Arundhati Roy and the politics of language

Abstract

This essay argues that Arundhati Roy’s inclusion of numerous Indian vernacular words and phrases in her fiction is carefully calibrated to serve the author’s activist political agenda. This is true not only of her first novel, The God of Small Things, but also of the more recent Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Both feature a Bakhtinian or dialogic interplay of linguistic modes. The earlier work poses two languages against each other: Malayalam, the primary language of Kerala, and English, the medium of narration and the preferred tongue of the prominent Ipe family. The outcome of this contest highlights the Ipes’ imprisonment within a life-denying straitjacket of outworn prejudices and conventions. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness the linguistic terrain broadens to include several tongues of the subcontinent, along with English. Roy gives special exposure to two: Urdu and Kashmiri, to reclaim them from the oppression both of them, along with their speakers, are undergoing at the hands of the dominant Hindi-speaking majority. Tilo, a pivotal character, is enthusiastically polyglot, a trait which accords with her more general adaptability and freedom from sectarian narrowness. The other central figure, the transgender Anjum, resembles Tilo in her resistance to strict definitions of her fluid selfhood, but must endure forms of verbal as well as physical violence. Like her first novel, but on a more capacious stage, Roy’s second aims at speaking multilingual truth to monolingual power.

Multilingualism and resistance

Language can act as a potent political force. According to Bill Ashcroft, “[t]he unshakeable link between ‘our’ language and us has made language not only the most emotional site for cultural identity but also one of the most critical techniques of colonization and the subsequent transformation of colonial influence by post-colonized societies” (2008: 1; emphasis in original). Ashcroft’s perception has a signal relevance to the fiction of Arundhati Roy. In both of her novels to date, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017a), language is a persistent object of scrutiny. Instead of language, however, a more apt word would be languages. Both of Roy’s novels make extensive use of linguistic variance, the insertion of non-English elements into the predominantly Anglophone narrative stream. My aim in the present article is to investigate Roy’s handling of this practice, and of allied linguistic concerns, in the light of her political commitments.

India’s staggering diversity has, unsurprisingly, been mirrored in the country’s literary output. While Roy creates fiction that relies on a mainly English narrative voice, she repeatedly varies that pattern by inserting Indian vernacular words and phrases. It is partly that habit that prompts Graham Huggan to critique The God of Small Things as catering to a metropolitan penchant for the exotic; he finds in the novel “the continuing presence of an imperial imaginary” (2001: 77). Elleke Boehmer (2005) acknowledges Huggan’s strictures (160–161), but maintains that “[t]he commercial and cosmopolitan complicities of Roy’s novel are offset both by its enunciatory resistances […] and by […] ‘the sophisticated debate over agency’ — relative to its transnational but also national axes” (199–200; emphasis in original). In what follows, my own concern will be not with the metropolitan appeal of Roy’s “exotic” interpolations, but rather with the specific work they perform in their fictional contexts — what they contribute to the “enunciatory resistances” that Boehmer identifies.

At the same time, while the primary language of Roy’s novels is English, that does not ipso facto render these texts complicit with the ousted Anglo-colonialists. As Ashcroft argues, “[c]olonial languages have been not only instruments of oppression but also instruments of radical resistance and transformation” (2008: 3). Thus, as the same critic observes, interpolated vernacular words and phrases can assist the project of transformation: “[l]anguage variance can be a powerful form of resistance” (2008: 48). Pointing to “the deeply entangled dependencies between language and politics”, Christopher Stroud maintains that “a different [i.e. multilingual] construal of language may open up new political scenographies” (2018: 22); the championing of linguistic difference has often attended struggles for self-determination. Such struggles can be divisive; as Kenneth Haynes notes, “[l]anguage loyalty has been most intense whenever it has been enjoined by the political forces of nationality” (2001: 19). In India (as in other postcolonial nations, such as Nigeria, Cameroon, or Sri Lanka), those forces can be at odds with one another; regional animosities may be sharpened by difference of language. Most conspicuously in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy has striven to transcend this dividedness, cultivating the kind of ecumenical receptivity Bonnie Honig has dubbed “democratic cosmopolitanism” (2001: 13). Roy’s inclusion of vernacular languages plays a defining role in that cosmopolitanism.

