Hello everyone my name is Mansi Gujadiya . in this PPT I will discuss about" Anjum as a Transgender Character".

1. Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Date: 1st April 2024
Sem 4। Batch 2022-24
Contemporary English Literature
‘Anjum’AsaTransgernderCharacter
Prepared by Mansi Gujadiya

2. ‘Anjum’ As a
Transgender
Character
Present by Mansi Gujadiya

3. Personal Information
● Name:- Mansi B. Gujadiya
● Roll No.:- 12
● Enrollment Number:-4069206420220013
● Sem :- 4 (M.A)
● Paper No.:-207
● Paper Code:-22414
● Paper Name:-Contemporary Literatures in English
● Topic: ‘Anjum’ As a Transgender Character
● Submitted to:- Department of English MKBU
● Email:- mansigajjar10131@gmail.com

4. Introduction
● Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of “The God of Small Things”
(1997), wrote “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (2017), her second fiction,
twenty years after her debut with the former.
● “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” is an aching story and a decisive
demonstration. One follows Anjum, a trans-woman, struggling to make a life for
herself in Delhi. The world she conjures is often brutal. Psychoanalysis, the
Freudian theory is dealt with in this novel. The story begins and ends in the
graveyard. It possesses the strong voice of the LGBT community in Modern
India.
● The story speaks about gender discrimination, religious differences and the
political domination that encouraged assassinations of innocent people. The
victims are named as accused and they are murder on the name of law.
● The opening lines of “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” showed how Roy was
genuinely worried about sentiments and impact materials of the heart in her
portrayals of bigotry, violence, and a disgraceful lack of regard for humanity.
She relentlessly depicted “joy in the saddest places”

5. About Author
● Arundhati Roy, born in 1961 in Meghalaya to a Hindu father and a Christian mother
● She is a versatile figure known for her roles as an author, screenwriter, activist, actress, and
one-time aerobics instructor.
● Her works involve the harsh reality of society. She never showed any hesitation either to
write or speak on any felonious issue. As a writer, she never chooses to write fantasy, fairy
tale or romance but she prefers to decode the suffering of mankind.
● She is a writer with a cause behind every action; there is an effort to create a better situation
for the underprivileged. Today, She is world acclaimed authoress and a successful social
activist. She doesn’t believe in artificial traditions and manmade history. She questions the
taboos, patriarch ways of life, the authority of political power over people that is reflected in
her works.
● Roy has been involved in various protests such as against Sardar Sarovar Dam project which
took away homes of the poor .She was also against building Narmada dam.
● She gained global recognition with her award-winning novel, "The God of Small Things"
(1997), which won the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into 42 languages. Despite
controversies, the novel is considered a modern classic.
● In 2017, Roy released her second fiction book, "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," set in
Delhi and Kashmir, covering decades of modern Indian history. The novel, like its
predecessor, employs layered prose to depict the complexity of India's politics and society.

6. Transgender as Term
● The word “transgender” – or trans – is an umbrella term for people whose gender
identity is different from the sex assigned to us at birth.
● Although the word “transgender” and our modern definition of it only came into use in
the late 20th century, people who would fit under this definition have existed in every
culture throughout recorded history.
● The trans community is incredibly diverse. Some trans people identify as trans men or
trans women, while others may describe themselves as non-binary, genderqueer,
gender non-conforming, agender, bigender or other identities that reflect their
personal experience.
● Some of us take hormones or have surgery as part of our transition, while others may
change our pronouns or appearance.
● The very concept of Hijras and other Transgenders in India is not new; they have been
recognized in our ancient history as well. Transgender Community comprises Hijras,
eunuchs, Kothis, Aravanis, Jogappas, Shiv-Shakthis, etc. and they, as a group, have a
strong historical presence in our country in the Hindu mythology and other religious
texts.

