Necropolitics, Existential Crisis, and Third Space in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness through the Lens of the Rohingya Crisis

Abstract

Necropolitics is a concept derived from postcolonial theory about the politics of death, where political power categorizes people as disposable and determines how certain individuals should live and how others must die. Roy's fictional landscapes in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) (e.g., Delhi's graveyard, militarized Kashmiri valleys, forest near Telangana) and Myanmar's Rakhine State operate under sovereign control. These political spaces align with Achille Mbembe's notion of necropolitics wherein life and death become indistinct due to state-sanctioned violence, erasure, and the politics of disposability. Movingfrom state-driven structural violence to the psychological dimensions of being descended to"bare-life", both the characters of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) and the real- world Rohingya voices come to the fore with their existential crisis, confronting the absurdity of meaning and the indifferent moral order of the universe. Transitioning from vulnerability to resilience, both Roy's fictional graveyard and the Khwabgah in Delhi and the Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar offer a redemptive conclusion to the critical journey of their lives asThird Spaces of survival, healing, and solidarity. This research presents the intensifying marginalization depicted in Roy's fictional novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) asa panorama of literary testimony juxtaposing the escalating persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar's Rakhine State, who later on sought refuge in Cox’s Bazar camps.