Name – Janvi Nakum
Paper No - 207
Paper Name : Contemporary Literature
Roll no- 11
Enrollment no –4069206420210020
Email id – janvinakum360@gmail.com
Batch- 2021-2023(M.A. Sem – 4)
Topic : Political and Gender issues in Arundhati Roy’s "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness"
Submitted to – S.B. Gardi Department of English Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
What does Transgender mean?
Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of being male, female or something else; gender expression refers to the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, voice or body characteristics. “Trans” is sometimes used as shorthand for “transgender.” While transgender is generally a good term to use, not everyone whose appearance or behavior is gender-nonconforming will identify as a transgender person. The ways that transgender people are talked about in popular culture, academia and science are constantly changing, particularly as individuals’ awareness, knowledge and openness about transgender people and their experiences grow.
In India transgender issues
India is a multiracial and multicultural country where the concepts of gender, class and caste create a sense of discrimination among different categories of people. The gender identity impacts on hijras’ lives; they do not get gender recognition, employment, proper housing, and health-care services properly. They face discrimination and inequality so harsh that they feel that they are inferior. In Neither Man Nor Woman, Nanda (1999) states, “although cross-gender behavior in childhood is a prominent theme in hijra narratives, this behavior is not necessarily connected to a clear feminine gender identity” (p. 115). Hijras are in-between gender, and they face cross-gender situation. They are controversial community in Indian society and their existence disrupts essential ideas about sex or gender. Holmes (2004) writes, “recognition of third sexes and third genders is not equal to valuing the presence of those who were neither male nor female”. Though hijras as third genders adopt feminine identity and they are not like ordinary Indian women. Society cannot accept them as female; rather, people have negative attitudes towards them.
Indians face the national identity crisis in some of the places of the country. Though people are citizens and freedom are guaranteed by the Constitution, people still feel as if they reside in a foreign land. They could not align with the ethnically diverse society. Thus, they seek independence and isolation from their own country. They are in a bind because they do not know if they belong to India. This desire for recognition contributes to defiance and contempt.
Roy View
Roy gave voice to a socially outcasted community through Anjum/Aftab’s narrative and described their mental anguish with deep psychological insights. Anjum was told by Nimo Gorakhpuri, another hijra with whom she became intimate that they were created by God as an experiment. God wanted to create a living being incapable of happiness and therefore He created Hijras.
“The beating husbands and cheating wives are all in us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us… it will never settle down. It can’t” (p. 23).
Roy showed that India is not a utopia for hijras, rather they are always abandoned from all social rituals. India has a long-established tradition of caste which specifies boundaries of purity and pollution between communities. Society is homophobic and hijras are not treated as human beings; they attempt to be connected with the society participating in different social celebrations as wedding, birth, and house-warming ceremonies. Roy mentioned that:
they descended on ordinary people’s celebrations – weddings, births, housewarming ceremonies – dancing, singing in their wild, grating voices, offering their blessings and threatening to embarrass the hosts . . . and ruin the occasion with curses and a display of unthinkable obscenity unless they are paid a fee (p.24).
Roy's creations interpret spatial encounters as dynamic dialectic mechanisms, dealing with the race, class and caste consciousness of the characters. In terms of the dialectics of gender identity and space, Roy takes the reader in the streets of Delhi, Kashmir and some other places that are special in nature. Roy does seem to comply with the statement “nowhere is the tendency to gender space as evident in colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial spaces” . The novel also tells the stories of other people, such as R C's wife who finds space as an adhering, oppressive force. Naga gets shocked when R C told him about penalizing women by physical violence.
Political and Gender issues in Arundhati Roy’s "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness"
Indians face the national identity crisis in some of the places of the country. Though people are citizens and freedom are guaranteed by the Constitution, people still feel as if they reside in a foreign land. They could not align with the ethnically diverse society. Thus, they seek independence and isolation from their own country. They are in a bind because they do not know if they belong to India. This desire for recognition contributes to defiance and contempt.
The naturalized binary gender classification is critiqued in the novel through the life story of Anjum born as Aftab. Aftab was born as the son of Jahanara Begum and Mulaqat Ali in Khwabgah. The sexual identity of the child terrifies the mother and she does not unravel it even to her husband for some time. Both expected a baby boy but quite contrary to their conventional expectations it was neither a boy nor a girl. Jahanara Begum thought, “In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things–carpets, clothes, books, pens, and musical instruments –had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby”. She considered this as quite contradictory to live separate with language or conventional notions of life. Fausto Sterling expresses a similar idea when she states “European and American culture is deeply devoted to the idea that there are only two sexes. Even our language refuses other possibilities; . . . whether one falls into the category of man or woman matters in concrete ways”. His father Mulaqat Ali attempts to help the child become “normal” desperately, but he finds that his child is unable to fit comfortably into one sex. Aftab, a Hijra or Kinnar was ridiculed by other children and they pointed out to his ambiguous identity both as male and a female, “a he and a she”. Aftab finds himself physically and psychologically bothered because others expect him to fit into the conventional system. Aftab had a body which blurred the conventional borders of male and female. The story of Aftab divulges the problems of living in a society which is characterized by essentialist explanation of gender. The understanding of self in children begins with sex related categorization of the self as male or female. It is also found that certain types of behaviour are related to a sex and it is assumed to be stable. Such a distinction based on sex reinforces sexual inequalities according to feminist theorists. Gender variation according to the biologist Fausto Sterling is normal. Her study based on the infants whose abstruse genitalia were surgically changed shows impossibility of confirming always to a binary gender structure. Biologists like Fausto believe that there are actually five sexes – male, female, Hermes (that is a hermaphrodite or persons with both an ovary and testes), Mermes (That is male hermaphrodites which are raised with testes and with certain features of women's genitals) and Ferms (this is the female hermaphrodite with ovaries in tandem with certain features of male genitals).
