An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
The article examines the multilingual poetics of Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, focusing on the historically strained relations between English and India’s other languages. As a contribution to the project of “unforgetting English” (Walkowitz, 2015), the close reading of Roy’s novel reveals how English is construed and posited as a language within India’s multilingual environment. The use of English in Roy’s novel is tinged with a peculiar ambivalence: while it is marked as an alien language that is inimical to India’s linguistic plurality, English nevertheless serves as a literary and linguistic mediator that makes possible the encounter between different Indian languages in the first place. My article argues that the novel’s uneasy multilingualism navigates the possibilities (and impossibilities) of producing a literature that espouses ex-centric and small worlds in the hyper-central language of English.