A meditation on Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (TMoUH)
The first time I travelled to India, I came via Turkey,
Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That was in 1970. Arundhati Roy was then 9
years old, living in the Kerala of her The
God of Small Things (TGoST). My wife and I holidayed in Kerala in 2012, and
part of the motivation was to see the literary landscape depicted in TGoST. I had contacted Noam Chomsky and
Anthony Arnove (the latter listed in the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of TMoUH as ‘comrade, agent, publisher,
rock’ while the former is not … in my book about Noam Chomsky I included a
photograph of Noam and Arundhati together) but neither of them obliged in
giving me Arundhati’s private contact details, citing the promise they had made
to Arundhati never to divulge them. I suppose if they had done so I would have
asked Arundhati if we could meet her if she happened to be in Kerala at the
time. I also tried to contact her mother at the famous school she runs in
Kottayam but to no avail either. In the event our driver just took us to the
‘house’ in Kottayam where the Roys used to live along a river bank and where
much of the action of TGoST took
place. It was kind of disappointing as the area had been developed as a sort of
up-market residential area. We also saw the Baker’s House in Kumarakom which
featured as the haunted house in TGoST. By
now it was converted into a Taj Hotel – I told the hotel manager that a plaque
of literary interest might attract more tourists. He said that Arundhati Roy
did not merit such honours as she advocated ‘extremist’ views.
Anyway, having come to India the first time via Turkey,
Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1970, arriving in Amritsar, I was thoroughly
immersed in what in broad terms can be called Islamic culture. Being 21 years
old and having been brought up in West-Germany and having been educated to
university level (Munich University, studying psychology) I had relatively
little knowledge about the history of the Indian subcontinent, merely following
the overland hippy-trail all the way to Australia.
When my German travel companion and I came to the Golden
Temple and were accommodated there as honorary guests, we immediately adopted
Sikh culture, at least as far as getting a bracelet, kara (which still adorns my wrist some 47 years later), and
sporting shorts and a dagger (and of course very long hair and a beard).
Personally I was even more fascinated by the many chillum-smoking sadhus who
loitered along the highways and byways. After a few weeks at the Golden Temple
we decided to hitchhike to Srinagar. Given our Sikh-garb it was a piece of cake
getting lifts with the long procession of gaudy trucks that weaved up the
Kashmir valley. I was given the honorary title of ‘commander’ by the Sikh drivers, sleeping under their trucks at
night. In Srinagar we of course rented a HB
(as noted in TMoUH and where tragic
events happen subsequently) and paddled around in a small shikara exploring Dal Lake. In those days Srinagar and surroundings
seemed to be a peaceful and very pleasant place. Having obtained a generous
amount of Kashmiri opium we did not exactly have sharp political eyes – we were
radical anarchist student activists in Munich in 1969 – and as such we were not
aware of any frictions between the Kashmiri Moslems and Sikh Punjabis (not to
mention the Hindu sadhus), nor were we actually aware that Kashmir was a
divided region, torn apart between India and Pakistan. The local youth that
hung around our HB were mainly interested
in our music tapes that played the
Rolling Stones and of course Leonard Cohen – and as Musa in TMoUH says:
“Even he
doesn’t know that he’s really a Kashmiri. Or that his real name is Las Kone …”
In those days the ‘trav’ling lady’ was more likely a hippy
lady but certainly of the mould of Tilo (aka Arundhati?) and the occasional
fellow hippy visitors to our HB would
include some outrageous Norwegian femme
fatale that even then outraged the local customs. While all and sundry were
used to scantily clothed (if at all) sadhus only us HB dwellers were used to such foreign female sadhus.
In TMoUH Tilo (aka
Arundhati?) on quite a few occasions gives voice to such crass gender bias
which goes against her grain even in her admiration of moderate Islam:
“Women are not allowed. Women are not
allowed. Women are not allowed.” (p.387)
Not that women are treated any better in Hindu/Sikh/Western
or what have you culture. One of the main points of TMoUH is of course that access to the Ministry of Utmost Happiness
is only granted to the hijra of this
world, and possibly to people like Tilo.
