NORMALIZING TARNISHED BODIES: A MAXIST ANALYSIS OF ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

Abstract

The present research study is an effort to explore the issues of class struggle and survival of the individuals who are considered outcast, belonging to transgender community, an untouchable class; and occupied states in India, with reference to Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy, 2017) under the framework of Marxist theory (Rummel, 1977). The context of ‘class struggle’, ‘Base and Superstructure’ by Karl Marx is the fundamental approach which has been utilized to observe and analyze the text. The study of the novel highlights how these individuals living with physical and mental traumas struggle against the capitalistic society to normalize themselves in an intolerant socio-economic and political atmosphere; and what obstructions they face to behave as normal people around them. The Marxist approach in the text reflects how the class difference and domination of bourgeois controls different threads of the various marginalized and underprivileged communities in terms of their existence in the society where an eruption of communal violence is a power-show game in politics to propagate all the false ideologies in the name of religion and nationalism. The aim of this research is to find out how far less-privileged and tarnished individuals, and freedom seekers are able to recover and feel normalized in an established capitalized society on the social, political and ideological basis.