This Blog is a Part of the Flipped Learning Activity on the Novel The Ministry of Utmost happiness by Arundhati Roy, Assigned by Prof. Dilip Barad Sir.
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Introduction
5.Thematic Study | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy
6.Symbols and Motifs | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy
Roy’s novel is dense with symbolism. Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed represents spiritual rebellion and love beyond orthodoxy. The Old Man-Baby reflects how protest movements can be appropriated and diluted by power structures. Shiraz Cinema symbolizes cultural domination, surveillance, and state violence in Kashmir.
Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed
Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed is one of the most powerful symbolic figures in the novel. A historical Armenian mystic who embraced Islam and fell in love with a Hindu man, Abhaychand, Sarmad was executed for reciting an “incomplete” Kalima. His refusal to conform to religious orthodoxy makes him a symbol of spiritual freedom, love beyond boundaries, and resistance to dogma.
His shrine welcomes people from all religions and identities, standing in sharp contrast to rigid, exclusionary religious practices. Through Sarmad, Roy emphasizes that true spirituality lies in love, questioning, and inclusivity rather than blind obedience. His presence resonates strongly with Anjum’s life, reinforcing the novel’s challenge to fixed identities.
The Old Man-Baby (Tubby Old Gandhian)
The Old Man-Baby symbolizes protest movements in modern India, particularly anti-corruption campaigns. Initially, he represents hope for marginalized communities—displaced people, farmers, and the urban poor—who see in him a possibility of justice and reform.
However, as the movement gains popularity, it is appropriated by political elites and the urban middle class, losing its original purpose. This transformation reflects Roy’s critique of how genuine resistance can be diluted, commodified, and turned into spectacle. The Old Man-Baby thus embodies both the promise and the failure of mass movements.
Shiraz Cinema
Shiraz Cinema functions as a haunting symbol of cultural and political violence in Kashmir. Originally a space of entertainment and cultural exchange, it was shut down by Muslim separatists who viewed it as a symbol of Indian cultural dominance. Later, the Indian Army converts it into a detention and torture center.
This transformation of a cinema into a site of brutality symbolizes how cultural spaces are weaponized during conflicts. Shiraz Cinema represents the erasure of joy, the militarization of everyday life, and the cyclical nature of oppression in Kashmir.
Jannat Guest House and Funeral Parlor
The Jannat Guest House is one of the most central symbols in the novel. Located in a graveyard, it blurs the boundary between life and death. Unlike traditional ideas of paradise (Jannat) as a posthumous reward, this guest house represents a living, breathing version of heaven created through care, empathy, and inclusivity.
It shelters hijras, Dalits, abandoned children, protestors, and the displaced—those rejected by mainstream society. Its proximity to graves reminds readers that suffering and hope coexist. The funeral parlor attached to it further emphasizes Roy’s idea that life continues amid death and loss.
Duniya and Jannat (The World and Paradise)
The contrast between Duniya (the world) and Jannat (paradise) runs throughout the novel. Traditionally, Duniya is associated with suffering, while Jannat signifies peace and reward after death. Roy complicates this binary.
The world contains cruelty, violence, and injustice, but it is also where love, solidarity, and resistance exist. Meanwhile, paradise is not free from danger or struggle. Through this inversion, Roy suggests that heaven and hell are not distant metaphysical spaces but conditions created by human actions.
Motherhood
Motherhood in the novel is not confined to biological reproduction. Anjum’s desire to become a mother challenges societal norms that deny hijras the right to nurture. Her care for abandoned children like Zainab and Udaya Jebeen redefines motherhood as an ethical and emotional act rather than a biological one.
Roy also critiques nationalist ideas of “Mother India,” showing how such imagery often excludes minorities who do not fit dominant religious or cultural narratives. Motherhood thus becomes a symbol of compassion, belonging, and resistance against exclusion.
Bodies, Waste, and Inner Struggles
Roy repeatedly uses imagery of bodies—wounded, violated, discarded—to expose social hierarchies. Dalits, responsible for cleaning waste and handling dead bodies, symbolize how certain communities are forced to bear society’s filth, both literal and moral.
The body becomes a site of resistance as well as oppression. Hijra bodies, Dalit bodies, and tortured bodies challenge the illusion of a “clean,” orderly nation. Waste imagery exposes the hypocrisy of progress that depends on invisible labor and suffering.
