Personal is political: the alchemy of happiness in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

From the title to the text, happiness matters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. However, happiness has garnered less critical attention than the text’s political, cultural, social, gendered, and realist readings, implicating the impossibility of achieving ‘utmost happiness’ in the post-9/11 world rife with political chaos. Alternatively, this paper claims that by defying the limitations of a political vision, oppressing gendered norms, and social structures that ensnare individuals in unhappy states, the drab graveyard where, Anjum- the Muslim transgender first takes up residence after failing to find happiness in Duniya and Khawabgah, and later sets up ‘a People’s Pool, a People’s Zoo and a People’s School’, the personal becomes a space where everyone, irrespective of gender, class, caste, and religion, can live together happily. Based on this counter reading of the text, this study divulges Roy’s optimistic invocation of the connection between the personal and political as an imaginative manifestation of the alchemy of happiness, which was theorised by Muslim philosopher Ghazali–whereby the divine contemplation experienced at the personal level contributes to communal happiness at the broader scale. Thus, the text philosophizes happiness as a transcendental experience that enables the individual to rise above base material concerns and drives him to the love of God, self, and humanity. This recognition of happiness as a spiritual reality holds the power to turn even a graveyard into paradise.

Keywords

• Happiness
• 9/11
• personal is political
• humanity
• paradise
• graveyard