What distinguishes Roy’s practice from that of many other Indo-Anglian novelists is her carefully calibrated, strategic deployment of vernacular elements so as to challenge hegemonic forces, whether exerted by an entrenched caste system wedded to Anglo-colonial norms (The God of Small Things) or by a violent sectarianism and an equally violent administrative bureaucracy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness). To be sure, such elements also occur in the work of Roy’s contemporaries. These vary widely in their linguistic practice. Some, like Anita Desai and Vikram Seth, draw on non-English vocabulary sparingly. Others, like Salman Rushdie, use such elements more freely, but their occurrence tends to be sporadic; they transmit a sense of the “otherness” of the complicated Indian milieu, but play no crucial part in delineating conflicts between characters or social cadres. The same is true of novelists as diverse as Aravind Adiga and Amitav Ghosh. (Jon Kertzer makes a strong case for the structural importance of “zubben”, a hybrid “flash” language, in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, arguing that it “weaves together culture, character and plot” (2018: n.p.), but even here language variance does not carry the targeted political charge one finds in Roy.) Roy’s indebtedness to earlier Indo-Anglian fiction, particularly Rushdie’s, has been widely remarked, but in this area she can lay claim to notable originality.

In Roy’s work, diverse languages tend to possess a metonymic status; they stand for cultural allegiances and psychic spaces. To what extent any language can embody a culture is a subject of long-standing dispute, but in Roy’s two novels the nexus between the language (or languages) one speaks and the culture one belongs to is taken for granted. In her polemical essays Roy has repeatedly deplored what she calls “the ritualistic slaughter of language” (2016: 153), the drive in Indian and other societies tor “strong” languages like Hindi or English to supplant less robust ones. Though written primarily in one such “strong” language, Roy’s texts push back against this tendency. In her novels, character is frequently defined in relation to language, a matter not only of which language one speaks, but of how many, and in what fashion.

The polyphony of tongues in Roy’s work has prompted some (for example, Anna Clarke, 2007 and Christine Vogt-Williams, 2003) to apply to it Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia. Michael Holquist speaks of Bakhtin’s “extraordinary sensitivity to the immense plurality of existence” (1981: xx), a description that would admirably fit Roy as well. For Bakhtin, the power of the novel stems from the interplay of discrete voices; the author functions as the impartial conductor of a multifarious chorus of ideologues. “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (1981: 262). Bakhtin is not greatly concerned with the counterpoint of languages in the ordinary sense — Spanish, German, and the like — which he mentions only parenthetically; his principal emphasis is on individual idiolects. By contrast, in Roy, diversity of speech modes more often points to group affiliations, whether ethnic or sectarian, a major source of conflict in her work. As John Edwards observes:

In all linguistic struggles, both within and between languages, in all situations of linguistic maintenance and decline, in all language-planning efforts we observe a competition which is not between languages themselves but, rather, between language communities or linguistic “interest groups”. (1994: 205)

Both of Roy’s novels involve precisely this sort of competition. Nevertheless, Bakhtin’s model of interwoven and often discordant voices remains generally relevant to Roy’s work, above all to the lavishly polyphonic Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

A different transnational influence on Roy has been the American theorist and political writer Noam Chomsky. While Roy has not engaged with Chomsky’s seminal work on transformational grammar, she shares his broader pragmatic concern with deliberate distortions of discourse, along with his warm valorization of linguistic diversity. Roy would heartily second Chomsky’s assertion that “the variety of languages and cultures is — and should be — a source of human happiness and enrichment” (1988: 151). In particular, she shares his conviction “that there is and will always be a need to discover and overcome structures of hierarchy, authority and domination and constraints on freedom” (1988: 395). For Chomsky, as for Roy, the manipulation of language for authoritarian ends gravely compromises that struggle. Such discourse, for Chomsky, has one “essential function: to design, propagate and create a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent understanding and analysis of institutional structures and their functions” (1988: 619). As Roy testifies in her appreciative essay “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky”, Chomsky “has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live” (2016: 265). ¹ Roy closes her essay by confessing, “hardly a day goes by when I don’t find myself thinking — for one reason or another — “Chomsky Zindabad” (2016: 275). The unexpected vernacular phrase “Chomsky Zindabad” (Long live Chomsky!) borrows its force from Roy’s Indian lexicon, symbolically enlisting the revered Western thinker in the ranks of postcolonial protest. Like many to follow, it is a good example of Roy’s adroitness with the “borrowing” of language.

