Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Finished reading the Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Mixed opinion. Good things first. Here and there woven with a string of brilliant and evocative language. Evocative language with some excellent metaphor ( like the tree in the graveyard) make the book readable. Opened up social and political labyrinths of the old Delhi, transgender people, Urdu poetry and politics. Significant amount of research has gone in to making of the book. It is a political counter narrative that tends to link the dotted lines of multiple struggles within a beyond from the perspective of marginalized , ( particularly marginalized Muslim community) linking Delhi, Gujarat, Kashmir, Bastar etc. While the subtext of Social and Political narrative is woven well enough, it also paradoxically compromised the quality of the narrative coherence of the text as a novel. Because the text oscillates between a pamphlet and evocative satire.This code mixing and multiple register compromised the quality of overall narrative of the novel.( Unlike the implicit , irreverent , evocative,and philosophical political satire in the Saga of Dharmapuri by OV Vijayan) In many ways it is a specific reading of the political predicament of India through a counter narrative of real and unreal; political critique and imaginative evocation. However the very strength of this subtext compromised the potential of imaginative narrative of the novel with littering of explicit pamphlets here and there that took away the beauty of the implicit, implied and evocative narrative aesthetics of the novel itself. Hence I have a mixed opinion about the work.