On my second visit to India in 1974 (before the Emergency),
in the company of a wild New Zealand femme
fatale who would not bow to any religious of secular customs, Kashmir was
not included in the otherwise extensive travels (coming from Myanmar, Kolkata,
Varanasi, Agra, Delhi, Mumbai, Goa (again), Kerala … on to Sri Lanka). Goa was
then still a haven for ‘trav’ling ladies’ and me having acquired a sitar in
Kolkata and having learned to play it a bit from Mr. Khan in Kathmandu, there
was no end to more of Leonard Cohen and of course Ravi Shankar (the latter who
cultivated a reverse Indian guru meets Western ladies of wealth and taste …). There
was a certain male Hindu menace that not only googled the ‘trav’ling ladies’
but felt free to grope and assault. Luckily my female companion in the mould of
Tilo was adept in muscular self-defence and swatted them like flies. Of course
we know that the rise of right-wing (neo-fascist) Hindu nationalism, so
eloquently and passionately decried in TMoUH
(is Modi nick-named Gujarat ka Lalla
to forestall libel?) has given rise to previously unheard of levels of sexual
violence against women (no woman adept at self-defence can defend against gang
rape, and anyway why should a woman have to practice self-defence against men).
Back to Kashmir, surely the centrepiece of TMoUH. Tilo’s (aka Arundhati!)
unflinching support for azadi is accentuated
by her non-English language feature, namely Urdu. Hardly any review I have read
mentions this but I as a linguist take note, and as one of the misguided
protagonists (The Landlord) in TMoUH states
somewhat sarcastically:
Because nothing warms the subcontinental
Muslim’s heart more than a few well-chosen lines of Urdu verse (p.158).
Reading up on the history of Urdu, one is somewhat surprised
that Arundhati Roy is an adept as an offspring of a Kerala Syrian-Christian
family. However when considering her long life in Delhi, especially in Old
Delhi, one can understand her choice of language. Not that I fully understand
the ins and outs of language choices in India (or in Kashmir for that matter)
but on quizzing some Indian and Pakistani colleagues at my work, one comes to
the conclusion that modern Urdu is inextricably linked to Muslim culture
although liberal Indians of all denominations (atheists included) appreciate
Urdu as a Hindustani mutually intelligible variant of Hindi, especially as a
linguistic vehicle of fine poetry.
I suppose only readers who can read and understand Urdu and
Hindi in Roman alphabet transliteration – it is not clear what system the
author uses – can also figure out what is what. For example the first such
instance comes about when Anjum (who only speaks Urdu) says “You mean I’ve made
a khichdi of their story?” one could
safely assume that is an Urdu word. When subjected to Google Translate it
yields HUG (as in ‘to hug, hugged’) which doesn’t seem to make much sense in
the sentence quoted. While Arundhati does provide English translations for most
of her Urdu and Hindi texts, there are quite a few – as above – where the
uninitiated is at a loss, i.e. no translation is provided. I suppose as well
that such language questions are a can of worms, what with an Indian author
writing about India in English, an India (and Kashmir) where ordinary folks (as
the main protagonists) speak no or only little English. Comrade Revathy’s (CPI
(Maoist)) long letter in halting English may or may not be a genuine article in
this regard. The grim content of the letter played out in Southern India
mirrors that of Kashmir. When we were in Kerala in 2012 the Revolutionary
Marxist Party leader T. P. Chandrasekharan was murdered and the local
newspapers reported the story as internecine fighting, blaming the local CPM
faction. The English language daily the Decan Chronicle (8 May 2012) reported
that a suspect was ‘nabbed in a secret operation’ and that ‘the interrogation
is on in a secret place’. Sounds very much like the secret interrogations in
the Shiraz in TMoUH. A political commentator
cum academic historian in a previous
edition of the Decan Chronicle had put down the whole saga to primitive
Dravidians who were prone to believe Marxist and Muslim (sic) propaganda,
resulting in the ‘Talibanisation of Kerala’. I wrote a letter to the editor
which to my surprise was published in large print, pointing out that a
complicit corporate media is to blame instead and that ordinary Keralites know
as much as anybody that the ‘Talibanisation of Kerala’ is a common tactic used
by the elites to scare the populace into accepting extreme measures of arrest
and detention (and murder by the secret state police).