The God of Small Things: Languages of caste and dissidence

In Roy’s debut novel the main linguistic “interest groups”, dialogically in conflict, are dual: speakers of “standard” English, primarily the upper-caste Christian Ipe family, and speakers of the regional language, Malayalam, including most of the other actors and (when unsupervised) the young Ipe twins, Rahel and Estha. The painful social tensions in the novel are underscored by clashes of speech habits. Anna Clarke summarizes the overall effect: “[i]n the narrative of TGST, and for the characters represented in the novel, language matters” (2007: 133).

In contrast with the adult speakers of both languages, who tend to be serious or even stern, the Ipe children are notable for their verbal playfulness. In their language games they display a precocious self-consciousness about words, a trait that distinguishes them from the mostly incurious grown-ups: “What a funny word old was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself: Old” (1997: 77; emphasis in original). ² The “funniness” Rahel detects here suggests her sense of remoteness from the stolid elders who surround her. An equally telling feature of the local linguistic horizon is the casual mixing together of the two featured languages. As Clarke demonstrates, nonchalance regarding speech decorum works as a disruptive force: “The twins break the rules and unsettle the certainties of the knowable order of grammar”, and “breaking the rules […] is a highly subversive and politicized act” (2007: 137).

A minor but revealing example of such subversion occurs in the aftermath of a working people’s rally. Here the rule-bender is not the children but their friend, the Paravan (untouchable) Velutha, who will later bend stricter rules with more dire consequences. When Rahel insists that she spotted Velutha at the rally but he ignored her, he replies, “Aiyyo kashtam”, Malayalam words translated as “Would I do that?” When the Paravan goes on to claim that he was sick in bed, Rahel objects that he is smiling. “That means it was you. Smiling means ‘It was you.’” But Velutha counters Rahel’s logic with a teasing evasion: “That’s only in English! […] In Malayalam my teacher always said that ‘Smiling meant it wasn’t me’” (169). This joking disagreement between adult and child conveys their common at-homeness in both languages, along with their easy at-homeness with each other, despite the social and cultural gulf separating them. (Velutha’s penchant for whimsical humour also hints at one source of his erotic appeal to Ammu’s stifled sensibility. ³ ) As Doris Sommer remarks, bilingual jokes “punctuate the […] signs of cultural difference and acknowledge them with a laugh” (2004: 73). Such disputes about how words work can overleap barriers of caste and language. Indirectly, the banter mocks the stuffy Anglocentrism of upper-caste adults like Baby Kochamma, who “felt she spoke much better English than everybody else” (25).

It contrasts, too, with the stilted performances of the children of the labour union leader Pillai, who parrot on demand hackneyed passages of English verse. Daughter Latha undertakes Scott’s “Lochinvar”, while the tendentiously named son Lenin mangles Shakespeare: “I cometoberry Caesar, not to praise him. | Theevil that mendoo lives after them, | The goodisoft Interred with their bones” (260). This is funny, but it is more than “a juvenile attempt at humour” (Nityanandam, 1999: 116); it is a comic exemplar of one of Roy’s persistent concerns: the stultifying reification of language. The absurdity of the recitation exposes the performer’s failure to comprehend the meaning of the English words. Here, as also on the lips of Baby Kochamma, English, a “status” language, figures as a marker of unearned privilege. By contrast, the twins’ unforced, spontaneous perceptions are voiced in an idiom imbued with individuality, as with Rahel’s musing on the word old, grappling bravely with a concept still distant from her lived experience.

It is only the exceptional grown-up who retains any such open relation to language. In a scene closely following the Pillai children’s spavined efforts, Velutha, violently expelled from the Ipe household, comforts himself by recalling a schoolboy poem about a train, in Malayalam. It begins: “Koo-koo kokum theevandi | Kooki paadum thee evandi (269). Even to uninstructed readers the lines signify more than Lenin Pillai’s attempt at Shakespearean verse (“theevil that mendoo”); their soothing nursery-rhyme lilt makes itself vividly felt. Though he is a mature man embroiled in a perilous love affair, Velutha can still tap into the child’s linguistic responsiveness, a fact that makes him, to cite Clarke’s terms, a subversive force amid the banal verbal miasma of the local landscape (and languagescape). That banality permeates the dialogue between two local authority figures, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew: “They were not friends […] and they didn’t trust each other, but they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult” (248). In Roy’s unsparing vision, a “normal” adult mindset inhibits free verbal exchange. When a panicky Estha is later terrorized by Mathew into betraying Velutha, “Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt” (303). Afterward, by a natural reaction, the boy loses the ability, or the will, to speak. Perceptual innocence and meaningful utterance are tightly linked; it is inevitable that they are jointly locked out of Estha’s life.

