Goddess Of Big Things
Anil Nair
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In her latest `big' novel, Arundhati Roy the polemicist trumps literature
The philosopher John Gray famously spoke of how secularism, like chastity, is defined by what it denies. Something similar afflicts Arundhati Roy , a passionate votary of all things small, perishable and precious but who somehow seems unable to write in sustained fashion about anything but the big, bad and ominous.Twenty years of ranting against mammoth dams, nuclear bombs and the Leviathan Indian state would have, one assumed, cured her of polemic and, when finally news arrived that her second novel was on its way , it appeared to herald her return to that rare talent evidenced in her maiden novel.
The God of Small Things, whose sentences, like two-egg twins, combined childlike precociousness with adult presentiment was essentially a story about love and loss, the first forbidden, the second inevitable. It was a story about individuals, ordinary ones, and the war of loss and longing occasioned in their souls. The big bad world was always there, but always as an outcrop, a backdrop.
On the contrary , what we have with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that just hit bookstores is an unabashed history lesson, where individuals are mere pawns in a larger-than-life plot.The story has beautiful, bleeding Kashmir at its centre and ugly India, imperial, impervious and with its “infrastructure of impunity“, slowly worming its way through the fine gossamer web to devour what is left of it.
By the time the well-worn plot is exhumed, examined and laid back to rest, the pro-Kashmiris, so to speak, have chosen one of the only two options available to such freedom fighters, patriots who are not nationalists they scorn Pakistan but end up in Qabristan.As for the Indian end of the troika of individuals who are at the heart of this episode, the minion of the state develops a conscience, enough of it to concede at the end to the martyrdom-inclined, “you may be right but you will never win“.
The whole tone of the book is that of a Cassandra call, which declares that fascism is already here in India, that it is not a drill, that it is not alarmist to say such things but is merely true. Of course, these sections are very well-written, where scrupulous reportage melds with deadpan machismo, a world where Pankaj Mishra (investigating the alleged Chittisinghpura massacres) meets Frederick Forsyth (plotting The Dogs of War).
But, where, you might well ask, since this is a literary novel, is Amos Oz, an Israeli who surely knows quite a bit about wars within? Amos Oz, who unforgettably said that it is the task of any serious writer who enters the No Man's Land of conflicts, within and without, to always differentiate “the bad from the worse from the worst“. Nuance, in plain English. Something that The Ministry sadly lacks, determined as it is to deal only in big bromides and simplistic black and white. There is Aftab-turned-Anjum, of course, with whom the book begins, who periodically resurfaces and is adroitly there at the finale to tie up the loose ends, proof that even in an unfortunately expository work like this Roy's novelistic instincts do survive. Anjum is finely wrought, initially like her friend Razia, “a man who wanted to remain a man but be a woman in all other respects“, but is eventually reconciled to her new self after reconstruction surgeries coarsen her voice, with its peculiar rasping quality , like two voices quarrelling with one another.
This `in-betweeness', roiling ambi guity or hybridity if you will, is the real terrain of fiction and where Roy was so at home in Small Things. In The Ministry her perfect pitch is spoiled by abundant false notes, and in the final analysis it merits a verdict that mirrors what Orwell remarked about Dickens, that he “had rotten architecture but great gargoyles“, in other words, a floundering novel with flashes of brilliance.
In The Ministry , the politically unexamined life of the liberal, who is sure that she is right about everything, has trumped the novelist, a trap Roy could have avoided if only she had heeded her mentor John Berger's exhortation to convert self-pity to anger but also to beware of looking too far ahead, in fact, “a refusal to look ahead“. But Roy insists on looking too far ahead, always after a Chad Crowe new Camelot if it was Paradise pickled and preserved in Small Things it is Jannat, “guesthouse in the graveyard“ in The Ministry . Instead of rubbing history against the grain and questio ning received notions, including her own, Roy toys with `revolution'.
A left-liberal autodidact, Roy behaves here more like a red diaper baby , conjuring, in the absence of a real political programme, possible prosthetic proletariats who might overthrow the existing order. “Lal Salaam Aleikum“, as Anjum intones at Maoist comrade Masse Revathy's funeral, and intoned in turn by Saddam Hussain, her sidekick and local cheat, who changes his name from Dayachand to that of the late Iraqi despot's because, “it would give me the courage to do what I had to do and face the consequences, like him“.
