The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: thoughts

Imrul Islam
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

This is the longest it’s taken me to read Arundhati but then again, this isn’t the easiest book to read. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, for me, is a book about love — but love of the slow, creeping conflicted variety — the real kind. It enthralls and shocks, and makes one aware of the precarity of each intake of air. Page after page, Arundhati details what is routinely overlooked in wars — the failed romances, the little nuances, the profound heartbreaks — all of which is as, if not infinitely more important, than the predictable banality of violence. By pivoting the locus of storytelling from the public to the private purveyors, warriors and survivors of war, Arundhati highlights the genealogy of violence that envelops us so completely, and pays homage to what is so easily forgotten: the woman, the children, the revolutionary, the human. And of course, this is a book about Kashmir even as it isn’t. It is a story of oppression, war, corruption and resistance and religion and the apoliticization of the political, of Tilo and Musa and Naga and Jebeen and Anjuman and Islam and India and Hindus and Gujarat and a boat that drifts vulnerable across the water. And it is a novel that stops the reader in their tracks, and makes you dog ear every other page.

“Martyrdom stole into the Kashmir Valley from across the Line of Control, through moonlit mountain passes manned by soldiers. Night after night it walked on narrow, stony paths wrapped like thread around blue cliffs of ice, across vast glaciers and high meadows of waist-deep snow. It trudged past young boys shot down in snowdrifts, their bodies arranged in eerie, frozen tableaux under the pitiless gaze of the pale moon in the cold night sky, and stars that hung so low you felt you could almost touch them.

When it arrived in the Valley it stayed close to the ground and spread through the walnut groves, the saffron fields, the apple, almond and cherry orchards like a creeping mist. It whispered words of war into the ears of doctors and engineers, students and labourers, tailors and carpenters, weavers and farmers, shepherds, cooks and bards. They listened carefully, and then put down their books and implements, their needles, their chisels, their staffs, their ploughs, their cleavers and their spangled clown costumes. They stilled the looms on which they had woven the most beautiful carpets and the finest, softest shawls the world had ever seen, and ran gnarled, wondering fingers over the smooth barrels of Kalashnikovs that the strangers who visited them allowed them to touch. They followed the new Pied Pipers up into the high meadows and alpine glades where training camps had been set up. Only after they had been given guns of their own, after they had curled their fingers around the trigger and felt it give, ever so slightly, after they had weighed the odds and decided it was a viable option, only then did they allow the rage and shame of the subjugation they had endured for decades, for centuries, to course through their bodies and turn the blood in their veins into smoke.”

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Imrul Islam

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