7. Birth and Family Reaction
In the novel when Aftab's mother discovers he is not a boy, but a girl. Furthermore, Aftab was born as a
boy but he doesn't feel comfortable being a boy, and his mother kept a secret of a girl part by thinking it
will be gone.In a novel When Jahanara Begum Knows about it Writer Describe it very wall like:
○ Is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby? Jahanara Begum was.
○ Her first reaction was to feel her heart constrict and her bones turn to ash.
○ Her second reaction was to take another look to make sure she was not mistaken.
○ Her third reaction was to recoil from what she had created while her bowels convulsed
and a thin stream of shit ran down her legs.
○ Her fourth reaction was to contemplate killing herself and her child.
○ Her fifth reaction was to pick her baby up and hold him close while she fell through a crack
between the world she knew and worlds she didn't know existed.
○ Her sixth reaction was to clean herself up and resolve to tell nobody for the moment. Not
even her husband.
○ Her seventh reaction was to lie down next to Aftab and rest. Like the God of the Christians
did, after he had made Heaven and Earth. Except that in his case he rested after making
sense of the world he had created, whereas Jahanara Begum rested after what she
created had scrambled her sense of the world. It wasn’t a real vagina after all, she told
herself.(Roy)

8. Childhood
● Anjum faces the social unacceptability in her life from her childhood to an old age Anjum’s parents
tried their best to treat her, but they could not do so. In her childhood, she was admitted to a
music school.
● She was an intelligent student and performed well in that school, but when her class fellows
came to know that she was a transgender, they started teasing her. ‘’He’s a she. He’s not a He or
a She. He’s a He and a She. She -He Hee! Hee! Hee! ’.At last, Anjum was forced to leave the
school and stayed at home all day. Trauma victims can have low self-Esteem and alienation. This
mocking and teasing was also the cause of severe pain for Anjum
● One day when Aftab saw someone who took all his attention,
“a slim-shaped woman wearing bright lipstick, gold high heels, and wore a green satin
salwar kameez were buying bangles at Chili Qabar.”(Roy)
● As a result, he felt something that made him following her. She felt like want to be freed and
wanted to be like her. He wanted to dress, walk, and behave like her freely.

9. Medical Encounters
"It took him a while to get over the initial shock. Times had changed, he said. This
was modern era. He was sure there was simple medicul solution to their son's
problem" (Roy)
The parents of Aftab took him to a doctor, a sexologist to determine his sex. According to
the doctor, he was not a hijra yet for practical purposes can be called one. On the other
hand, he was instilled with both male and female characteristic features. The doctor
called him a Hermaphrodite and suggested that the female parts be removed surgically.
As an Indian transgender,Anjum dressed in an Indian woman and she wanted to
feel like a normal woman phase. Then she went to a doctor and chose to do the
surgery and add her female hormones. Although she already had her surgery it did
not last forever, her vagina turned out to be a scam. She did not have enough
money to do surgery again, so she collected her money at that time. However, her
hormones make her voice deeper like a male, so she took out the pills from the
doctor, and it helps a lot.

10. House of Hijra
“He Khwabgah was called Khwabgah, Ustad Kulsoom Bi said, because it was
where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be
realized in the Duniya. In the Kwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies
were liberated.” (Roy)
● Anjum decided to leave her house and move to the Khwabgah or House of Dreams,
where other transgenders lived and worked, mostly as specialist courtesans.
House of Jannat
“She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and
welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did the opposite. Between shifts she
conferred with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high branches. She felt
gentle grip of their talons like an ache in an amputated limb. She gathered they
weren’t altogether unhappy at having excused themselves and exited from the
story” (Roy)
● Once again when Anjum finally moved from Kwabgah to the graveyard it marked her
passage to yet another world. She sheds her brightly coloured costume and dressed
herself in Pathan suit. Her adopted femininity gave way to her dreaded masculine
features. She converted the local cemetery into a kind of guesthouse, and she called it
a Jannat or paradise.

11. Hijra Community
● Another community on which Roy’s novel focuses for its first six
chapters: India’s hijras – a name that refers to gay or transgender
men, or eunuchs, who crossdress and have surgery and/or
hormone treatment to live as women, and which can also
encompass a broader range of non heteronormative markers
including the male use of cosmetics and forms of camp behaviour.
● As part of a trans community they are still marginalised and
subjected to forms of social injustice and ostracism in relation to
wider Hindu-Muslim society. as fictional subjects in Roy’s novel
they reflect the author’s long-standing interest in forms of
hybridity and figure her ethical commitment to what we might call
the radical postcolonial politics of ‘unclassifiability’.
● in a space of doubly marginalised, alternative community: not the
more conventional family home or workplace but the ambiguous
self-fashioning sisterhood of the Khwabgah.

