This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip barad sir. It deals with Arundhati Roy’s second novel ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’. As a task, we are assigned three questions and from them, this blog deals with Characters, Narrative plot, and facts and fiction from the novel.
1) The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children By S. Tilottama - Give answers to the questions asked regarding any three stories. Questions are given at the end of each story.
2) Three points mentioned in the photo of board-work. (List of characters, Summary - plot - narrative structure, Fact & Fiction)
3) Write about any one theme or character of the novel with the help of Chat OpenAI GPT. Ask to Chat GPT and put screenshot as well as copy-paste the answer generated by this response generator.
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She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know"
-Arundhati Roy
About Arundhani Roy
Arundhati Roy, full name Suzanna Arundhati Roy, (born November 24, 1961, Shillong, Meghalaya, India), Indian author, actress, and political activist who was best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes.
Novels and nonfiction works
In 1997 Roy published her debut novel, The God of Small Things to wide acclaim. The semiautobiographical work departed from the conventional plots and light prose that had been typical among best-sellers. Composed in a lyrical language about South Asian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author and won the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Key facts of Novel Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Author:Arundhati Roy
Cover artist:Mayank Austen Soofi
Country:India
Language: English
Genre:Fiction
Set in:India
Publisher:Hamish Hamilton (UK & India)
Alfred A. Knopf (US)
Publication date :6 June 2017
Pages: 449
Website: theministryofutmosthappiness.com
Four parts of the novel
The novel has four parts and all characters are divided in the four part.
Jannt/GraveYard
Khawabgah
Jantar Mantar
Kashmir
Characters of The novel
Kulsoom Bi, Saeeda, Bismillah, Ziauddin - the blind Imam, Gudiya & Bulbul, Bombay Silk, Jahanara Begum, Mulaqat Ali, Anjum/Aftab, Ahlam Baiji, Mary, Razia, Nimmo Gorakhpuri, Mr. Aggarwal, Tubby Old Gandhian, Manipur Nationalists, Bhopalis, Protest to make Hindi as National Language, Jannat Guest House - Saddam Hussein, Mr. Gupta, Captain Amrik Singh, ACP Pinky Sodhi, Balbir Sodhi, Jalil Qadri, Musa Yeswi, Gulrez, King Aurangzeb, Abhaychand, Hazrat Sarmad, Zainab, Changez Khan, Borte Khatun, Sakim, Sangeeta Madam, Sherawat, Dr, Azad, Gujrat ka Lalla, Trapped Rabbit, Biplab Das Gupta, Charerupa, Rabia and Ania, Hariharan Nagarjun, S, Tillotama, Maryam Ipe, Arifa, Jebeen , Baby - Jebeen(The second Udaya), Khadijha, Aijaz, Revathy.
Anjum/Aftab:The story started in the khawabgah where the protagonist Anjum is introduced he/she was born as a intersex child.
Mulaqat Ali:Mulaqut Ali was a father of Anjum/Aftab
Jahanara Begum:she was mother of Anjum and wife of Mulaqat Ali.
Kulsoom Bi:The Head Hijra of the Khwabgah, Ustad Kulsoom Bi is a powerful member of the transgender community in Delhi.
Tilo: A mysterious, dark-skinned, South Indian woman who seemingly has no past, no caste, and no family, Tilo is a highly independent and secretive character.
Biplab Dasgupta :The first-person narrator of a large portion of the novel, Biplab Dasgupta is a Brahmin high-ranking bureaucrat in the Indian government with an alcohol addiction.
Saddam Hussain
A member of the Dalit caste and former security guard, Saddam Hussain is Anjum’s first permanent guest at Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services
Imam Ziauddin
The first friend Anjum makes when she moves to the graveyard, the old Imam Ziauddin is blind and often bonds with Anjum when she reads newspaper articles to him.
Miss Jebeen
Musa’s daughter, who dies at the age of three in a massacre in Srinagar, Kashmir.
