Hello everyone,
This blog is a response to a flipped learning task which is assigned by Dr.Dilip.Barad sir based on Arundhati Roy’s novel ‘Ministry of Utmost Happiness’.
#About the novel
‘Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, Arundhati Roy's novel, is not one that revolves around one story, but rather brings together all the broken stories, allowing them to coexist. The novel weaves together experiences from Old Delhi, Gujarat, and Kashmir.
Anjum, who is a hijra, knits together an unusual home for the unwanted in a graveyard, while Tilo is a strange, quietly strong-willed woman whose life intricately becomes entwined with the politics of Kashmir. What appears to be two disparate stories eventually merges into how individual pain cannot be extricated from the historical past.
This novel is written in a fractured, non-linear style that mixes fiction, politics, memory, and poetry. Rather than providing easy solutions or closure, the novel encourages the reader to bear witness to the ways in which people continue to exist, love, and struggle in a deeply fractured world. This is a very powerful novel about finding small pockets of hope within a sea of despair.
Phase 1: PRE-CLASS TASK (CORE E-CONTENT)
Video 1: Khwabgah
1.1 Narrative Structure and Opening
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness begins with a fragmented, non-linear narrative infused with elements of magic realism. The novel opens with the striking image of Anjum living in a graveyard “like a tree,” immediately establishing themes of marginality, survival, and coexistence between life and death.
1.2 Anjum’s Origins
The narrative then moves backward to trace Anjum’s childhood as Aftab, born in Old Delhi to Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali. At birth, the child is discovered to be intersex. Jahanara Begum experiences a series of intense emotional responses shock, denial, fear, despair, and even suicidal thoughts reflecting the trauma caused by society’s rigid gender binaries.
1.3 Life in Khwabgah
Seeking belonging and self-recognition, Aftab gradually finds refuge in the Khwabgah, the “House of Dreams,” a communal home for Hijras led by Kulsoom Bi. Within this protected space, Aftab becomes Anjum and embraces her identity. The Khwabgah stands in contrast to the outside world, referred to as the “Duniya,” which enforces binary norms and exclusion.
1.4 The 2002 Gujarat Riots
A turning point in Anjum’s life occurs during her visit to Gujarat, where she is caught in the 2002 communal riots. She witnesses horrific violence, including the killing of pilgrims and the brutal murder of her companion Zakir Mian. Anjum survives only because the mob believes killing a Hijra would bring misfortune. This episode leaves her deeply traumatized.
1.5 The Graveyard and Jannat
Unable to return to life in the Khwabgah, Anjum withdraws to a graveyard, where she builds a new home. Over time, this space transforms into the Jannat Guest House, a sanctuary where the rejected, the wounded, and even the dead find acceptance. The graveyard becomes a living community rather than a place of finality.
Video 2: Saddam Hussein and Jantar Mantar
2.1 Saddam Hussein’s Backstory
The narrative introduces Saddam Hussein, originally named Dayachand, a Dalit man employed at the Jannat Guest House. He recounts the lynching of his father, a cobbler falsely accused of cow slaughter. The murder is filmed and celebrated by the perpetrators, highlighting the normalization of caste-based and communal violence.
2.2 The Name Change
Dayachand renamed himself Saddam Hussein after watching the execution of the Iraqi leader. He admires Saddam’s refusal to beg for mercy before American power, seeing in this act a form of defiance denied to people like his father.
2.3 Systemic Oppression
Through Saddam’s experiences, the novel exposes caste discrimination in government mortuaries and the exploitation of low-paid security guards by corrupt contracting agencies. His story illustrates how oppression is embedded within state institutions.
2.4 Jantar Mantar Protests
The narrative shifts to Jantar Mantar in Delhi, portrayed as a space where marginalized groups gather to protest. The novel critiques the 2011 Anti-Corruption Movement for monopolizing media attention while sidelining other struggles, such as those of the Mothers of the Disappeared from Kashmir and activists from Manipur and Bhopal.
