SPATIAL IMAGINATION AND POLITICAL CARTOGRAPHY IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FICTION:A STUDY OF ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

Abstract

The spatial turn in literary studies has foregrounded the shaping role of geography, territory and place in the political and narrative imagination. In the South Asian context, the urgency of these questions comes from the region's histories of partition, occupation, caste segregation, and urban transformation. Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) stages this spatial politics, investing graveyards, ruins, and sites of conflict with the political work of narrative, memory, resistance, and other possible modes of belonging. It critically engages with the spatial poetics and political cartography of Roy’s novel. Through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, as read through a postcolonial and decolonial critical framework. Methodologically, the research combines close reading and textual analysis with spatial mapping, tracking references to place, borders, and movements throughout the text in order to gain a better understanding of the novel’s cartographic imagination. This close textual analysis yields a reading of Anjum’s graveyard as an alternative social space, the Jannat Guest House as radical hospitality, Kashmir mapped as heterotopia of crisis in the context of militarised occupation, and Delhi’s ruins as heterotopic archive of loss and memory. The confluence of these spaces in the novel produces a counter-map that undermines the territorial order of the state. The study concludes that Roy’s novel demonstrates literature’s capacity to reorganize spatial knowledge, producing counter-cartographies that reimagine nationhood and belonging.