Miss Jebeen the Second / Miss Udaya Jebeen
Also known as Miss Udaya Jebeen, Miss Jebeen the Second is the baby Revathy gives up at the Jantar Mantar protest, whom Tilo kidnaps and then raises at Jannat Guest House with Anjum.
Musa
Tilo’s lover and a member of the Kashmiri resistance, Musa participates in a play with Tilo, Biplab, and Naga as a young man while he is in architecture school.
Major Amrik Singh
A major of the Indian Army known for torturing and murdering many members of the resistance, Major Amrik Singh is an extraordinarily violent man.
Revathy
Miss Jebeen the Second’s birth mother who sends a letter to Jannat Guest House via Dr. Azad Bhartiya explaining who she is. A low-caste woman from a rural area in India.
Mr. Aggarwal
A bureaucrat and aspiring politician, Mr. Aggarwal is present at the protests at Jantar Mantar trying to build a name for himself.
Saeeda
A “more modern” Hijra who lives with Anjum at the Khwabgah, Saeeda is young Zainab’s second favorite.
2.Narrative Structure/Summary of the novel
The novel skips backwards and forwards in time freely, often pauses for detours into the stories of minor characters and includes several texts within the main text Bhartiya’s manifesto however, the novel consists of two main narrative threads, one of which is centered in Delhi, and the other in Kashmir.
The first begins with Anjum, a Muslim Hijra Anjum, who is born intersex and named Aftab, is initially raised as a boy. Once Aftab enters adolescence, however, he rejects this male identity and joins the Khwabgah, or “House of Dreams”—a local community of Hijras—taking the name Anjum. Anjum spends more than three decades in the Khwabgah, earning her living as an entertainer and a sex worker. Although she becomes quite successful, she longs to experience life as an “ordinary” woman and, in her 40s, adopts an abandoned toddler whom she names Zainab. However, her plans to leave the Khwabgah and live with Zainab as a typical mother and daughter are thwarted by the rise of anti-Muslim feeling in the early 2000s. While making a religious pilgrimage, Anjum is attacked by rioting Hindu nationalists in the Indian state of Gujarat—an experience that leaves her too traumatized to care for Zainab and eventually prompts her to leave the Khwabgah altogether.
Anjum moves into an old Muslim cemetery, intending to stay there until she herself dies. Over time, however, and with the support of friends from her former life, Anjum begins to come to terms with her experiences, and makes a real home for herself in the graveyard. She builds a house, complete with facilities like electricity, and eventually takes in fellow lodgers. The two most significant of these are a blind imam (Muslim spiritual leader) named Ziauddin, and a young man who gives his name as Saddam Hussain, but who is in fact a Dalit (the lowest class in the Indian caste system) seeking vengeance for his father’s murder.
The second major storyline takes place partly in Delhi, but primarily concerns events that occurred in Kashmir in the 1990s, which Roy explores from several different characters’ perspectives. The figure at the heart of all these narratives is S. Tilottama, or “Tilo”—the illegitimate daughter of a well-to-do Syrian Indian woman who “adopted” Tilo several months after the child was actually born. Tilo grows up to attend architectural school in Delhi, which is where she meets three men who fall in love with her: Biplab Dasgupta (a cautious and pragmatic man who goes on to work for the Indian government), Nagaraj Hariharan (the charming and passionate son of upper-crust Hindu bureaucrats who becomes first a radical journalist and later and Musa . All four characters fall out of contact after college, but their lives intersect again years later in Kashmir, where separatists are waging a war for independence against the Indian Army.
One night in Kashmir, Biplab Dasgupta (who is posted in the region) receives a call that Tilo has been arrested in a raid and sends Musa (who is also there on assignment) to pick her up from army headquarters. Both men assume that the “Commander Gulrez” who was killed in the raid alongside Tilo must have been Musa, who had joined the separatist movement after his wife and daughter (“Miss Jebeen”) were mistakenly shot and killed by Indian forces. However, Roy eventually reveals that this was not the case: The man identified as “Commander Gulrez” was simply a mentally disabled man who worked on the houseboat where Musa and Tilo were visiting with one another (Musa himself had left some hours before the raid).
