Where Old Birds Go to Die: Spaces of Precarity in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract:This article connects recent work on precarity and postcolonial theory, focusing on Arundhati Roy's representation of spaces of precarity in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I read The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as an attempt at mapping the neoliberal state and possibilities of resistance that escape its frameworks of surveillance. The novel complicates claims that precarity in post-colonies is a recent occurrence ushered in by the liberalization of their economies in the late 1980s. It does this by tracing the genealogy of earlier forms of precarity through the histories of its characters, specifically that of its protagonist, Anjum, a Hijra. Such histories offer ways of understanding not only marginal constituents of a seemingly all-encompassing neoliberal order but also local traditions of spatial organization used to resist neoliberal incursions. These traditions converge in the novel in the space of a graveyard, where Anjum provides other characters temporary refuge and a model of dissidence that defies conventional parameters of spatial organization legible to the state. The novel posits such illegibility of resistance as an antidote to cooption by the neoliberal state, mirroring the taxonomic resistance that the Hijra offers to the heteronormative nation state.