Arundhithi Roy is a Champion of Human Rights in Extremist and Subaltern India

Arundhithi Roy

Roy has said in one of her interviews that she has lived for more than ten years with the characters of the novels in the novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”. She has not presented characters of her novels out of mere imagination but the factual realities. Even, the non-biased critics of the novel have acknowledged that Roy has documented historical and cultural facts f current India, or the state that came into existence after getting independence from British Colonial rule. The sparks of denouncement and explosive hidden psyche is clearly visible in the marginalized characters of the novel. 

Arundhiti Roy has not only written a novel for the sake of mere fiction, but a critical analysis or post- mortem of her own country whom she loves from the core of the heart. She want it to be true secular and liberal state, and that’s why we can the clear statements of revolt in her novel under study which is very much like the essays she had switched to after the success of her first novel “The God of Small Things”.

      
When people of Indian ad around the globe were praising her for the new choice and beauty of herself as a new generation of writers. She immediately switched to write about the rights of people who were affected by dam construction, and the Godhara train incident. Here in the novel she remain mostly in Delhi and then into Kashmir. Delhi is town where she has spent most of her adult life, and Kashmir is her focal point as being a witness and observer of the direct crimes of Indian forces and governments against the people of Jammu and Kashmir. So, we can the bewilderment and lots of intermingled and separate subject matters in the novel. It is because of the fact that she wanted her readers to be aware of different historical and current situation in India. She deliberately wanted to pour the matters of concerns and how Indians are still divided and ruled by another set of colonist mindset. The only difference is that they are not white skinned, blonde haired and have a foreign language. But the local invaders and trespassers who invade the hearts, minds and souls or their own countrymen.

It is high time for the intellectuals and serious minded people of India, to think about their country as where they are heading. They should be more vocal and clear like Suzanna Arundadhti Roy, who has written the novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”, with a purpose of highlighting the issues of the different marginalized, outcast and subaltern people whom we observe in our own daily lives. What is actually happening to them and how the authorities and and the society can make a bigger and better difference in their lives, first by non-conditional acceptance. Secondly, by looking at their troubles and to find ways to provide them a chance to have a normal and decent life. To embrace them as equal partners of the society and with a provision of all sorts od legal, economic, political, social, educational, medical and cultural rights as every civilized society is offering nowadays.