2.5 The Abandoned Baby
At Jantar Mantar, a baby is found abandoned. A custody dispute follows, involving Anjum and others. The child, later known as Miss Jebeen the Second, mysteriously disappears, adding to the novel’s recurring motif of loss and displacement.
Video 3: Kashmir and Dandakaranya
3.1 Narrative Shift
The narrative voice shifts to a first-person perspective through “The Landlord,” Biplab Dasgupta, an Intelligence Bureau officer. This section introduces key characters including Tilo, Musa, and Naga, expanding the novel’s geographical and political scope.
3.2 Tilo and Political Resistance
Tilo emerges as an enigmatic figure, often seen as resembling the author herself. She becomes involved in rescuing the abandoned baby from Jantar Mantar, positioning her within networks of dissent and care.
3.3 Musa’s Tragedy
Musa Yeswi’s transformation forms the emotional core of the Kashmir narrative. Initially a peaceful man, he turns to militancy after his wife Arifa and infant daughter, Miss Jebeen, are killed by a single bullet during a military operation. His personal loss reflects the larger tragedy of Kashmir.
3.4 Captain Amrik Singh
Captain Amrik Singh, an army officer responsible for severe human rights abuses, represents the brutality of state power. Haunted by Musa, he eventually flees to the United States seeking asylum. Consumed by paranoia and guilt, he kills his family and himself, illustrating the psychological collapse produced by violence.
3.5 Revathy’s Letter
The section concludes with a letter from Revathy, a Maoist fighter in the Dandakaranya forest. She reveals that she is the biological mother of the abandoned baby, conceived after she was raped by police officers. She describes the child as having “six fathers and three mothers,” challenging conventional ideas of family and parenthood.
Video 4: Udaya Jebeen and the Dung Beetle
4.1 Convergence at Jannat
The fragmented narratives of Anjum, Tilo, Saddam, and the child eventually converge at the Jannat Guest House. Jannat becomes the central space where broken lives intersect.
4.2 The Dung Beetle (Guih Kyom)
The dung beetle, Guih Kyom, emerges as a key symbol. Though it survives on waste, it performs an essential ecological function. The beetle represents the marginalized characters who create meaning, care, and order from what society discards.
4.3 Resilience and Survival
The novel does not offer a conventional happy ending. Instead, it emphasizes endurance. Saddam abandons his desire for revenge and marries Zainab, while Anjum finds purpose in caring for others. Survival itself becomes an act of resistance.
4.4 “Becoming Everything”
The novel’s closing reflection suggests that a shattered world requires a shattered narrative. The famous line—“How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything”—captures the novel’s philosophy of inclusive storytelling.
Video 5: Thematic Study
5.1 Redefining Paradise
Paradise (Jannat) is presented not as a religious afterlife but as a secular, earthly space of inclusion created by the marginalized for themselves.
5.2 Ambiguity and Diversity
The novel celebrates ambiguity and plurality. Anjum’s intersex identity destabilizes rigid divisions of gender, religion, and nationality, advocating fluidity over fixed categories.
5.3 Critique of Development
Modernization and development are sharply critiqued. Symbols such as the Mercedes-Benz represent economic inequality, while the disappearance of vultures signifies ecological destruction caused by human intervention.
5.4 Life and Death
The boundary between life and death is blurred throughout the novel, especially in the graveyard where people live among graves and perform “second burials” to find emotional closure.
5.5 Social Hierarchies
Roy critiques caste, gender, and regional hierarchies that push Hijras, Dalits, and Kashmiris to the margins of society.
5.6 Religion and Power
The novel exposes how religion is politicized, manipulated for electoral gain, and used to justify violence and exclusion.
Video 6: Symbols and Motifs
6.1 Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed
The saint symbolizes radical love, spiritual freedom, and defiance of religious orthodoxy.
6.2 The Old Man (Anna Hazare)
This figure represents the Anti-Corruption Movement and the strategic use of Gandhian imagery to mobilize political power.
6.3 Shiraz Cinema
Once a space of joy, the cinema in Kashmir is first shut by militants and later converted into a military interrogation center, symbolizing the erasure of normal life under conflict.