The ultimate responsibility for Estha’s silencing lies not with Mathew but with Baby Kochamma, who is at once implacably adult and emotionally infantile. Her name is a give-away; as Julie Mullaney comments, “‘Baby’ […] ostensibly relating to her diminutive stature, comes to describe her general stagnation and failure to go forward in life” (2002: 31). On top of that, in Malayalam “kochamma” denotes a privileged woman; the relevance to Baby is obvious. Baby’s inability to comprehend adult passion testifies to her immaturity, but it does not spell childlikeness. She is far from possessing a juvenile freedom from the life-cancelling inhibitions that blight this postcolonial terrain, the shibboleths of caste snobbery and sexual dread. Along with other family members, like her Oxford alumnus nephew Chacko, she exhibits a reflexive Anglophilia coupled with a morbid cultural myopia, an enslavement to outworn ideas. The pickles produced by the family firm are the least noxious of the things they preserve.

The family’s lingering embrace of the colonial outlook manifests itself strikingly on the level of language. Baby enforces her preference for the English of the bygone regime by monetizing the twins’ discourse: “whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which was deducted […] from their pocket money” and she enforces conformity by compelling them to write lines: “I will always speak in English” (76; emphasis in original). In the car, en route to the local cinema to see the acceptably English-language film The Sound of Music, she has them sing an English car song while being “particularly careful about their pronunciation. Prer NUN sea ayshun” (76) — the children’s cockeyed reception of the word mocks the older woman’s lexical fussiness.

A pivotal early scene featuring a Bakhtinian joust of languages begins when, stopped on the way to the cinema by the workmen’s demonstration, Baby is tauntingly asked her name in English. An onlooker proposes a Malayalam name meaning “landlord”: “‘What about Modalali Mariakutty’, someone suggested with a giggle” (76); the vernacular jibe pinpoints Baby’s privileged, exploitative status. Her linguistic humiliation does not end there; she is mortified by being obliged to say Inquilab Zindabad! (Long live the Revolution!) while waving a banner.

“Wave it,” [the demonstrator] ordered.

She had to wave it. She had no choice. It smelled of new cloth and a shop. Crisp and

dusty.

She tried to wave it, though she wasn’t waving it.

“Now say Inquilab Zindabad!”

“Inquilab Zindabad,” Baby Kochamma whispered.

“Good girl.”

The crowd roared with laughter. (77)

Being jeered at while obliged to utter words that outrage her social pretensions in a language she despises is a violation of Baby Kochamma’s most cherished sense of self. It provokes a trauma that haunts her throughout the subsequent narrative, and that in turn contributes to the traumas that afflict other characters.

Languages in collision: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Predictably, much criticism of Roy’s second novel, published a full 20 years after her first, has endeavoured to “place” it with reference to The God of Small Things. Thus Alex Tickell, in a perceptive article, says that “The Ministry can be read as both the first novel’s development and its opposite” (2018: n.p.). Some reviewers found the later book all too “opposite”; several, in view of its narrative amplitude, deemed it “sprawling” or structurally incoherent. ⁴ Others objected to the abundant echoing of Roy’s political essays; according to Somak Ghoshal in The Huffington Post, “it’s as though Roy pours her years of stellar non-fiction into a melting pot of liberal outrage and stirs it in with some fictional garnish” (2017). Tickell’s essay, however, examines the “fictional garnish” more searchingly and highlights its underlying thematic coherence, as does an article of the same year by Filippo Menozzi. According to Tickell, “The Ministry is not just a multifarious changing stage for Roy’s characters but the basis for an extended, historically-embedded commentary on citizenship, dissent and conflict in contemporary India” (2019: n.p.).

