but lives whose claims to recognition, security, citizenship and belonging are repeatedly diminished by social hierarchies and structures of power. Drawing principally on Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of sovereign power and “bare life,” while engaging with postcolonial and subaltern approaches to representation, the study investigates how Roy converts marginal existence into a central category for rethinking the contemporary nation. It argues that the novel’s fragmented structure, multiple narrative voices, documentary elements, shifting geographical locations and interweaving of private memory with public history constitute more than formal experimentation. They create a counter-archive through which neglected experiences enter the narrative of the republic. Characters such as Anjum, Tilo, Musa, Saddam Hussain, Comrade Revathy and Dr Azad Bhartiya reveal different and non-equivalent forms of exclusion, while their convergence prevents marginality from being understood as a single homogeneous condition. The paper further argues that Roy moves beyond the absolute implications of “bare life” by representing marginal subjects as capable of memory, resistance, care, humour, testimony and the creation of alternative communities. The Jannat Guest House consequently emerges as a crucial counter-space in which abandonment is provisionally transformed into belonging. Through these narrative strategies, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness interrogates the distance between the democratic promise of citizenship and the uneven realities through which citizenship is lived. Roy’s novel ultimately transforms minimal lives from objects of political and social power into subjects of memory, narration and historical presence.