Guih Kyom – The Dung Beetle
The dung beetle in the final chapter is a quiet yet profound symbol. Though small and often ignored, the beetle plays a crucial ecological role by recycling waste and maintaining balance. When Anjum and Udaya Jebeen observe the beetle lying on its back, staring at the sky, it becomes a metaphor for survival against overwhelming odds.
The dung beetle represents marginalized individuals who sustain society without recognition. It suggests that resilience and hope often come from unexpected, overlooked sources. The novel’s ending through this image emphasizes endurance rather than triumph.
“Gujarat ka Lalla” is a thinly veiled reference to Narendra Modi and symbolizes the rise of aggressive Hindu nationalism in India. His association with the 2002 Gujarat riots highlights how political power can be built upon communal violence and selective memory.
This symbol critiques authoritarian leadership, majoritarian ideology, and the normalization of hatred against minorities. Roy presents this figure as a reminder of how nationalism can become a tool of exclusion rather than unity.
Saffron, traditionally associated with spirituality, is re-signified in the novel as a symbol of Hindu extremism and political aggression. It represents mobs, violence, and ideological rigidity. Anjum’s survival during the Gujarat riots—based on the superstition that harming hijras brings bad luck—underscores the randomness and brutality of communal violence.
Saffron thus becomes a color of fear, trauma, and dominance rather than peace.
The Vulture
The vulture symbolizes both ecological and ideological loss. Its near extinction due to chemical use in agriculture parallels the silencing of dissenting voices in modern India. Vultures, which clean the environment by feeding on carcasses, are essential yet despised—much like activists, writers, and marginalized communities who expose uncomfortable truths.
Their disappearance represents the cost of modernization that prioritizes profit over balance, sustainability, and moral responsibility.
Activity A: The "Shattered Story" Structure
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness employs a deliberately non-linear, fragmented narrative structure, Instead of moving smoothly from beginning to end, the novel unfolds through a fragmented, non-linear narrative that mirrors the trauma experienced by its characters. This narrative method can be understood through the idea of “how to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everything”—a strategy that allows Roy to represent broken lives, interrupted histories, and unresolved violence.
Trauma, by its very nature, disrupts memory and perception. Victims of violence do not recall events chronologically; they remember in fragments, repetitions, and sudden returns. Roy’s narrative structure reflects this psychological reality. The novel constantly shifts between past and present, between individual memories and collective history, creating a sense of temporal instability. This non-linear movement reflects the inner worlds of characters whose lives have been shaped by loss, displacement, and political brutality.
Anjum’s life provides a powerful example of this shattered narrative. Born as Aftab and later identifying as Anjum, her story moves back and forth across time—childhood, gender transition, the Gujarat riots, and life in the graveyard. The Gujarat violence is not presented as a closed chapter; it reappears throughout the narrative, echoing the way traumatic memories resurface without warning. The graveyard where Anjum settles becomes a symbolic space where time stands still, reflecting her suspended psychological state. Her life does not progress toward healing but expands outward, absorbing other damaged lives.
The Kashmir sections of the novel further disrupt linear storytelling. Through characters like Musa Yeswi, Roy presents trauma as ongoing rather than historical. The narrative circles around disappearances, insurgency, and mourning without offering resolution. Time in Kashmir is cyclical, marked by recurring violence rather than forward movement. This reflects a collective trauma that refuses closure, challenging the idea that political conflicts can be neatly concluded.
Tilo, one of the central figures, acts as a connective presence but is herself fragmented. Her story is told through letters, notebooks, and partial disclosures. She does not dominate the narrative; instead, her identity dissolves into the stories of others. This reflects Roy’s broader narrative philosophy—trauma cannot be contained within a single voice or perspective.
The idea of “slowly becoming everything” captures the novel’s ethical ambition. Rather than telling one coherent story, Roy allows the narrative to gather multiple voices—hijras, Dalits, Kashmiris, political prisoners, and the forgotten dead. The novel becomes an archive of pain and survival. By refusing linear order, Roy resists official histories that demand closure and progress, insisting instead that violence lingers beneath national narratives.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, fragmentation becomes truth. The non-linear structure does not heal trauma; it bears witness to it. By telling a shattered story through multiplicity, Roy transforms storytelling into an act of resistance and remembrance.