One area in which The Ministry of Utmost Happiness extends the concerns of The God of Small Things is its preoccupation with language. Here too, however, it is the differences that stand out. Where the earlier novel focuses on the frictional cohabitation of a pair of languages, the later one offers a potpourri, featuring the default narratorial medium, English, along with Urdu, Kashmiri, Hindi, and what have you. This diversity results partly from the more panoramic purview of The Ministry, but its implications reach beyond matter-of-fact geography. Owing to this multiplicity of tongues it becomes risky to generalize about the rhetorical effects produced by each separately. What matters most is the cumulative impression made by the cascade of “foreign” words and phrases; the overall sense one receives of an endlessly multiform and turbulent cultural surround, its cross-currents colliding with one another in dialogic fashion.

Amid that profusion, the novel’s dramatis personae are defined, or define themselves, largely in relation to the language (or languages) they speak. As Paul Brass points out, in the Indian Babel “[t]he dialect/language chosen, as well as its form and style, constitute political as well as ‘linguistic acts’” (2010: 195). Of the two central characters, Anjum the hijra (transgender courtesan) has far less freedom to “choose” a language than the polyglot Tilo; she is confined by birth and upbringing to Urdu, a language spoken mainly by Muslims. For both women, however, linguistic endowment has far-reaching political consequences. Their idioms help to define the life-opportunities open to them, but can also risk a confining hyper-definition.

Tickell speaks aptly of Roy’s “ethical commitment to what we might call the radical postcolonial politics of ‘unclasssifiability’” (2018). In her essays Roy repeatedly returns to the use, or misuse, of language to classify and categorize: the reductive recourse to “pigeonholes”, especially political ones. She decries “imaginations that are locked down into a grid of countries and borders, in minds that are shrink-wrapped in flags” (Roy and Cusack, 2016: 92–93). Where the primary thrust of The God of Small Things was toward the transgression of caste barriers — the “love-laws” — The Ministry of Utmost Happiness aims at the radical erasure of boundaries of every sort. It is no accident that prominent figures among the cast are anomalous: an androgynous courtesan who dwells in a cemetery, a vagrant who rides a horse and calls himself Saddam Hussein. And it stands to reason that the book itself should resist confinement within a standardized linguistic grid, encompassing a profusion and confusion of tongues. Throughout Ministry Roy marshals language variance and vernacular tags to challenge homogeneity, an enforced “normalcy”, a regimen of binding language-laws dating from the British Raj but maintained in place by its Indian successors. The issue is again, at bottom, political: “We have to use our skills and imagination and our art to re-create the rhythm of the endless crisis of normality, and in doing so, expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things — food, water, shelter, and dignity — such a distant dream for ordinary people” (Roy, 2016: 292). To build such “exposure” into her novel requires linguistic experimentation.

Roy’s second novel foregrounds the weaponizing of language for purposes of dominance and humiliation. A vivid instance is the episode of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom of Muslims, which the traumatized Anjum barely manages to survive. Draped across the dead body of her unlucky traveling companion, Zakir Mian, Anjum is forced by her assailants to mouth inflammatory catchphrases in Hindi, a language she does not normally speak:

So they stood over her and made her chant their slogans.

Bharat Mata Ki Jai! Vande Mataram!

She did. Weeping, shaking, humiliated beyond her worst nightmare.

Victory to Mother India! Salute the Mother! (2017a: 67) ⁵

The Hindi catchphrases will be still more alien to the ears of Western readers than they are to Anjum’s, and their strangeness compounds the disturbing effect of the incident. Once again, as in the scene in The God of Small Things in which Baby Kochamma is made to mouth a Malayalam political slogan, the keynote is humiliation. Here, however, the person humiliated is a humble wayfarer with no class or caste pretensions. What is shown is not an uprising of exploited labourers but a far darker force: rabid sectarian hatred. This is the idiom not of protest but of genocide.

