Wrong Identities Trapped in a Wrong World: Critiquing the Process of Othering and disabling in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

Traditionally marginalized groups and people with disabilities are excluded from mainstream cultural norms because these suppressed voices lack power, resources, and privilege. The image of a different or wrong body interrupts the social order, much like gays, lesbians, women, and blacks. The novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) talks about the most oppressed groups in society whose abilities are ignored and perceived as inferior because of their difference. Society fails to accommodate people with differences, i.e., cultural, political, gender, ideological, and geo-political. To cover up the limitations in society, it constructs the idea of disability. The extensive analysis of this novel will show how the capitalist society makes others in the name of difference. Society excludes, does injustice, and maintains a disabling process of making the other. Arundhati Roy voices the decentering role of these marginalized characters and shows how they fight back against the socially disabling process and normative gaze. The dis/abled other challenges the notions of being and belonging.