Thematic Analysis
Cost of Modernization
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the "Cost of Modernization" is depicted as a violent process of erasure where the success of the few is built upon the displacement of the many.
The Illusion of Development
The concept of "development" in the novel is presented as a façade for progress that prioritizes industrial expansion, luxury infrastructure, and globalized wealth over human lives. Modernization is seen in the construction of massive dams, steel factories, and multi-lane highways. While these projects are framed as symbols of a "new India," they often require the forced seizure of land from farmers and the working class, ending traditional ways of life and leaving the original inhabitants with no source of income or social safety net.
Displacement of the Poor and Slum Dwellers
As cities strive to become more "modern" and "civilized," the poor are viewed as an eyesore or an obstacle to progress. Slum dwellers are frequently evicted under the guise of "beautification" or urban planning. These individuals are pushed out of the city centers to make room for parks, malls, and high-rises. This physical displacement mirrors their social displacement; they are treated as surplus people who have no right to the city they helped build.
Anjum and the Graveyard as a Sanctuary
Anjum, an intersex woman (Hijra), represents the ultimate margin of society. After witnessing the horrors of communal violence, she can no longer find peace in the world of the living and moves into a city graveyard. This move is symbolic:
Living on the Margins: The graveyard is the literal and metaphorical edge of society—a place for the dead that the "modern" city has forgotten.
The Jannat Guest House: Anjum reclaims this space by building a guest house over the graves. She creates a community for those whom the modern world has rejected: the poor, the "untouchable," the intersex, and the orphaned.
Resistance through Survival: By naming her home "Jannat" (Paradise), Anjum turns a place of death into a site of resistance and survival. However, this sanctuary remains precarious, as it is built on "illegal" land that the state could reclaim at any moment with bulldozers in the name of further "development."
Activity B: Mapping the Conflict
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Activity C: Automated Timeline & Character Arcs
Anjum’s and Saddam’s arcs unfold from childhood trauma toward a shared space of fragile refuge and political defiance at Jannat Guest House, with each major turn driven by violations of body, community, and dignity. Their journeys move chronologically from early identity formation and caste–communal violence to a later attempt to transform a graveyard into a space of hospitality and justice.
ANJUM’S JOURNEY (Aftab → Anjum → Jannat)
Anjum / Aftab: Early Life and Identity
Birth as Aftab, intersex child in Old Delhi
Aftab is born to Muslim parents, Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali, and is initially celebrated as a long-awaited son. Over time, the parents realize Aftab has both male and female characteristics, creating a tension between familial joy and social shame in a deeply gendered society. Motivation: The family’s conflicted response to Aftab’s body foreshadows Aftab’s need to seek spaces where this embodiment is intelligible and affirmed rather than denied.
Discovery of feminine identification and attraction to hijras
As Aftab grows, there is a strong identification with femininity, such as listening to music, watching women, and being drawn to hijras in the neighborhood.
Cause–effect: Social gender norms and the impossibility of living openly as intersex in the natal household push Aftab toward alternative kinship structures.
Motivation: Desire for recognition and a livable identity motivates the gradual distancing from the “respectable” family world (Duniya) toward hijra community life.
Life in Khwabgah and Formation of Anjum
Movement to Khwabgah (House of Dreams) and taking the name Anjum
Aftab eventually joins the gharana of Ustad Kulsoom Bi in the Khwabgah, a communal home of hijras, and begins living full-time as Anjum, a hijra woman.
Cause–effect: The earlier conflict in the natal home and the appeal of a community that shares similar embodiments lead directly to this relocation and renaming.
Motivation: Anjum’s transformation from Aftab is driven by the need for communal belonging, the affirmation of gender identity, and escape from normative surveillance.
Everyday life, chosen family, and adoption of Zainab
In Khwabgah, Anjum builds relationships with fellow hijras and later finds an abandoned baby, Zainab, on the steps of a mosque and chooses to raise her as a daughter.
Cause–effect: The security and solidarity of Khwabgah make it possible for Anjum to imagine motherhood, extending hijra kinship to include a child.
