The Politics of Form in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67436/llilj.2021v11i1.%25pKeywords:
Politics of Literature, Literary Form, Allegory, Poetics, RedemptionAbstract
Most commentaries and reviews of Arundhati Roy's novel The Ministry of UtmostHappiness
(2017) have engaged with its politics by conflating the politics of literature with the politics of
its writer. While this can be a valid approach to express the relation between the novel and its
politics, this paper argues that the truly political element in the novel is its form, not its
content. Drawing from the work of Jacques Ranciere, Walter Benjamin and Gyorgy Lukacs, this
paper is an attempt to engage with the novel's formal constitution by focusing on three
elements---its allegorical style, Roy's poetics and the idea of form as fulfilment. A close reading
of the novel, keeping in mind these three indices, I have argued, offers a paradigm of political
emancipation in our historical era.
