Small Things" And "Utmost" Worlds: A Comparative Study of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract This paper analyses the novels written by Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), to understand the changes in her themes, narration and political perspectives. Both novels, written two decades apart, delineate the on-going issues of marginalised communities and societal injustices in India, of which Roy's is always the central theme. The study indicates that The God of Small Things is a poetic and tightly knitted story which emphasizes on the personal remembrance, childhood trauma and caste discrimination in a family and a small locality in Kerala. In non-linear style and with lyrical language, it awakens intimate images of suffering and the tragic consequences of violating the “Love Laws” of society. Whereas, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness expands Roy's storytelling talents into a wide-ranging, multivoiced account of India, communities and history. The novel is composed of fictional, journalistic and political texts that tackle issues of religious violence, government repression, gender and sexual identity and displacement. This paper will use comparisons of the forms, characters, themes, and space that Roy uses in his stories to demonstrate how his writing begins by focusing internally on his own grief and ends by criticizing the violence of the society and the government. Both books, however, have a strong moral tone and are concerned with giving voice to the voiceless and uncovering the mechanisms of exclusion. Overall, the novels demonstrate Roy's development from the lyrical reflection to the assertive political witness, making the point that personal experience and political issues are intertwined in contemporary Indian literature. .