Motivation: Maternal desire and the urge to protect a vulnerable child in a violent city motivate Anjum’s decision to adopt Zainab and craft a “normal” family form within a marginal community.
Communal Trauma in Gujarat and Withdrawal
Pilgrimage to Gujarat and encounter with the massacre
During the early 2000s, amid rising anti-Muslim sentiment, Anjum goes on a religious pilgrimage to a shrine in Gujarat with Zakir Mian.
They are caught in the communal violence associated with attacks on Hindu pilgrims and retaliatory pogroms against Muslims; Zakir Mian is killed, while Anjum is spared because killing hijras is considered bad luck.
Cause–effect: The political climate of Hindu nationalism and the targeting of Muslims directly place Anjum’s Muslim–hijra body at the epicenter of state-enabled violence.
Psychological aftermath and changed relation to Zainab
After surviving the massacre, Anjum returns profoundly traumatized and anxious about the future of her community, especially the younger generation like Zainab.
Anjum tries to dress Zainab as a boy to protect her from the gendered and communal violence she has just witnessed, a move that Ustad Kulsoom Bi strongly opposes.
Cause–effect: Trauma from Gujarat produces hypervigilance, which manifests as attempts to regulate Zainab’s gender presentation for safety, generating conflict in Khwabgah.
Motivation: Anjum’s actions are driven by fear and a desire to shield her child from a world where nonconforming bodies and Muslims are targeted, even at the cost of Zainab’s self-expression.
Departure from Khwabgah and move to the graveyard
The disagreement over Zainab’s upbringing and Anjum’s inability to resume “normal” communal life lead her to leave Khwabgah, leaving Zainab in Saeeda’s care.
Anjum relocates to the graveyard behind a government hospital, initially living there in a state of withdrawal and despair.
Cause–effect: Gujarat trauma plus intra-community conflict cause Anjum to sever ties with the house of dreams and retreat to a space associated with death and erasure.
Motivation: Anjum’s withdrawal is motivated by PTSD-like symptoms and a sense that conventional social spaces—even hijra ones—cannot accommodate the intensity of her fear and grief.
Jannat Guest House: From Graveyard to Refuge
Gradual construction of a home in the graveyard
In the graveyard, Anjum slowly builds a home around the graves of ancestors, turning a marginal, spectral space into a dwelling.
Cause–effect: The absence of a viable place in the living city pushes Anjum to claim the space of the dead as the only site where she can exist without immediate threat or regulation.
Motivation: This transformation is driven by a need to reclaim agency, create sanctuary, and inscribe her existence literally among the dead who cannot expel her.
Reimagining the graveyard as Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services
After meeting Saddam Hussain, who encourages her to charge for guests and funerals, Anjum begins calling her home “Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services.”
The graveyard evolves into a quasi-political space that hosts the poor, outcasts, and other marginalized figures, including later intersections with Tilo and others.
Cause–effect: Saddam’s practical suggestion and Anjum’s existing role as an outcast together transform a private retreat into a collective refuge and informal institution.
Motivation: Anjum’s move from solitary grief to hosting others reflects a shift from pure withdrawal to a form of political care and solidarity rooted in shared dispossession.
SADDAM HUSSAIN’S JOURNEY (Dalit Son → Renaming → Encounter with Anjum)
Saddam Hussain (Dayachand): Violence and Reinvention
Early life as Dayachand, low-caste cow-skin worker’s son
Dayachand is born into a low-caste Dalit family whose traditional occupation involves removing cow carcasses and making leather, a stigmatized yet economically necessary work.
Motivation: From the outset, caste structures define his horizon of possibility, embedding humiliation and dependence on upper-caste-controlled economies.
Witnessing his father’s lynching during cow-protection violence
A corrupt police inspector, Sehrawat, implicates Dayachand’s father in killing a cow, provoking a communal mob.
Dayachand witnesses his father being lynched in a bout of cow-protection violence, an incident facilitated by collusion between caste prejudice, communalism, and local police power.
Cause–effect: The false accusation plus existing cow-related vigilantism produce the lethal mob attack that annihilates both the father and Dayachand’s trust in law and state.
Psychological impact: fixation on revenge and systemic betrayal
The lynching leaves Dayachand with intense trauma, humiliation, and a burning desire to avenge his father’s death by killing Sehrawat.