Aftab, a female trapped in a male body, embraces the identity of a woman and hopes to realize his/her true self. In Judith Butler’s opinion we need not consider gender to be passively determined but “it is a process of constructing ourselves”. Body is considered as a locus of dialectical process and in this process, what has been imprinted on the flesh gets a new set of historical interpretation. Aftab’s transformation to Anjum is explicated as a passage into another world. She lives with other people, a heterogeneous community of hermaphrodites, which incorporates men who don’t believe in surgery, Hindus, and Muslims. The dichotomy of the ordinary world, Duniya and the world of Hijra’s is presented in a subtle manner. Anjum learns that the Hijra’s were a chosen set of people who were endowed with the power to curse and bless. But the irony is that the very same chosen people bestowed with this power are confined to a peripheral existence. For Aftab initially, the transformation into Anjum is a mode of self-transcendence. But Anjum often reflects about the despicable condition of the Hijra’s, and Kwabgah was the abode of such people like her. It is a place which liberated their souls from their bodies. Anjum’s friend Kulsoom Bi recounts the history of Kwabgah and Hijra’s and underlines the significant role played by the Hijra community in the great Hindu mythology and the Royal palace. They enjoyed a position and were respected and loved for their services to society too. Kulsoom remarks “To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being written out of it altogether” (Roy 2017, 51). They have a tradition of being an integral part of and outside of the culture.
Kwabgah, the house of dreams, provides shelter and hope to many people like Anjum whom the rational world hasostracized. Anjum sought to escape from the borderland of the gender conflict within the self. It is not only Anjum in the novel, but characters as well have a border within the self and in the external world. She satisfies her urge as a half-woman when she takes up the role of a mother figure by raising Zainab, an abandoned kid from the street. Zainab grows with a lot of mothers like Anjum in an uncustomary way. Anjum through her transformations - from a boy, to neither being boy or girl physiologically, to a woman psychologically – tries to redefine her life. The duality of being neither a man nor a woman or being both a man and a woman lead Anjum into different territories of the world. Kwabgah is one such place where the Hijra’s hope to liberate their “Holy Soul” trapped in their wrong bodies. Kwabgah is unlike the ordinary world and it is defined as “another world”. Anjum refers to this world as Duniya, a world which for her is oblivious of the predicament of the Hijra’s. Kwabgah is a world in itself; it is considered to be abode of “special people”, or “blessed people” who “came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya” (Roy 2017, 53).
The narrative unwinds the drifting life story of Tilotama in a world of war violence. In contrast to Anjum’s tale which unfolds the internal conflicts of a transgender, Tilo’s life exposes a world of external conflict. The tragic life of people in Kashmir is intricately expressed through the life of Tilo. Her quest for Musa, a Kashmiri activist, leads her into trouble. She witnesses the inhuman punishment meted out to people by the military officials. She herself becomes a victim of it and in the name of interrogation they shave her head. It is a comment on the way the state deploys and justifies its approach to gender. She tries to retaliate it by deciding never to grow her hair long anymore. Her unconventional and adventurous life breaks the barrier between her public and private sphere. Her presence in the fictional world questions such assumptions regarding the role of men and women in both the public and private world. Man is considered responsible for the productive public sphere and a woman to the reproductive private sphere. Tilotama breaks the narrowly defined assumptions of sexuality and childbearing when she decides to terminate her pregnancy medically because she believed that she would not be a good mother. Her escape from the bonds of family life, the private to the public sphere as an activist mark the emergence of her social and political identity. According to Linda Alcoff, women’s subjectivity and identity constitute their position. The act of conceiving, giving birth, and breast feeding related to the body differentiates men and women. In Alcoff’s (2005) opinion on biological reproduction is
“the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, it can generate a wide variety of effective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction.” (Alcoff 172)
The perspective of oppressed gender identities as third-space experiences depicts their challenges, revolutionary actions and their continuing stories of rebellion. Their constant struggles territorialise and re-territorialize, hence restructuring the assemblages which shape human survival in societies. While woman is considered as the Other—a conventional identity, the marginalised other which helps to build up the binary seems to coexist with the hegemonic class that continuously undermining and struggling hegemonic settlements and social relations—Other gender identities are struggling in the wider range to preserve their identity. They detach and develop their own social networks and social structures which establish heterotopias and struggle to survive the normative frameworks of the societies. Literary narratives, if they are to consider the interrelationship of space and class, appear like Arundhati Roy's book, as an important cultural trope of every specific historical period.
Work cited
Suleman, Danish, Abdul Halim Mohamed, and Md Ahmmed. "Political and Gender issues in Arundhati Roy’s' The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'." Suleman, D., Mohamed, AH, & Ahmmed, MF (2020). Political and Gender issues in Arundhati Roy’s" The Ministry of Utmost Happiness". Indonesian Journal of Cultural and Community Development 5 (2020): 10-21070.
Suleman, Danish, and Dr Ab Rahman. "Transgender issues in Indian society from the viewpoint of Arundhati Roy’s novel, the ministry of utmost happiness." Suleman, D., & binti Ab Rahman, F.(2020). Transgender Issues in Indian Society from the Viewpoint of Arundhati Roy’s Novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. South Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 1.3 (2020): 159-172.
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