6.4 Jannat Express
A chilling metaphor used by security forces to describe the killing of militants, exposing the casual brutality of state violence.
6.5 Motherhood
The novel contrasts Anjum’s non-biological, inclusive motherhood with the aggressive nationalist ideal of “Bharat Mata.”
6.6 Internal Organs
References to internal organs whispering or fighting symbolize internalized trauma and psychological fragmentation.
6.7 Saffron Parakeets
These birds symbolize the rise of Hindu nationalism and the disciplined, mobilized political crowds associated with it.
Activity A: The "Shattered Story" Structure (Textual Analysis with ChatGPT)
"Analyze the narrative structure of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Specifically, explain how
The non-linear timeline reflects the trauma of the characters. Use the concept of 'How to tell
a shattered story by slowly becoming everything' as a core argument."
Narrative Structure and Trauma in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness resists a conventional, linear narrative. Instead, it unfolds as a fragmented, polyphonic text that moves across time, geography, and subjectivities. This shattered structure is not a stylistic indulgence but a political and ethical necessity. The novel demonstrates how trauma personal, communal, and national cannot be told in a straight line. Roy’s narrative answers the question she implicitly poses: How do you tell a shattered story? Her answer is: by slowly becoming everything.
Non-linearity as a Form of Traumatic Memory
Trauma theory suggests that traumatic experiences are not remembered sequentially but erupt in fragments, repetitions, and sudden returns. Roy mirrors this psychological reality through a non-linear timeline that moves between Old Delhi, Gujarat, Kashmir, and back again, often without smooth transitions.
Rather than beginning with a stable “origin,” the novel opens in the aftermath: Anjum already lives in a graveyard. Only later does the narrative return to her childhood as Aftab in the Khwabgah of Old Delhi. This backward movement reflects how trauma works—the wound is visible before its cause is fully known. The reader encounters the scar before the injury.
From Khwabgah to Graveyard: Spatial Shifts as Trauma Markers
The transition from Khwabgah (House of Dreams) in Old Delhi to the graveyard (later named Jannat Guest House) is one of the most powerful structural movements in the novel.
Khwabgah represents a fragile, performative refuge for hijras already marginal, already provisional. The graveyard is not merely a setting but a narrative transformation: a space where the rejected dead and living coexist.
This shift is not linear progression but traumatic displacement. Anjum does not “move forward” in life; she is pushed sideways by the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. The massacre fractures her sense of time and belonging so completely that she exits ordinary social space altogether. Living among graves literalizes what trauma does metaphorically: it places the survivor outside normative time.
Roy does not narrate the pogrom as a single climactic event. Instead, it reverberates across the text, resurfacing in memory, fear, and spatial withdrawal. The graveyard becomes a narrative strategy—a place where broken timelines can coexist.
“Slowly Becoming Everything”: Multiplicity as Narrative Ethics
Rather than centering the novel on one protagonist, Roy allows the story to expand outward, absorbing multiple lives, histories, and conflicts. This is what “slowly becoming everything” means structurally:
The novel begins with Anjum, Shifts to Tilo
Expands to Kashmir Absorbs political movements, footnotes, reports, letters, and testimonies
This refusal of narrative hierarchy reflects the ethics of trauma narration: no single story can contain the damage.
Tilo’s Kashmir Narrative: A Parallel Trauma
Tilo’s story in Kashmir does not follow Anjum’s chronologically, but it mirrors her thematically. Kashmir, like the graveyard, exists outside official time as a space of perpetual suspension, surveillance, and mourning.
Roy fractures Tilo’s narrative through: Letters, Dossiers, Interrogation records, Interrupted memories
This documentary fragmentation reflects the political trauma of Kashmir, where truth is always partial and violently contested. Just as Anjum survives by creating an alternative world (Jannat), Tilo survives by refusing fixed identity—she remains elusive, resistant to closure.
The Found Baby: Narrative Convergence Without Linear Resolution
The novel’s most crucial structural convergence occurs through the found baby, Miss Jebeen the Second.
