The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

As its title suggests, happiness is a central concern in Roy’s novel. More specifically, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness deals heavily with where happiness can be found and what it consists of. Another way of putting this is that the novel involves the search for paradise: a place of perfect pleasure and contentment in the Abrahamic religions (primarily Islam and Christianity) that the novel’s major characters practice or grew up in.

That isn’t to say that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness conceives of happiness only in terms of a spiritual realm or afterlife. In fact, the social and political movements Roy depicts throughout the novel are in some sense an attempt to create paradise on earth; at the demonstrations in Jantar Mantar, for instance, a group of documentary filmmakers ask protesters to speak the phrase “‘Another World is Possible’ in whatever language they spoke” (113)—the implication being not only that a fairer and more peaceful world is within reach, but that in that world people from all different backgrounds will exist harmoniously side by side.

Anjum’s response to the filmmakers casts doubt on whether such a society is possible in reality. Because Anjum is used to drawing a distinction between the Khwabgah and the outside world, she “stare[s] into the camera” and proclaims, “we’ve come from there … from the other world” (114).