All so moving, if it was not all so contrived. The noted critic James Wood pertinently asked, “Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle?“ We all looked up to Roy , back from the wilderness after 20 years, to redress the balance. God, hasn't she disappointed us!
The God of Small Things, whose sentences, like two-egg twins, combined childlike precociousness with adult presentiment was essentially a story about love and loss, the first forbidden, the second inevitable. It was a story about individuals, ordinary ones, and the war of loss and longing occasioned in their souls. The big bad world was always there, but always as an outcrop, a backdrop.
On the contrary , what we have with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that just hit bookstores is an unabashed history lesson, where individuals are mere pawns in a larger-than-life plot.The story has beautiful, bleeding Kashmir at its centre and ugly India, imperial, impervious and with its “infrastructure of impunity“, slowly worming its way through the fine gossamer web to devour what is left of it.
By the time the well-worn plot is exhumed, examined and laid back to rest, the pro-Kashmiris, so to speak, have chosen one of the only two options available to such freedom fighters, patriots who are not nationalists they scorn Pakistan but end up in Qabristan.As for the Indian end of the troika of individuals who are at the heart of this episode, the minion of the state develops a conscience, enough of it to concede at the end to the martyrdom-inclined, “you may be right but you will never win“.
The whole tone of the book is that of a Cassandra call, which declares that fascism is already here in India, that it is not a drill, that it is not alarmist to say such things but is merely true. Of course, these sections are very well-written, where scrupulous reportage melds with deadpan machismo, a world where Pankaj Mishra (investigating the alleged Chittisinghpura massacres) meets Frederick Forsyth (plotting The Dogs of War).
But, where, you might well ask, since this is a literary novel, is Amos Oz, an Israeli who surely knows quite a bit about wars within? Amos Oz, who unforgettably said that it is the task of any serious writer who enters the No Man's Land of conflicts, within and without, to always differentiate “the bad from the worse from the worst“. Nuance, in plain English. Something that The Ministry sadly lacks, determined as it is to deal only in big bromides and simplistic black and white. There is Aftab-turned-Anjum, of course, with whom the book begins, who periodically resurfaces and is adroitly there at the finale to tie up the loose ends, proof that even in an unfortunately expository work like this Roy's novelistic instincts do survive. Anjum is finely wrought, initially like her friend Razia, “a man who wanted to remain a man but be a woman in all other respects“, but is eventually reconciled to her new self after reconstruction surgeries coarsen her voice, with its peculiar rasping quality , like two voices quarrelling with one another.
This `in-betweeness', roiling ambi guity or hybridity if you will, is the real terrain of fiction and where Roy was so at home in Small Things. In The Ministry her perfect pitch is spoiled by abundant false notes, and in the final analysis it merits a verdict that mirrors what Orwell remarked about Dickens, that he “had rotten architecture but great gargoyles“, in other words, a floundering novel with flashes of brilliance.
In The Ministry , the politically unexamined life of the liberal, who is sure that she is right about everything, has trumped the novelist, a trap Roy could have avoided if only she had heeded her mentor John Berger's exhortation to convert self-pity to anger but also to beware of looking too far ahead, in fact, “a refusal to look ahead“. But Roy insists on looking too far ahead, always after a Chad Crowe new Camelot if it was Paradise pickled and preserved in Small Things it is Jannat, “guesthouse in the graveyard“ in The Ministry . Instead of rubbing history against the grain and questio ning received notions, including her own, Roy toys with `revolution'.
A left-liberal autodidact, Roy behaves here more like a red diaper baby , conjuring, in the absence of a real political programme, possible prosthetic proletariats who might overthrow the existing order. “Lal Salaam Aleikum“, as Anjum intones at Maoist comrade Masse Revathy's funeral, and intoned in turn by Saddam Hussain, her sidekick and local cheat, who changes his name from Dayachand to that of the late Iraqi despot's because, “it would give me the courage to do what I had to do and face the consequences, like him“.
All so moving, if it was not all so contrived. The noted critic James Wood pertinently asked, “Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle?“ We all looked up to Roy , back from the wilderness after 20 years, to redress the balance. God, hasn't she disappointed us!
Source: Times of India, 15-06-2017