That the educated elites in India (see Kerala above),
Pakistan and Kashmir read all this stuff in English as a matter of course is of
course a mixed blessing but of course (excuse the endless pun) we (who read
English only, and maybe German and French) are ever so grateful to a myriad of
Indian authors whose English prose surpasses that of the English English
writers. Arundhati Roy certainly is in a league of her own in this respect (but
what if she were to write in Urdu?). The main point, however, seems to be that
Roy’s choice of Urdu as local language flavour is destined to be an eye-opener
for all of her Indian readers, inasmuch as her book is really compulsory
reading for all Indians. Readers like me will miss many of the allusions, Urdu
or otherwise. Readers like me will however receive an English education as to what
the political, social and individual issues are. Of course it is grim reading.
Roy subverts Stalin’s saying that one death is a tragedy but a thousand are a
statistic. By describing the tragic deaths of individuals like children that
get mowed down by indiscriminate machinegun fire, the reader has to contemplate
the many more deaths, twenty at a time. For anyone who has never ever been even
close to such massacres, the scenarios are beyond comprehension. Those in the
midst of it all, be it in Kashmir, Syria, Yemen or whatever place you care to
name, the reality of such incomprehensible suffering on an almost daily basis must
amount to barbarity on a scale not seen before on this earth. How a literary
voice like that of Arundhati Roy gets inside the heads of both victim and
perpetrator is also short of miraculous. Sure there are other harrowing
accounts of the brutality of warfare, be it All
Quiet on the Western Front or the seminal The Wretched of the Earth, but written by male protagonists who
experienced many of the atrocities themselves. As such there can be only few
women authors who lay bare both the facts and emotions, none more cutting to
the bone than Arundhati Roy. As I write this review, Guardian news from Kashmir
is that seven Hindu pilgrims got shot during an ambush, inserting Modi’s tweet
that ‘India will never get bogged down by such cowardly attacks & the evil
designs of hate’. Maybe it is not too surprising that so-called liberal news
media as the Guardian see the need to side with Modi. Has the Guardian
forgotten that much of the Northern Ireland bloody conflict resulted from the
Ulster Regiment provocations, marching through Catholic neighbourhoods under
heavy military protection? A reported 115,000 Hindu pilgrims marched through
Moslem Kashmir neighbourhoods last year, all under heavy military protection.
Obviously violent death cannot be condoned in any circumstances but those who
provoke sectarian conflict for political gain must be answerable for the
gravest of human rights violations. The Modis of this world are of course
beyond the law that may yet silence the likes of Roy (that she fled to London
to complete her book is testament to that). The Landlord in TMoUH
is given a voice that seems to be intended to showcase how certain
Indian liberal reactionaries think about Kashmir:
… I have never understood how
that storm of dull, misguided vanity – the absurd notion that Kashmir should
have ‘freedom’ – swept him up as it did a whole generation of Kashmiri men
(p.160).
Of course the Landlord in the end realizes his incorrect
thinking when deprived of the ‘infrastructure of impunity’ (p.434) – unlike the
one enjoyed by Modi. It is of course interesting to note in our era of
political revenge politics that occasionally the high and mighty get caught up
in the net and end up in jail – rightly or wrongly (the latter include Brazil’s
former popular president da Silva and the Taiwanese Chen Shui-bian, what with
the former lot including South-Korea’s impeached Park Geun Hye, and who knows
if Tony Blair will for ever escape a court hearing and if Trump escapes
impeachment). In TMoUH the other
semi-reactionary character, Naga, the TV journalist semi-celebrity who is
handled by the Landlord’s Indian Secret Service outfit gets married to Tilo
after Musa is killed. One does wonder about this a lot. Would a real Tilo (aka
Arundhati?) contemplate such a marriage? Arundhati’s own marriage adventure, as
much as it is revealed in her various biographies, begs the question. One’s
obsession to equate Tilo (from Kerala) and Arundhati also stems from the mother’s
story, the Syrian-Christian who has a school – biographical coincidences? One
hopes so, as Tilo’s mother dies a sad death while Arundhati’s mother is alive
and kicking as far as I know. In any case if I were Arundhati’s mother I would
be a bit worried. Of course there was a lot of speculation as to who is who in
real life compared to the characters in TGoST,
what with mother and various uncles protesting that it wasn’t them. It is
common literary speculation that many a great novel has autobiographical traits
– and why not? One’s real life experiences provide many facts that are stranger
than fiction, and weave stories from them is an art form that Arundhati Roy
surely masters like no one else.