The antagonism between Hindi, the language spoken by the Hindu nationalists, and Urdu, Anjum’s mother tongue, is of course the product of long-standing grievances between Hindus and Muslims. (Ironically, the two languages are closely related; to detached listeners the differences — more Sanskrit elements in Hindi, more Persian and Arabic in Urdu — are apt to seem less than crucial.) As Granville Austin notes, in the period leading up to Indian independence “anger against the Muslims turned against Urdu” (2010: 56). It is a language that has come to embody the trauma of Partition. Although Anjum is herself no zealous partisan, her speech stigmatizes her as a member of the adversarial religion, and she is compelled to “clear” herself by mouthing a chauvinistic Hindi slogan. While Roy does not disparage Hindi (or any other language) per se, in Ministry she makes no secret of her abhorrence of the current propagandistic misuse of that language to enforce sectarian supremacy. Some instances of such enforcement are less glaring than the Gujarat massacre, but are none the less troubling. The Hindi slogans of the elderly anti-corruption “crusader” who sets up in Jantar Mantar Square are triumphs of deviousness. Although his message to “[n]ationalists of all stripes” purports to be benignly universalist, its subtext is menacing: “‘Doodh maangogey to kheer dengey! Kashmir maangogey to chiir dengey!’” (107). The translation provided drives home the point — “Ask for milk, we’ll give you cream! Ask for Kashmir, we’ll rip you open seam to seam!” Readers to whom the Hindi words are opaque may find their resonance all the more unsettling.

As a strategy to contest majoritarian aggression, Roy valorizes minority languages, above all Anjum’s. As Ashcroft argues, language in general acts “not as a receptacle of culture […] but as a signifier of culture” (2008: 71; emphasis in original); what Urdu signifies here is the culture of the Mughal ascendency, now only a memory, but an august memory. Ustad Kulsoom Bi, the presiding presence of Anjum’s Khwabgah (hijra residence), regrets the decline of Islamic civilization and speech in India, mourning “lost glory and a dying language” (43). By offering an abundance of Urdu phrases, poems, and songs, the novel pays its respects to a treasured history, embedded in a linguistic tradition that is now endangered. Still, the language itself is not idealized; in common with other languages, it does not foster a fully adequate accounting of the intricacies of life. It simplifies reality by imposing a procrustean binary scheme, channelling the perceptions of a speaker like Anjum’s mother: “In Urdu, the only language [Jahanara] knew, all things, not just living things but all things — carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments — had a gender” (12). Anjum’s father, too, Mulaquat Ali, has difficulty seeing beyond this linguistic grid, which leaves him baffled by his offspring’s sexual indeterminacy. His composition of couplets in the ancient Urdu poetic mode is a touching trait, but one that only serves to entrench his own either-or habit of vision. Anjum’s inborn, undeniable ambiguity leaves him “pitching perilously on an ocean of couplet-less incomprehension” (21).

Given the convoluted nature of south Asian realities, confinement to a single language can be limiting, whereas a knowledge of multiple languages can broaden one’s perspective. Caryl Emerson cites Bakhtin’s belief that “[m]ultilingual environments […] liberate man by opening up a gap between things and their labels” (1984: xxxii). Historically not all Indian politicians favoured linguistic diversity; in the lead-up to independence, Austin notes, the so-called Hindi-wallahs — advocates for Hindi as national language — “preached that multilingualism was incompatible with national unity” (2010: 45). Thus, the novel’s other pivotal character, Tilo, a confirmed polyglot, occupies what is potentially a contentious space in the polity. The spirit of linguistic eclecticism she embodies emerges in a brief encounter, the first meeting between her and the engaging crank, Dr Azad Bhartiya, when both are waiting to have their shoes mended by a street cobbler: “Dr. Bhartiya surprised Tilo by asking her (in English) if she had a cigarette. She surprised him back by replying (in Hindi) that she had no cigarettes but could offer him a beedi. The little cobbler lectured them both at length about the consequences of smoking” (266). Here there is no fraught political undertone to the mixing and matching of diverse languages; rather, a relaxed camaraderie, a common enjoyment of the options available in the multiform social universe they inhabit.

Tilo’s liberal mixing of languages is an offshoot of her prolonged struggle against the looming threat of rigid, formulaic categories — of “pigeonholes”. Elevated by an adventitious marriage to an unfulfilling life in lofty diplomatic circles, she finds that “[s]he had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete — a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity” (236). Sane or not, she comes to realize that she can be true to her own mixed nature, and to the mixed world she must negotiate, only by allowing the disjointed components of her personality to mingle. Such a course involves the shunning of linguistic purity and the embrace of heteroglossia as a strategy for survival. It is conjoined with a disregard for the observance of verbal “decency”: “She had been exceptionally foul-mouthed as a young woman, and when she first started learning Hindi took pleasure in using newly learned expletives as the foundation on which she built a working vocabulary” (271). When at length she applies herself to learning Urdu, she displays a similarly cavalier disdain for polite linguistic etiquette. She recites an Urdu poem (first recited many pages earlier by Dr Bhartiya (137)) containing the lines “Apni sunehri gaand mein | Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar”, words addressed by a caged bird to her captor. Rather than the expected burst of high-flown lyricism, the translation reads: “Please take the spring harvest | And shove it up your gilded arse” (441). The Urdu lines distil the flouting of overweening authority that is Tilo’s hallmark. Her lover Musa comments darkly but appropriately: “‘That sounds like the anthem of a suicide bomber”’ (442).

