Arundhati Roy: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize and has been translated into more than forty languages. She also has published several books of nonfiction, including The End of Imagination, Capitalism: A Ghost Story and The Doctor and the Saint. She lives in New Delhi.

The God of Small Things NONFICTION

The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and the Annihilation of Caste (The Debate Between B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi)

Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack)

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Broken Republic

Walking with the Comrades

Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers

The Algebra of Infinite Justice

The End of Imagination

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy

The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , Booker Prize — winner Arundhati Roy’s dazzling new novel that explores deeply connected layers of family, love, and identity, set against the backdrop of contemporary India.

Discussion Questions

1. The novel opens with a vignette describing the mysterious death of vultures — and how “not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds” (this page). How does this occurrence set the stage and tone for the rest of the novel with regard to the state of India’s society and the unrest that the characters experience within themselves and with the outside world? How does that mood transition into the graveyard setting of the first part of the book?

2. Discuss the complications of Aftab’s upbringing and his parents’ reactions to their child’s gender. What does the family dynamic suggest about the role that biology plays in determining one’s true family versus an individual’s ability to create or choose one’s family?

3. Anjum is told that a Hijra is “a living creature that is incapable of happiness…The riot is inside us. The war is inside us” (this page). To what extent do you see this manifest in Anjum’s character throughout the book, and in what ways does she defy that definition?

4. What roles do magic and superstition play throughout the novel? Which characters are more inclined to subscribe to unconventional beliefs, and do they seem more comforted or disillusioned by those beliefs in the face of harsh realities?

5. Discuss the following idea: “What mattered was that [the moment] existed . To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether” (this page). How does the formal inventiveness and variation of the novel’s narrative — which is told through documents, written and oral histories, and other archival materials passed among characters or left in their absence — attest to this sense of one’s relevance in history at any given moment? What are the different characters’ motives for leaving an impression of their existence?

6. How does the variety of perspectives that the documents in the novel afford you as a reader — from Tilo’s notebooks to the letter from Miss Jebeen the Second’s real mother — different, if not conflicting, portraits of the political conflict going on in Kashmir? Overall, did they allow you to more clearly see one side’s argument over another’s? What kind of texture did the shifts in narrative form create in your overall reading experience?

7. What is the intersection between death and life in the novel? Consider the ways in which Anjum’s graveyard/funeral parlor prospers and grows throughout the novel, and the notion that “Dying became just another way of living” (this page).

8. How does Roy create the atmosphere and emotional tenor of the novel’s primary cities/places in India? What sensory details or descriptions stuck with you the most as the backdrop for the characters’ somewhat nomadic existence?

9. Did you find there to be more similarities or differences between places or scenes where protesting and violence occur in contrast to those where there is relative peace and civility? How does the point of view from which a given scene is narrated affect how you see a place?