On Musa’s advice, Tilo marries Naga shortly after her arrest. Soon after the wedding, she discovers that she is pregnant (by Musa) but has an abortion because she fears that her own relationship with a child would be no better than her mother’s relationship was with her. She also remains traumatized by her experiences in Kashmir and eventually separates from Naga after 14 years of marriage, no longer able to bear the double life she’s leading. After the divorce, she spends four years in an apartment she rents from Dasgupta, who, after she leaves, finds an array of papers in her rooms dealing with Kashmir and the trips Tilo has made there over the years.
Tilo’s reasons for leaving her apartment are where her story intersects with Anjum’s. Sometime in the 2010s, a series of protests erupt at Jantar Mantar in downtown Delhi (Roy’s fictionalized account is likely based on the 2011 anti-corruption and land acquisition protests). Anjum, Saddam Hussain, and a few of their friends have gone to Jantar Mantar to see the demonstrations for themselves, when they suddenly hear that an abandoned baby has been found in the crowd. Anjum hopes to take charge of the little girl herself, but before she can, a mysterious woman—Tilo—whisks the child away.
Tilo takes the baby (whom she names Miss Jebeen the Second) on impulse, feeling that the child will somehow “turn the tide” Fearing police involvement, however, she readily agrees to leave her apartment when Saddam Hussain leaves a card for her with the address of Anjum’s cemetery home, Jannat Guest House and Funeral Parlor. Tilo accordingly moves into the cemetery with the baby and slowly begins to move beyond the trauma of her experiences in Kashmir.
Jannat Guest House, meanwhile, has become a bustling business and community center. One regular visitor is Zainab (now a seamstress), who eventually becomes engaged to and marries Saddam, who has decided to set aside his quest for vengeance in the knowledge that other Dalits are carrying on the fight. Both he and Tilo gain additional closure when Imam Ziauddin, Anjum, and the rest of Jannat’s makeshift family symbolically “bury” the ashes of Tilo’s mother, as well as a shirt they have bought in honor of Saddam’s father. Eventually, the group also buries a letter they receive from Miss Jebeen the Second’s birthmother—a Maoist freedom fighter who became pregnant as the result of rape and who has since died in action.
Meanwhile, Dasgupta continues to obsess over the documents he found in Tilo’s apartment. When Musa unexpectedly stops by one night, Dasgupta admits that he now believes the Kashmiri separatists are in the right. However, he doesn’t move beyond this realization and begins to slide into alcoholism.
Musa visits Tilo at Jannat Guest House; although both he and Tilo are aware that he will likely be killed when he returns to the fighting in Kashmir, she is now able to make peace with that fact. As the novel ends, Anjum takes Miss Jebeen the Second out for a walk through nighttime Delhi, and even the dung beetle that lives near Jannat Guest House feels that “things would turn out all right in the end […] Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, was come”
3.Write about any one theme or character of the novel with the help of Chat OpenAI GPT. Ask to Chat GPT and put screenshot as well as copy-paste the answer generated by this response generator.
S. Tilottama is a character in the novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" by Arundhati Roy. She is a transgender woman who is one of the central characters in the novel. She is a resident of the graveyard-turned-home known as "Jannat Guest House" and is known for her kind and nurturing nature. She is also a strong advocate for the rights of transgender individuals and works to create a sense of community and acceptance within the guest house. Despite the hardships and discrimination she faces, Tilottama maintains a positive attitude and a deep sense of empathy towards others. She is a complex and nuanced character who plays an important role in the novel's exploration of issues such as identity, marginalization, and the human capacity for love and compassion.
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