Living and Dying Under Power: A Necropolitical Reading of PostcolonialFiction
Keywords:
Sovereign power, postcolonial literature, state violence, marginalized communities, critical theoryAbstract
This paper discusses necropolitical relations in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) by Arundhati Roy within the theoretical context of necropower by Achille Mbembe (2003) and biopolitics by Foucault and grievability by Butler. The novel is a fragmented yet very political narrative that foreshadows the existence of the marginalized communities that are forced to experience incessant surveillance, violence, and socio-political marginalization in postcolonial India. This paper examines the processes of power through the prism of death, abandonment, and systemic oppression in conflict-ridden regions such as Kashmir and among socially outcast groups such as hijras, religious minorities, and political dissidents to examine how the state exercises power to control life and death. Based on a qualitative textual analysis, the paper highlights that necropolitical formations transform living bodies into expendable subjects and simultaneously establish the field of resistance and survival. In the end, this study claims that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness not only reveals the inhuman face of state-approved violence but also reinvents the other ways of living in the conditions of death, thus disrupting the mainstream power structures and redefining the concept of humanity in the postcolonial world.
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