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Sunday NY Times Book Review, June 11 2017
Arundhati Roy’s Return to the Form That Made Her Famous
By KARAN MAHAJAN
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS
By Arundhati Roy
449 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
A writer has witnessed a riot. He is not, he says, a “joiner,” but the
violence is so ugly that he enlists in a peaceful protest movement. The
experience of solidarity changes him. “When I now read descriptions of
troubled parts of the world,” he writes, “in which violence appears
primordial and inevitable, a fate to which masses of people are largely
resigned, I find myself asking: Is that all there was to it? Or is it
possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form —
or a style or a voice or a plot — that could accommodate both violence
and the civilized, willed response to it?”
This was the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, writing in 1995, a decade
after a government-sponsored massacre left 3,000 Sikhs dead in Delhi.
The questions he asked have only grown in relevance. How to write about
such an event without descending into despair? And how to give hope
without being treacly?
I thought of these questions while reading Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry
of Utmost Happiness” — her first novel in 20 years. Set in India in the
present decade (with back stories extending into the 1950s), it is a
novel about social and political outcasts who come together in response
to state-sponsored violence.
Roy’s first and only other novel, “The God of Small Things,” was a
commercial and critical sensation. The gorgeous story of a doomed South
Indian family, it sold six million copies and won the Booker Prize. It
became a sort of legend — both for its quality and for its backwater
publishing story: Roy, unlike so many other successful Indian writers in
English, didn’t live abroad or attend an elite college. She had trained
as an architect and had an obscure career as an indie actress and
screenwriter. Her success, which involved foreign agents and a startling
advance, was linked to India’s kick-starting, liberalizing economy as
well. It seemed everything had come together for Roy’s book.
Roy reacted with instinctive defiance. She stopped writing fiction and
began protesting against the Indian state, which, she felt, was
steamrollering the rights of the poor and collaborating with capitalist
overlords. Several books of essays followed. Their titles — “The Algebra
of Infinite Justice,” “The End of Imagination,” “Capitalism: A Ghost
Story” — convey the largeness of her concerns. She traveled with Maoist
guerrillas in an Indian forest, marched with anti-big-dam protesters,
met with Edward Snowden in a Moscow hotel room, and was threatened and
even briefly imprisoned by the Indian government — and she continued to
write. But the writing was not of the same standard as her fiction.
Though occasionally witty in its put-downs, it was black-and-white and
self-righteous — acceptable within the tradition of political writing,
but not artful.
So it is a relief to encounter the new book and find Roy the artist
fully and brilliantly intact: prospering with stories and writing in
gorgeous, supple prose. The organs of a slaughtered buffalo in one scene
“slip away like odd-shaped boats on a river of blood”; the “outrageous”
femininity of transgender women or hijras in a neighborhood make the
“real, biological women” look “cloudy and dispersed”; a boat is seen
“cleaving through a dark, liquid lawn” of a weed-choked lake. Again and
again beautiful images refresh our sense of the world.
The story concerns several people who converge over an abandoned baby at
an anti-corruption protest in Delhi in 2011. There is a hijra named
Anjum who has survived the anti-Muslim Gujarat riots of 2002. There is
her sidekick, a former mortuary worker who calls himself Saddam Hussain
because he is obsessed with the “courage and dignity” of Saddam “in the
face of death.” And there is an enigmatic middle-class woman called S.
Tilottama who ferries the abandoned baby to her home.
Tilottama, who shares biographical details with Roy, is perhaps the
central node of the book; she connects everyone. In college for
architecture in the 1980s she was close to three men — all of whom end
up being involved with the Kashmir conflict in some way: one as an
intelligence officer, the other as a journalist, and Musa, the Kashmiri
of the group, as a freedom-fighter, or militant. The three men intersect
again on an autumn night in Kashmir in the 1990s, when Tilottama,
nicknamed Tilo, is arrested on a houseboat for apparently colluding with
a militant. What follows is a saga that enfolds the whole conflict.