Languages of resistance and language of authority: The Kashmir impasse

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness the capacity to speak more than one language does not guarantee a corresponding breadth of perspective, or even common humanity. The brutal officer in charge of Kashmiri operations, Amrik Singh, makes a show of mastering languages only under the influence of alcohol: he speaks English when drunk (342). This is a bogus multilingualism; an aping of the speech of the former colonial rulers by a sociopathic thug. And yet even a true master of languages, the government official Biplab Dasgupta, displays a disappointingly blinkered vision.

Dasgupta is an intelligent, urbane, and (within limits) perceptive centre of consciousness in the novel. He is at home in several languages; when he encounters Anjum he recognizes that she “speaks the most beautiful Urdu” (210), and he is capable of deciphering a threatening letter in Pashto (148). Understandably, some reviewers have found the abrupt intrusion of Dasgupta’s first-person voice into the novel, following the lengthy opening section focusing on Anjum, disconcerting. Joan Acocella (2017: n.p.) in The New Yorker asks: “who is this new narrator who is talking to us, telling us that he needs to go to a rehab center?” But in fact this startling juxtaposition of voices is deliberate, one of the novel’s most arresting Bakhtinian clashes of idioms and outlooks; its purpose is to create a pointed, jarring contrast with the raffish, genial world of the Khwabgah. Roy herself insists that Dasgupta is not a straw man; even that “he is brilliant” (2017b). But Dasgupta’s monologue betrays traits that are hardly brilliant, above all his categorical use of language, his propensity for pigeonholing. Upon catching sight of Anjum he registers her as “[s]ome sort of freak” (210); his vocabulary traduces a figure we have come to know as complex and vital, if manifestly unusual. He is fatally given to drawing hard and fast lines between the conventionally defined “normal” and “abnormal”.

Here, as elsewhere, linguistic habits fuse with other aspects of personality to function as a metric of character. Although he can appreciate Anjum’s refined Urdu, Dasgupta’s own narrative style in English is straitjacketed. He is known to Tilo, whose friend he was during their undergraduate years, as Garson Hobart, an old theatrical sobriquet. The Waspish alias is more than a joke; it implies Dasgupta’s estranging adoption of the mentality of India’s bygone colonial administrators. The unruffled flow of his rhetorical manner bears out the expectations aroused by the name. Witness his reaction to a spate of terrorist bomb explosions: “As for myself, blasts evoke a range of emotions in me, but sadly, shock is no longer one of them” (147). It is the tone of the jaded overseer of “native misconduct”, the stiff upper lip of the wearied but diligent functionary. Like Chacko in The God of Small Things, though under different circumstances, he pays a price for his fidelity to the spirit of the vanished Raj, in his case alcoholism, neurasthenia, and collapse in intimate relations.

Dasgupta’s linguistic prowess does, it is true, make him an alert sleuth of militant discourse, notably the anonymous threatening message in Pashto he receives while posted to Afghanistan. The text is quoted in its original form (“Nun zamong bad qismati wa” and so on (148)), sounding to the lay reader like the plausibly spontaneous, angry outcry of an oppressed indigenous people. But Dasgupta punctures the presumed sincerity with a practised gaze, revealing the threat to be a cheap act of ventriloquism, “a close-to-verbatim translation of what the IRA said after Margaret Thatcher escaped their bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984” (148–149). Yet this alertness to globalized chicanery is offset by obtuseness on matters closer to home. When confronted with private texts produced by Tilo, a woman he has loved, “Garson Hobart” stumbles. Tilo’s archives of current news items and other extracts read like grim parodies of the language games played by the children in The God of Small Things; her “Kashmiri-English Alphabet” (211) sardonically mimics a scholastic reading primer, while her Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children (275) masquerades as a test of basic reading skills, complete with multiple choice questions.

