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Description
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) offers a fertile site for interrogating the intersections of aging, gender, and marginality in transcultural contexts. Literary gerontology has often been dominated by Western paradigms, where narratives of decline and the male aging experience receive disproportionate attention. In contrast, Roy’s narrative broadens the scope of gerontological inquiry by situating aging in South Asia and foregrounding experiences that unfold beyond the male–female binary. The character of Anjum, an aging hijra, embodies this critical shift. Her story foregrounds how old age intersects with non-normative gender identities, religious minority status, and political exclusions, complicating conventional understandings of lifespan and aging.
The novel presents Anjum’s trajectory as emblematic of compounded insecurities: social invisibility, the absence of institutional care, and physical vulnerability are aggravated by her transgender identity. When Khwabgah, the space that once provided refuge to hijras, burns down, Anjum relocates to a graveyard, where she builds a shack that is periodically threatened by municipal authorities. Her assertion that she is “not living but dying” near her ancestors’ graves resonates as a poignant commentary on the erasure of marginalized aging bodies from the collective imagination of the nation-state. Yet, paradoxically, this deathlike existence is also her cultural presencing: Anjum embodies a transcultural liminality that extends “beyond” herself, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s formulation.
By foregrounding Anjum’s life course, this paper demonstrates how Roy challenges cultural hierarchies of aging. Historically, women have been punished more severely than men for growing old, their aging bodies perceived as abject or burdensome. Roy radicalizes this asymmetry by extending it to the hijra community, where aging entails a unique convergence of social stigma, gender exclusion, and existential precariousness. Anjum’s narrative disrupts binary constructions of both gender and aging, offering instead a model of endurance, memory, and redefined belonging.
The analysis draws upon literary gerontology (Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s “narratives of decline” and Kathleen Woodward’s reflections on the mirror stage of old age), gender studies, and the lens of transcultural intersectionality. The paper argues that Roy constructs alternative communities of care—however fragile—that resist erasure, while simultaneously revealing the persistence of institutionalized abandonment. By placing The Ministry of Utmost Happiness within a transcultural gerontological framework, the paper highlights how South Asian literature contributes to global aging studies, not as derivative of Western models but as an expansion of them.
Ultimately, this reading of Roy’s novel underscores how aging narratives, especially those situated outside binary gender categories, can deepen our understanding of literature across the lifespan. It demonstrates how the aged body, often coded as decline, can instead function as a site of resilience, memory, and transcultural survival.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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