Hindutva Doctrine, Communal Violence, and the Postcolonial Subalternization of Indian Muslims in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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.