Analysis Of The God Of Small Things By Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things, came up with her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017 after a long interval of twenty years. “Fiction takes it’s time”- this was her response. Roy’s apprehension is inaccurate, yet plausible at the same time. It is inaccurate in the sense that a work of fiction is supposed to originate from the writer’s imagination, and it does not usually take years. On the other hand, Roy’s realization is tenable because she did count on imagination, but waited for the story to unfold gradually over time since she does not merely tell a story. Rather, she gives a meticulous account of India’s political history mostly. The novel reads as if Roy has been inspecting
Azad Bhartiya”, “The Slow-Goose Chase”, “Some Questions for Later”, “The Landlord”, “The Tenant”, “The Untimely Death of Miss Jebeen the First”, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”, “The Landlord” and “Guih Kyom”. It starts with Anjum already settled at the graveyard. Soon after, it returns to her days in Khwabgah, the resort exclusively belonging to the transgender as their safe-zone. Throughout the first four chapters, the readers are introduced to one of the shocking and unnerving subject-matters of the novel where it deals with an almost ruled out domain- the domain of the hijra- the transgender. The moment readers come to the lines where Anjum’s mother found “nestling underneath his [Anjum’s] boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly, girl-part”, they are shocked to have apparently discovered that the protagonist (until Chapter-7) is a hijra. Roy mercilessly flings the invariably discounted phenomenon of the hijra’s life at our face which we have so long repudiated either out of fear of the unknown and, to a great extent, the forbidden or ‘let-them-be’ attitude by denying their existence on the whole. Roy seems to have closely observed the adversities, disgrace and hatred they confront in the society of ‘normal’ people and recounted them in her novel. It is in the third chapter that Miss Jebeen, the Second emerges into the scene as the seed of hope and the
This love-story is premeditatedly pervaded with the reality of Kashmir insurgency. She has brought into light the actual horrifying picture of how innocent people on both sides were butchered to keep the Kashmir issue alive to serve the Indian army and bureaucrat’s own