Importantly, this connection is not causal but relational:
The baby emerges from the violence of Kashmir
She is carried into Anjum’s graveyard-world
She becomes the living bridge between two otherwise fragmented narratives
This moment does not “resolve” the novel. Instead, it reconfigures it. The baby represents a future that cannot be narrated through progress or redemption, only through care, improvisation, and coexistence.
Structurally, this is Roy’s ultimate answer to trauma:
Not healing through forgetting
Not unity through order
But survival through assemblage
Conclusion: A Shattered Nation Requires a Shattered Form
The non-linear narrative of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness reflects the psychic and political trauma of modern India—Partition, communal violence, caste oppression, state terror, and gendered marginalization. Roy refuses linear realism because linear realism belongs to stable nations and coherent histories, which her India is not.
By moving between Khwabgah and graveyard, between Anjum and Tilo, between Delhi and Kashmir, Roy shows that trauma cannot be told—it must be lived across forms. The novel becomes a shelter for fragments, just as Jannat becomes a shelter for the living and the dead.
In this way, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness teaches us not just how to read a shattered story, but how to inhabit one—by slowly, stubbornly, becoming everything.
Activity B: Mapping the Conflict (Mind Mapping with NotebookLM)
Activity C: Automated Timeline & Character Arcs
Chronological Timeline of Anjum and Saddam Hussain’s Journeys
Anjum’s Journey: From Aftab to the Graveyard
Birth as Aftab (Old Delhi)
Motivation: Anjum is born as a boy named Aftab. The midwife discovers that the child has dual genitals. Jahanara Begum, her mother, faces five stages of shock and chooses to conceal Aftab’s gender identity, hoping the female genitals will "seal off" naturally.
Key Event: Birth of Aftab with dual genitals, hidden identity.
Childhood and Secret Identity
Motivation: Jahanara Begum’s secretive handling of Aftab’s gender situation stems from fear, societal pressures, and a desire for normalcy.
Key Event: Aftab’s upbringing under the disguise of a regular male child, hiding his true identity.
Move to Khwabgah (Ages 14–15)
Motivation: Aftab is drawn to the Hijra community after encountering Bombay Silk, a beautiful Hijra on the streets. The desire for self-expression and finding a community pushes Aftab to leave home.
Key Event: Aftab transitions into Anjum and moves into the Khwabgah (House of Dreams), a traditional sanctuary for the third gender.
Motherhood and Raising Zainab
Motivation: Anjum’s internal sense of womanhood and motherhood leads her to find a three-year-old abandoned girl, Zainab, and raise her as her daughter.
Key Event: Anjum adopts Zainab and takes on a maternal role.
Trauma of the 2002 Gujarat Riots
Motivation: Anjum witnesses the brutal murder of Zakir Miya by a mob during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Her survival is attributed to the belief that killing a Hijra is an "ill omen". This traumatic experience fundamentally alters her view of the world.
Key Event: Anjum experiences the traumatic loss of Zakir Miya, her deep disillusionment, and the loss of interest in "worldly matters".
Post-Traumatic Change
Motivation: After the riots, Anjum is forever changed. She cuts her hair, dresses in a male Pathani suit, and retreats from her previous identity. This act signifies her withdrawal from the world and her new purpose.
Key Event: Anjum changes her appearance, shedding her earlier identity, signaling retreat from worldly concerns.
Move to the Graveyard
Motivation: Following conflict with Kulsumbi, the leader of the Khwabgah, and the trauma of the Gujarat riots, Anjum seeks peace among the dead. She moves to a graveyard near a government hospital and starts the Jannat Guest House around the graves of her ancestors, symbolizing her desire to live "like a tree", rooted and calm.
Key Event: Anjum's move to the graveyard to start the Jannat Guest House, a retreat from societal pressures.
Saddam Hussain’s Journey: From Dayachand to Vengeance
Witnessing the Lynching (Haryana)
Motivation: Dayachand, a Dalit (Chamar), witnesses the brutal lynching of his father by a group called the "Jaishree Ram gang". His father, a traditional cow-skinner, is accused of cow slaughter, and Dayachand's life is forever altered by the trauma and systemic oppression surrounding this act of violence.