As such it also perhaps no surprise that a lot of the story
in TMoUH plays out in Delhi, Roy’s
long-term place of residence. Her intimate knowledge of all the nooks and
crannies of this vast metropolis shines like nothing else in TMoUH. Not being much acquainted with Old or New Delhi other than on my first
visit to India when my new travel companion, a guy from Switzerland and I
applied for an Australian resident visa at the Australian High Commission in
New Delhi – of course as hippies were domiciled in Old Delhi. It was quite a
lengthy process that required us to be there for a couple weeks. In those days
the Australians welcomed any white-skinned Europeans, hence with my personal
lack – as a German passport holder – of any qualifications other than an
unfinished psychology degree but with a good head of very long hair, all I
needed to do was to fill out lots of forms, get passport photos with hair out
of the way and get a medical clearance by going to a flash hospital for rich expatriates
and even richer Indians. Being short on money we walked for miles and only used
rickshaws in emergencies. One day we ended up in a dusty park (minus the graves
as in TMoUH) where squatters welcomed
us like newfound brothers. We also hung around the Red Fort – minus the light
shows mentioned in TMoUH – ‘shooting
the breeze’ (which seems to be a favourite idiom in TMoUH). Not that we ever came across any Hijra there or anywhere in India (I did come across some in Sri
Lanka though). That the Red Fort should be a special attraction for the band of
Hijra in TMoUH is of course further testimony to the fact that Old Delhi and
the Red Fort still are part of the essential Urdu-Moslem fabric of India (the
‘Urdu’ language itself is said to be named after the Urdu Bazaar that existed
there), what with Roy also acknowledging her supporters in Shahjahanabad (the ancient capital of the Moghul Empire and what
later became Delhi). The Hijras’
excursions into New Delhi, with its monstrous highways and byways, shopping
malls and high-rise residences growing like tropical mushrooms by night, are both
hilarious and somewhat tragic, giving voice to Roy’s anti-capitalist
(anti-corporate) stance that has seen her operate as a major activist in the
many environmental battles that rage across India. Delhi, now one of the most
polluted super cities of the world, is destined to be submerged in the sludge
of ever faster development. Roy’s dire warnings in TMoUH are falling on deaf ears. Kashmir due to its lack of rapid
industrial development may well come out best in the end, if only by default. Indeed
when in TMoUH in the last (short) chapter, Tilo shows off
‘her prowess in Urdu’ to her Kashmiri tragic hero Musa , there is also Guih
Kyom, the dung beetle, announcing that ‘things would turn out alright in the
end’. This by the way is not an allusion to Bertrand Russell’s dystopian famous
lines on how the world, trilobites and all, will return to peace when man makes
himself extinct but rather a celebration of the human species ‘because Miss
Jabeen, Miss Udaya Jabeen, was come’ (note the clever braking of a rule of
English grammar).
The last chapter also contains that statement stretching
across the page – noted by almost every review I have come across – namely ‘How
to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By becoming
everything.’ I suppose reviewers prefer such mystical statements to the grim
political narratives spanning most other pages. Actually I think this line is
very much in keeping with ancient Zen practice: didn’t the Zen painter of
bamboo say that in order to paint the perfect bamboo he (or possibly she) had
to become a bamboo? Or is it the Kafkaesque ‘metamorphosis’ that necessitates
one to become a beetle in order to understand what it is like to be a beetle?
Or what does Arundhati really mean when in the first chapter Anjum ‘lived in
the graveyard like a tree’? Yes, surely we have to agree with Arundhati that we
have ‘to become everything’ in order to make this world a better place.
In the first place, reading her book TMoUH will make you a better person.
