ABSTRACT
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) presents the suffering of hijras, militants, political activists and victims of religious and political tensions in India as well as their resilience through the healing power of solidarity, interconnectedness and love. The novel thus partially qualifies as a transmodern narrative which puts the voice of subaltern subjects into words and presents their interconnectedness in a world of tolerance and re-enchantment. Accordingly, this chapter first demonstrates how the novel presents the vulnerable lives of wounded hijras and animals against the destructive practices of capitalism and consumerism. In doing so, the novel constructs a transmodern cultural world of India which defends life against capitalist tendencies and privileges the lives of wounded animals and subjects left without any kind of consolation. This chapter then moves on to demonstrate how the novel draws attention to the individual singularities of political and religious victims in India whose vulnerability paradoxically becomes a source of spirituality and solidarity. The chapter finally analyses the narrative form of the novel and discusses how it achieves truthful communication by combining fictional and non-fictional components.