Key Event: Dayachand’s father is lynched over a false cow slaughter accusation, and Dayachand vows revenge.
The Vow of Revenge
Motivation: After witnessing the lynching and enduring systemic corruption (including from a police officer, Shahrawat), Dayachand is consumed by a deep desire for revenge against those who wronged him and his father.
Key Event: Dayachand runs away, driven by vengeance, marking the beginning of his transformation.
The Name Change (Act of Defiance)
Motivation: While in Delhi, Dayachand watches the execution of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. Inspired by Saddam’s defiance in the face of overwhelming American power, Dayachand adopts the name “Saddam Hussain”. The name change is an act of defiance against oppressive forces—both the "Goliath" of American imperialism and local, oppressive systems.
Key Event: Dayachand renames himself Saddam Hussain as an act of defiance, identifying with Saddam's resistance to oppression.
Life on the Margins
Motivation: Saddam, now using his new name, struggles with life on the margins. He works in a mortuary, performing post-mortems on bodies that higher-caste doctors refuse to touch, and later works as a security guard, witnessing further corruption and oppression. His life is marked by the systems of caste discrimination and economic exploitation.
Key Event: Saddam works in various menial jobs, continuing to experience systemic oppression and marginalization.
Meeting Anjum
Motivation: Saddam eventually moves into the Jannat Guest House. Initially, he hides his Dalit identity, pretending to be Muslim. His lie is uncovered by Anjum, leading to his eventual acceptance into the community.
Key Event: Saddam meets Anjum at the Jannat Guest House, and his true background is revealed after Anjum catches him in a lie.
New Purpose Beyond Revenge
Motivation: Saddam finds a new purpose in the "Ministry" (a group that resides in the Jannat Guest House), shifting from his earlier obsession with revenge to a new sense of belonging and community with Anjum and the other members. He begins to heal and reframe his identity.
Key Event: Saddam becomes a permanent member of the "Ministry" at the Jannat Guest House, moving beyond his past revenge.
Axtivity D
Phase 3: Critical Reflection
"Cost of Modernization"
In Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the "Cost of Modernization" is a central theme that explores the intersection of material progress and human displacement. The sources define this "cost" as the heavy price paid by the poor and marginalized to facilitate the rapid westernization and industrialization of India during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The Paradox of Development
The sources characterize modernization as a race for skyscrapers, steel factories, and express highways that often result in the destruction of fertile land and natural resources. This "progress" is described as a "land grabbing" or "land acquisition" process where the state takes fertile land from villagers, replacing sustainable hereditary farming with unstable service jobs.
Key insights from the sources regarding this cost include:
• Economic Disparity: While development produces "shining missiles" and "massive dams," it benefits a specific class while the poor lose their livelihoods.
• The Mercedes Symbol: The Mercedes car is used as a potent symbol of modernization and corruption. Ironically, the very express highways built for these luxury cars are constructed on land taken from the poor, who are then forbidden from walking on those roads to avoid accidents.
• Ecological Loss (The Vulture): The vulture serves as a symbol for the "unintended post-causality of modernization". These birds died out due to chemicals used in commercial milk production to meet market demands, mirroring how marginalized human groups are erased by economic shifts.
Displacement to the Margins (The Graveyard and Slums)
The sources explain that "development" often necessitates the beautification of city spaces, which results in the systematic removal of those who do not fit the modern aesthetic.
• Slum Dwellers and Homelessness: The sources provide the example of joggers' parks being built on old railway tracks. These tracks were previously the only homes for the homeless and slum dwellers, who are subsequently "thrown off" to create a pleasant environment for the middle class to walk in the morning. This illustrates how human lives are frequently dislocated and displaced for the sake of urban "modernization".
• Anjum and the Jannat Guest House: Anjum’s move to the graveyard is a form of self-marginalization after the trauma of the "Dunya" (the real world). She builds her sanctuary, the Jannat Guest House, on land she occupies illegally, since a graveyard is a community space and not private property.
