ABSTRACT
This chapter examines forms of human rights narrativity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a novel set in the contested territory of Kashmir that traces the fact-finding work of its protagonist, Tilo. This chapter focuses on how The Ministry makes a case for reclaiming imaginative and political space for fictional narrative forms to plot the stories of Kashmir and advocate for the rights of its people while offering critical insights on the Indian occupation. Roy deploys multiple genres within an overall fragmented postmodern metafiction in order to enable a comparison between fictional conventions of storytelling in the novel in relation to the conventions of the human rights report and the testimony while advancing knowledge of Kashmir in the transnational literary public sphere. This chapter argues that Roy breaks the putative hegemony of human rights discourses by showing their malleability, which can be exploited and misused to benefit the perpetrators of atrocity. Her novel contests the limited repertoire of representations of Kashmiri life and Indian occupation, which are apprehended through the singular plot of a traditional human rights narrative and offers a more complex understanding of the region, against such simplistic depictions.