Dasgupta is baffled by the mixture of the whimsical and the serious embodied in Tilo’s collections. While generally well-intentioned — he helps to rescue Tilo from the clutches of Amrik Singh — he is, like Pillai and Mathew in The God of Small Things, “truly, terrifyingly adult”. The “alphabet”, which he chances to unearth in the lodgings Tilo has been renting from him, amounts to a scathing exposé of the realities of the Kashmir impasse. The shortest and simplest of the entries, the one for the letter Q, is a representative sample: “Q: Quran/Questioning” (213) implies the axiomatic link between a specific religious faith and brutal interrogation by the authorities. The other entries have a more oblique but equally disturbing bearing on the violent methods used to suppress dissent in the region. Dasgupta can respond only with a bureaucratic shrug recalling outworn complacencies of the Raj: “Why is she still wallowing in this old story? Everyone’s moved on” (214). It is actually Dasgupta whose story is old, who has not moved; he remains a fixture amid the turbulence of civil strife, numb to the atrocities highlighted by Tilo’s fanciful, grotesque alphabet.

Roy’s treatment of the Kashmir conflict repeatedly pits vernacular breaches of decorum against the language of official obscurantism. Following a massacre by Indian forces of participants and onlookers at a funeral procession, the narrator poignantly references “the deafening slogan there was nobody left to chant”: “Jis Kashmir ko khoon se sencha! Woh Kashmir hamara hai!” (translated as “The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood! That Kashmir is ours!” (330). Shortly afterwards the narrator comments: “Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration)”. The twinning of an impassioned Kashmiri slogan with a mendacious English platitude implicitly bestows a consecration on vernacular discourse, driving home the ironic contrast between a heartfelt patriotic utterance and bureaucratic evasion. For Roy, rejection of such clichés is an inseparable part of her own lexicon of resistance

Like the many Urdu interpolations in Ministry, the abundance of Kashmiri elements functions as a de facto reclamation project, validating the speakers’ drive toward national autonomy. The Kashmiri chant, “What do we want? Independence!” is pointedly given in its original form: “Hum Kya Chahtey? Azadi!” To clinch the effect, the slogan is chanted amid the rubble left from a devastating Indian military raid (287). Even though most readers may be unfamiliar with the local language, they still hear a voice that has its own unique mode of expressing itself; that is the point. Yet at the same time the novel rejects unquestioning compliance with claims to authority even when authority speaks with a vernacular voice. Musa’s infant daughter, Miss Jebeen, tragically killed by a stray bullet from a soldier’s gun, is for dramatic effect twice given the same lines in her own language. In their second iteration they are inscribed on the child’s gravestone: “Akh daleela wann” (322, 396; emphasis in original). The words, in life addressed to her solicitous father, are rendered in colloquial English as: “Tell me a story, and can we cut the crap about the witch and the jungle?” (322). Already, in her infantile artlessness, Miss Jebeen reveals herself as a dissident in the bud, rejecting “crap” from bombastic authority.

Tilo is an adult version of Miss Jebeen; she has spent her life repudiating the crap issuing from empowered mouths. By the end of the novel, in Anjum’s cemetery-cum-guest house, she has found a paradoxical refuge from unliving discourse. Tickell calls the Jannat Guest House “a space of both literal and figurative exclusion: a zone where those who are not accepted or welcomed in wider society can find a kind of sanctuary” (2018). That is true, but the graveyard is also a space of inclusion, a place where Tilo “may finally have found a home for the Rest of Her Life” (310). Among other things, it is a setting that favours her partiality for linguistic openness:

[S]he didn’t teach her own pupils to sing “We Shall Overcome” in any language.

Because she wasn’t sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone’s horizon. But

she taught them arithmetic, drawing, computer graphics […] a bit of basic science,

English, and eccentricity. From them she learned Urdu and something of the art of

Happiness. (403)

It is deeply typical of Roy that happiness here is inseparable from eccentricity — and from learning languages.

Linguistic versatility is vital to Roy’s own eccentric but steadfast vision; it means refusing to occupy any made-to-order pigeonhole, of discourse or of thought, and to confront life as an unfolding narrative of possibilities, even within the bounds of a cemetery. Filippo Menozzi has described The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as “a novel at war with itself” (2019: n.p.). If that description rings true for Roy’s novel, with its myriad dialogic cross-currents, it is also true that at its close the novel declares a modestly promising truce.