Heterotopic Space and Marginalized Identities in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Abstract

 Heterotopia’ as envisaged by Foucault, refers to a spatial peculiarity where a single place may represent various spaces. Michel Foucault presents this concept in his works, The Order of Things, Of Other Spaces as well as in his elaborations on Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ in Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison. This concept unravels the multiple possibilities in spatial studies where space can be more than what meet the eyes. Foucault presents six principles of heterotopias like heterotopia of crisis or deviation, its universal and embedded nature, as a space of otherness and illusion and so on. Places like cemetery, ships, prisons, menstrual huts, library, motels and museum are a few that Foucault refers to as heterotopic in nature. Arundhati Roy, in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) lines up a number of characters who represent the marginalized groups with respect to their caste, race, gender or religion in the present Indian political scenario. The fictional space of the novel gives them the narrative agency contrary to their realistic counterparts, who with vulnerable identities remain invisible and voiceless in the margins. The novel presents a desolate place like the graveyard which Anjum, the central character, transforms into ‘The Jannat Guest house’ which acts as a counter space where these individuals of vulnerable identities find voice of resistance to the dominant discourse and an abode to exist with dignity. Roy instead of presenting a fictional utopia which is non- existent presents a heterotopic world of counter narratives where all the prominent characters represent the marginalized sections of the contemporary Indian society thereby unraveling the marginal space occupied by such under privileged groups of the society as potential spots of resistance to dominant narratives of power and oppression.