The modern Kashmiri struggle for independence from India was inflamed in
1990, when Indian security forces fired on unarmed protesters; aid and
arms from Pakistan flowed in. Now Kashmiris agitating for
self-determination live in the most densely militarized area in the
world, with civilians regularly arrested, tortured, and “disappeared.”
Roy, in her nonfiction, has taken a sharp interest in Kashmir, and it is
evident in this novel, which is blazing with details about the Indian
government’s occupation and the Kashmiri people’s ensuing sorrow. She
knows everything from the frighteningly euphemistic military terminology
of the region (informers are “cats” and so on) to the natural landscape
of “herons, cormorants, plovers, lapwings,” and the “walnut groves, the
saffron fields, the apple, almond and cherry orchards.” She looks into
homes, into bomb sites, into graveyards, into torture centers, into the
“glassy, inscrutable” lakes. And she reveals for us the shattered
psychology of Kashmiris who have been fighting the Indian Army and also
occasionally collaborating with it.
These sections of the book filled me with awe — not just as a reader,
but as a novelist — for the sheer fidelity and beauty of detail. A
worried father watches his son save himself as he falls down the stairs
in their house. “How did you learn to fall like that?” he asks. “Who
taught you to fall like this?” (He fears, like so many Kashmiri parents,
that his son has joined a militant group.) A young militant describes
buying ammunition from the army, because, in Kashmir, “everybody on all
sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris.” A turncoat
Kashmiri torturer who works for the Indian government unconsciously
introduces a journalist as being “from India.” This is terrific
novelistic noticing, and it has none of the programmatic feeling of
Roy’s nonfiction.
The other part of the book, which concerns Anjum, gives Roy more
trouble, but only in its political aspects. We see how Anjum, born
intersex as Aftab in the conservative Muslim quarters of Old Delhi,
wishes “to put out a hand with painted nails and a wrist full of bangles
and delicately lift the gill of a fish to see how fresh it was before
bargaining down the price.” She eventually joins a hijra home. Then, in
2002, on a visit to Gujarat, she is attacked by right-wing Hindu mobs.
While swiftly narrated, this section is flatter in execution: We know
where Roy stands, where her sympathies lie, and though she finely
conjures the world of Old Delhi Muslims and hijras, what emerges is a
sort of political fairy tale, with the good guys and bad guys clearly
delineated. Even here Roy can’t help writing with astonishing vividness,
immersing us deep into a subculture. She has also crammed this section
with superb mini-biographies, as if she’s conducting a novelistic census
of the entire neighborhood. Nevertheless this section seemed for me to
belong to a different book.
And here one comes to the problem with the form Roy has chosen. For the
Kashmir stories, Roy relies on a looped, nesting structure familiar from
“Small Things”; though occasionally ponderous, it heightens our
suspense. The Anjum sections are linear and propulsive and often
playful. But Anjum and Tilo and the other outcasts are brought together
not through intellectual affinity but the device of the abandoned baby
at the protest.
The baby takes up a lot of space in the novel. Significant time is
devoted to debating who she is and to hiding her, and we don’t
understand Tilo’s or Anjum’s obsession; it seems like sheer novelistic
stubbornness, a desire to connect plotlines and political movements. And
in doing so, Roy ends up erasing meaning. In the Kashmir sections she
has so wonderfully answered Ghosh’s call, showing us the camaraderie of
Kashmiris in the face of despair; here, because the camaraderie is
forced, the novel begins to feel like a sentimental response to violence
— a fairy tale in a time of suffering.
Roy, who has witnessed a great deal of turmoil, is uniquely placed to
emphasize the solidarities between movements. She wants to show us a
genuine counterculture of protest. Nevertheless, I longed for fewer
connections, fewer babies and more in-depth depictions of the
psychologies of the movements. I wanted Roy to focus not on the big
symbols, but once again on the small things.
Karan Mahajan’s second novel, “The Association of Small Bombs,” was a
finalist for the 2016 National Book Award.
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