Urban Displacement and Marginal Lives: A Sociological Reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

A critical-theoretical reading is given to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in this article in which it is situated at the juncture of urban sociology, post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. The volume is treated as a disjunctive and polyphonic narrative that refuses to follow lineal storytelling while drawing readers into lives too precarious or marginal for the modern nation-state to buy them a place. With its revolving syntheses and abrupt transitions between speakers, Roy underlines the representational role given to the mainstream. She focuses on marginalized subjectivities instead of national pride and emphasizes the value of individual lives and diversity. Employing insights from Foucault and Agamben in the analysis of the novel, this paper examines how biopower is deployed on populations by such mechanisms as surveillance, control and exclusion. The book is an exemplar of biopower, where some communities in this case the religious minorities, transsexuals, and poor of city are reduced to “bare life,” living in zones where legal guarantees are suspended. Here state structures are exposed for the violence they contain and rights/acknowledgments with which they unevenly deal. Drawn above all on Henri Lefebvre's spatial theory, the book treats the city not just as a setting for stories but also as an ideologically and materially produced space. She depicts urban landscapes as contested terrain in which marginal communities carve out alternative spaces to call their own. Graveyards, informal settlements, and so forth all emerge as counter-spaces that reject the dominant tone given the urban scene and embody forms of collective resilience.