Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corruption, Political Violence, and Capitalism
Resilience and Hope
Gender Identity, Social Division, and Coexistence
Social Hierarchy vs. Social Inclusivity
Religion and Power
Summary
Analysis
Musa is at Jannat Guest House for his third and final night. It is his and Tilo’s last time together—in the morning, he will go to Kashmir, and he will never return. He and Tilo lie in bed, reading poetry to one another. Tilo shows him one poem that she wants to be an epitaph. It reads: “How / to tell / a / shattered / story? / By / slowly / becoming / everybody. / No. / By slowly becoming everything.”
The poem Tilo reads is an accurate description of Roy’s novel itself. Through deeply exploring the consciousness of characters from a whole range of backgrounds, religious and political beliefs, and personalities, Roy has slowly become everybody and everything, and has told the “shattered story” of modern politics in India.
Themes
That night, Anjum is too restless to sleep. She decides to go for a walk and takes Miss Jebeen the Second with her. As they pass the main road, the child needs to go pee and, when she’s done, “lift[s] her bottom to marvel at the night sky and the stars and the one-thousand-year-old city reflected in the puddle she [has] made.” Mother and daughter go back and go to sleep, like everyone else. Everyone except Guih Kyom the dung beetle, who is “on duty” lying on his back to catch the sky in case it falls. But he knows that everything “would turn all right in the end […] because they had to. Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, [is] come.”
Miss Jebeen the Second here appears as a clear representation of resilience and hope for the future. Although she was born in the most violent of circumstances, she is a thriving young child surrounded by loving caretakers. Roy’s metaphors of waste in this section further the message of resilience. Miss Jebeen the Second sees the beauty of the city in the puddle of her own pee, or waste. Similarly, the dung beetle’s function is to eat solid waste and digest it. In both examples, waste becomes transformed—into beauty in Miss Jebeen’s case, and into life in the case of the dung beetle.
Themes
