"Intersections of Environmental Degradation and Marginalized Bodies in Urban India: A Study of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy"

Abstract

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) offers a complex, fragmented narrative that brings together the stories of India’s most marginalized populations — including Dalits, Kashmiri militants, transgender communities, and displaced urban dwellers — against the backdrop of a decaying urban ecology. This paper explores how Roy situates the lives of socially marginalized characters within landscapes of environmental degradation in Delhi and other Indian urban spaces.

Using an eco-critical and postcolonial framework, the study investigates how the novel represents the entanglement of bodily and environmental ruin. It argues that urban environmental decay in Roy’s novel is not merely a setting, but a symbolic and material extension of the social and political neglect faced by marginalized identities. The transformation of a graveyard into a refuge for the transgender protagonist Anjum, for example, becomes a powerful metaphor for reclaiming dignity amid systemic abandonment — both ecological and human.

The study also engages with theories of environmental justice, biopolitics, and subaltern ecology, highlighting how the city is depicted as a space of simultaneous invisibility and hyper-visibility for its most oppressed citizens. Ultimately, this paper seeks to position Roy’s novel as a vital text for understanding the convergence of ecological and social injustice in contemporary Indian literature.