RESEARCH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SMC-PRIVATE) LIMITED(ROSS) & PAKISTAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW (PSSR) adheres to Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License. The authors submitting and publishing in PSSR agree to the copyright policy under creative common license 4.0 (Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International license). Under this license, the authors published in PSSR retain the copyright including publishing rights of their scholarly work and agree to let others remix, tweak, and build upon their work non-commercially. All other authors using the content of PSSR are required to cite author(s) and publisher in their work. Therefore, RESEARCH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SMC-PRIVATE) LIMITED(ROSS) & PAKISTAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW (PSSR) follow an Open Access Policy for copyright and licensing.
How to Cite
Hindutva Doctrine, Communal Violence, and the Postcolonial Subalternization of Indian Muslims in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Abstract
The paper studies Roy’s fictive character of Anjum: an Indian Muslim ‘Hijra’ of Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad) as the literary sum total of Indian Muslim’s social experience of communal violence and ‘Othering’ from the theoretical perspective of ‘Postcolonial Subalternization’ as explicated by Nayar (2008). The paper highlights various events of communal violence and ‘Othering’, since the inception of the postcolonial nation-state of India in 1947, especially in the lives of Indian Muslims as shown in Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (abbreviated as TMUH), to argue that these historical instances of brutality against them have actually been guided by the Hindutva doctrine that aims to vanquish all the Indian minority communities until they come under the fold of Hinduism either by converting or remaining socio-politically aloof and willing to celebrate the motherhood of Indian Nation State vis-à-vis Hinduness. The paper finds that these events of communal violence and ‘Othering’ against Indian Muslims, especially, have contributed to the Hindutvavadi vision of subalternizing Indian Muslims to social ciphers.
Authors
Muhammad Abid
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Government Graduate College, Block 17, D.G. Khan, Punjab, Pakistan
Aamer Shaheen
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Sadia Qamar
Lecturer in English Literature, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Keywords
Arundhati Roy, Communal Violence, Hindutva Doctrine, Indian Muslims, Postcolonial Subalternization, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