• The Threat of the State: The sources suggest that Anjum’s paradise is temporary; eventually, the bulldozers of the Delhi Municipal Corporation will likely arrive to destroy the guest house as part of a city-wide modernization effort. This highlights that even the "margins"—the graveyards and the ruins—are not safe from the encroaching reach of "development".
Ultimately, the sources argue that modernization creates a shattered reality where the state views land as an asset for national development, while the individual is left to ask, "Why only I have to give a piece of land?" For characters like Anjum and Saddam Hussain, the "Jannat" they build in a graveyard is a "utopian bubble" created specifically because they cannot live in the "Dunya" as it has been modernized.
Reflect on the ending of the novel with Refer to Prof. Barad’s view on resilience The Letter from Revathy: Tragedy Stitched into Hope, The letter from Revathy, a Maoist guerrilla fighter, reveals a backstory of extreme state-sponsored cruelty. She details being gang-raped by six police officers while unconscious, an act of violence that resulted in the birth of the baby found at Jantar Mantar.
However, as Prof. Barad highlights, this tragedy is transformed into a symbol of collective motherhood. The baby, Udaya Jebeen II, is described as having "six fathers and three mothers" (Revathy, Tilo, and Anjum) who are "stitched together by threads of light". This image suggests that the fragments of a broken society can be mended through unconventional bonds of care and solidarity, turning a child born of "fire and burning" into a "fish in the water" of a new, inclusive community.
The Dung Beetle: A Symbol of Resilience
The novel concludes with the symbolic image of the dung beetle . According to the sources, this creature serves as a metaphor for the characters’ ability to survive and find dignity in the "waste" of the world:
• Environmentally Friendly: Like the beetle, characters such as Anjum and Saddam Hussain live in a graveyard—a space society rejects as "unclean" or "unimportant"—yet they manage their own world with grace.
• Building Paradise from Filth: The beetle works with dung but stays clean, representing how the marginalized build a "Jannat" (Paradise) out of the trauma and refuse of the "Dunya" (the real world).
• A "Secular" Heaven: This symbol reinforces the idea that paradise is not an afterlife but a "harmonious existence" created on earth through the struggle of the living.
Hope vs. Hopelessness: When addressing whether the novel is hopeful or hopeless, Prof. Barad argues that it is fundamentally a novel of hope. This hope is not naive but is rooted in the concept of resilience—the human ability to "bounce back" from utterly adverse situations.
• Moving On: Prof. Barad notes that the act of "moving on" is itself an act of hope. For example, Saddam Hussain moves away from his "revenge drama" to find a new purpose in Anjum’s community.
• Prophecy of Survival: Although characters like Musa provide an "ice-cold" warning that the state is "self-destructing" through its violence, the presence of the new generation (Udaya Jebeen) suggests that the marginalized will outlast the systems that attempt to destroy them.
• The Ministry's Triumph: The Jannat Guest House stands as a "utopian bubble" where the living and dead coexist, proving that "another world is possible" through acceptance and the embracing of difference.
the novel suggests that while the "Dunya" may be broken and full of "troubles and problems," the resilience of characters who have "slowly become everything" creates a sanctuary where happiness can finally be attained.
Reference :
Barad, Dilip. "Flipped Learning Worksheet on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness." ResearchGate, Feb. 2025, (PDF) Flipped Learning Worksheet on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
DoE-MKBU. "Part 1 | Khwabgah | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy." YouTube, 28 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-29vE53apGs.
DoE-MKBU. "Part 2 | Saddam Hussein and Jantar Mantar | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy." YouTube, 28 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1z1AEXPBU.
DoE-MKBU. "Part 3 | Kashmir and Dandakaranyak | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy." YouTube, 28 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIKH_89rML0.
DoE-MKBU. "Part 4 | Udaya Jebeen & Dung Beetle | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy." YouTube, 28 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH5EULOFP4g.
DoE-MKBU. "Thematic Study | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy." YouTube, 28 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NYSTUTBoSs.
DoE-MKBU. "Symbols and Motifs | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy." YouTube, 28 Dec. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBOqLB487U.
Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Knopf, 2017.
Thank You!