He moves through a series of low-paid, precarious jobs (mortuary work, shop helper, bus conductor, newspaper seller, construction labor, security guard), all laced with petty cheating and vulnerability.
Cause–effect: Exposure to extreme caste–communal violence and the clear impunity of the perpetrators shape a psyche in which survival, anger, and small-scale hustling become intertwined.
Motivation: Saddam’s fixation on revenge is rooted in both filial loyalty and a recognition that formal justice systems will not punish upper-caste and police perpetrators.
Name Change and Political Defiance
Encounter with the execution video of Saddam Hussein
At some point after the lynching, Dayachand sees a video of the execution of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and is struck by the condemned man’s demeanor.
He interprets Saddam Hussein’s comportment at death as a model of defiance in the face of overwhelming power.
Cause–effect: The visual spectacle of another man facing a politicized execution resonates with Dayachand’s memory of his father’s murder and his own powerless rage.
Renaming himself “Saddam Hussain”
Dayachand adopts the name “Saddam Hussain,” consciously identifying with an internationally vilified yet defiant figure.
This renaming acts as a personal, symbolic counter to his caste-marked birth identity and a way of carrying an oppositional politics in his own body and name.
Cause–effect: The earlier trauma plus the inspirational image of defiance lead directly to this identity transformation, signaling his entry into a more overtly political subjectivity.
Motivation: The name change expresses anger at imperial and local power, an assertion of dignity, and an attempt to inhabit a persona capable of confronting violence rather than merely enduring it.
Convergence: Meeting Anjum and Shared Refuge
Saddam’s arrival at the graveyard
As an unemployed Dalit man planning to kill Sehrawat, Saddam eventually comes to the graveyard where Anjum has built her dwelling.
Cause–effect: His quest for revenge and his precarious economic position bring him, like other outcasts, to low-cost, marginal spaces rather than formal housing.
Relationship formation with Anjum
Anjum and Saddam begin living in proximity; he is among the first to suggest monetizing the space through guests and funeral services, recognizing a survival opportunity.
Their relationship is built on shared experiences of structural violence (communal for Anjum, caste–communal for Saddam) and mutual recognition as people discarded by mainstream society.
Motivation: Both are driven by needs for shelter, income, and solidarity; their bond allows them to convert individual trauma into a collective project of care and resistance at Jannat Guest House.
Transformation of the graveyard into Jannat Guest House and political shelter
With Saddam’s practical advice and Anjum’s emotional leadership, the graveyard becomes Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services, hosting the poor, hijras, Dalits, and other political and social outsiders.
Cause–effect: Anjum’s prior withdrawal and Saddam’s vengeful outsider status together generate a space that is both economically functional and symbolically oppositional to the exclusionary nation-state.
Motivation: The project is motivated by survival, but also by a desire to craft an alternative community that answers violence with hospitality and a fragile, improvised justice.
Activity D: The "Audio/Video" Synthesis
Audio Overview
Video
Conclusin
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness through its fragmented narrative, major themes, and character arcs to show how Arundhati Roy turns storytelling into an act of resistance. The non-linear structure mirrors trauma and refuses the idea of neat historical closure. The theme of modernization reveals how “development” displaces the poor and pushes marginalized lives, like Anjum’s, to society’s edges. Through Anjum and Saddam Hussain’s journeys, the novel shows how caste, gender, and communal violence shape identity and survival. The graveyard-turned–Jannat Guest House ultimately becomes a space of fragile hope, proving that care, memory, and solidarity can exist even amid injustice and exclusion.
References
DoE-MKBU. (2021a, December 28). Part 1 | Khwabgah | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-29vE53apGs.
DoE-MKBU. (2021b, December 28). Part 2 | Jantar Mantar | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1z1AEXPBU
DoE-MKBU. (2021c, December 28). Part 3 | Kashmir and Dandakaranyak | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIKH_89rML0.
DoE-MKBU. (2021d, December 28). Part 4 | Udaya Jebeen & Dung Beetle | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH5EULOFP4g
DoE-MKBU. (2021e, December 30). Symbols and Motifs | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBOqLB487U
DoE-MKBU. (2021f, December 30). Thematic Study | The Ministry of Utmost Happiness | Arundhati Roy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NYSTUTBoSs
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