Ghettoization of Transgenders in Indian Society: A Study of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happines

HUMANITIES

Arundhati Roy is one of the prominent Indian Writers in English and is also a social activist. She is best known for her novels The God of Small Things (1997), which won her the Booker Prize for fiction in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published in 2017 (after 20 years). For hundreds of years, sexuality has been a major form of identity for human beings. Concepts like Ardhnarishwara in the Indian tradition refer to the unitary nature of being instead of modern dual identities of male and female. Slightly deviated position in terms of sexuality is not tolerated by the modern society. Arundhati Roy, in her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, represents the same attitude of the people in the Indian society. Anjum Roy, a trans-woman, bears this insult throughout her life. She raises many uncomfortable questions in the course of the novel. She prefers to call herself a ‘hijra’ instead of a trans-woman. She enters ‘Khwabgah’, a place for people like her. Later on, she makes ‘kabristan’ her permanent residence and lives her rest of life there. Throughout the novel, she keeps on understanding, living, and problematizing her own ‘hijra’ identity. Her feminine instincts in a masculine body cause disturbance and uneasiness in the so called normal society. Her experience as a trans-woman is an important source to understand this phenomenon in a different way. So, in this light, this dissertation is a sincere effort to understand the link between human sexuality and identity by contextualizing it in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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