Evil Empire 43that. The Absurd Apocalypse. Who would have imagined that could be
possible? But it is possible—more than possible—and it will be quicker
in the coming if Trump makes the dreadful mistake of attacking Iran.as: There is a marked stylistic difference between your two novels, The
God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published two
decades apart. While both speak of politics and violence, the former is
written in a style often described as lyrical realism. Beauty is one of its
preoccupations, and it ends on a hopeful note. The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness, on the other hand, is a more urgent, fragmented, and bleak
novel, where the losses are harder to sustain. Given the dominance of
lyrical realism in the postcolonial and global novel, was your stylistic
choice also a statement about the need to narrate global systems of
domination differently? Is the novel an indirect call to rethink repre-
sentation in Indian English fiction?
ar: The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness are
different kinds of novels. They required different ways of telling a story.
In both, the language evolved organically as I wrote them. I am not
really aware of making “stylistic choices” in a conscious way. In The
God of Small Things, I felt my way toward a language that would contain
both English and Malayalam—it was the only way to tell that story
of that place and those people. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was a
much riskier venture. To write it, I had to nudge the language of The
God of Small Things off the roof of a very tall building, then rush down
and gather up the shards. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is written in
English but imagined in many languages—Hindi, Urdu, English....
I wanted to try and write a novel that was not just a story told through
a few characters whose lives play out against a particular backdrop. I
tried to imagine the narrative form of the novel as if it were one of the