An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Bibliographic Data

ID9002198
AuthorsBirgit Neumann (0000-0002-1181-9906, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume58
Issue3
Pages593-609
Publication date2021-04-29
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/00219894211007916
OpenAlexW3158067697
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited30

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

Alien · Ambivalence · Christian ministry · Citizenship · English language · Happiness · Linguistic landscape · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sociology · Theology · Translanguaging · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South Asian Studies and Diaspora · Translation Studies and Practices

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