Contemporary India in MoUH: a journalistic guide -Governance Now

Contemporary India in MoUH: a journalistic guide

What to expect (and what not to expect) in a novel that is also a compendium of recent eventful decades

GN Bureau | June 6, 2017

#Literature #The Ministry of Utmost Happiness #Arundhati Roy #Culture

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy’s new novel in two decades, reads like non-fiction at time – in a welcome sense, in a non-post-truth kind of way. Its characters have been painstakingly picked for their knack of running headlong into headline-making events, thus providing the author an opportunity to weave in those events in her larger narrative. An exhaustive list of the real-world events making an appearance in this novel that someone is bound to call necessary reading for our times.

Events in the novel:

The 1975-77 Emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi
Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi
The Union Carbide gas leak tragedy in Bhopal in 1984
The destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992
The prime ministership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi, with descriptions of their body language and speeches
The 9/11 terrorist attack in the US
The train burning at Godhra, Gujarat, in 2002, and the following communal riots (especially in Ahmedabad, described for some reason as the capital of the state)
The anti-corruption protests at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, in 2011
An Arvind Kejriwal lookalike named Mr Aggarwal
Mob attacks and lynching on cow/beef issues, including one in Una, Gujarat, in 2016
Kashmir, from the rise of insurgency to today, a thorough history
The Maoist insurgency in parts of India, an intimate history
Not to mention the references to much more

The recent history is recapped so exhaustively that young UPSC aspirants too may find the novel useful. There is almost a penchant for ticking off all headlines, so much so that a reader can complain why some events were not included, if for nothing else than for sake of complete listing.

Events that did not make the cut:

The terrorist bombings in Mumbai, 1993
Several other terrorist attacks in various parts of the country between then and 2008
The terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008

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