Precarious duniyas in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: life, death and repair in ‘ruin-worlds’

Abstract

ABSTRACT In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality, a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible solidarities through which a new ‘post-human' subjectivity and politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy's literary practices consummately carve a space for this post-human subject and its relational politics. The novel's structure, according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous borders between life and death, human and non-human, abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New - where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.