12. Societal Responses
● Roy showed that India is not a utopia for hijras, rather they are always abandoned from all
social rituals. India has a long-established tradition of caste which specifies boundaries of
purity and pollution between communities. Society is homophobic and hijras are not
treated as human beings; they attempt to be connected with the society participating in
different social celebrations as wedding, birth, and house-warming ceremonies. Roy
mentioned that:
“They descended on ordinary people’s celebrations – weddings, births,
housewarming ceremonies – dancing, singing in their wild, grating voices, offering
their blessings and threatening to embarrass the hosts . . . and ruin the occasion with
curses and a display of unthinkable obscenity unless they are paid a fee” (Roy) .
● Another instance of the ill-treatment is that which Anjum has to face during Gujarat riots
after the Godhra incident where her old companion is brutally killed by the mob in spite of
her attempts to save him. The mob is about to kill her but her life is saved as someone in
the mob opines that killing a Hijra is a bad omen, an ‘apshakun’. She is abused and
humiliated for being a ‘hijra’ and even more for being a ‘Muslim Hijra’.

13. Quest for Identity
● Gender is a cultural construct as Michel Foucault argued that “sexuality is not a
natural feature or fact of human life but a constructed category of experience
which has historical, social, and cultural, rather than biological, origins” . A
person’s identity is defined by his body and sexual identity is constructed by
society, which is a repressive and negative force.
● Roy portrayed the polarization of gender and race regarding the identity of hijras
who are treated as inferior, untouchable and marginalized in Indian society
● The trapping of sex into two divisions as female and male made her confused
about her identity. Although in the beginning, she wanted to become a woman,
eventually she realizes she can never become one as per the standards of the
society. Questions regarding her identity and existence started tormenting her.
The fact that she could never fit into the normal society hurt her deeply. In spite of
all this, she becomes Delhi’s most famous hijra.
● Ustad Kulsoom Bi, one of the older members of the Kwabgah, was very proud of
being a hijra. He always recited stories from the ancient history of India to make
the younger generation aware about the positions they held before the colonial
rule.

14. ● Transgender, third gender, (Hijras) are considered as neither man nor woman and are being subjected
to social exclusion and alienation from time to time. These people are shunned by both family and
society equally, and face severe identity crisis as they could not define themselves in the conventional
male and female boundaries.
● In every society, they are marginalized and forced to live a life of an "other." Their education as well as
public space is restricted or they themselves choose to live a life of seclusion due to certain limitations.
The author will analyse some major Transgender, third gender, (Hijra) characters in the novel, The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness and try to locate their alienation within gender specific literary discourse.
● In the novel, Transgender characters are mostly torn between two worlds-male-female, love-hate life-
death and so on. They sometimes seek to avoid desire altogether. As language and desire are
complementary, their attempts to remake themselves through 'naming' and 'renaming' turns out as a
heroic but unsuccessful exercise. Such characters either endure the pain of social stratification or try
to locate their identity in the complex social, and gender taxonomy, cultured by dominant class from
various prevalent and divisive socio-religious discourses.
● There is a complex history behind the segregation of this under class group, ranging from religious
doctrines to the social mythical narratives. Since, it is not possible to cover the whole spectrum of their
suppression from Adam's creation to the present time in this research paper, the author will only give a
brief account of the plight of Hijra community in India as portrayed in the novel, keeping in mind the key
texts related to gender studies in order to explore the problems they face in day to day life.
As a marginalized Group

15. Government Riots
● Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act – Under Section 18 of this Act, it is illegal for any person to
sexually abuse any transgender person.
● Indian Penal Code – All transgender women can seek protection under all the sections of the Indian Penal Code
protecting women from sexual abuse. This was mentioned by the High Court of Delhi in the case of Anamika v.
Union of India(2020).
● Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace – If any transgender person faces sexual harassment at
their school/college, then it will be considered as Sexual Harassment at the Workplace. Any transgender
student is eligible to file a complaint with the Internal Complaints Committee of the said school/university.
● The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019 was introduced in Lok Sabha on July 19, 2019, by the
Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, Mr. Thaawar Chand Gehlot.
The Act also allows for the constitution of a National Council for Transgender Persons. The National Council has been
tasked with
● Advising the Central Government on the formulation of policies, programs, legislation, and projects for
transgender persons;
● Reviewing and coordinating the activities of all the departments of Government and other Governmental and
non-Governmental Organisations which are dealing with matters relating to transgender persons;
● Redressing the grievances of transgender persons;
● Performing such other functions as may be prescribed by the Central Government.

16. Conclusion
Anjum's portrayal as a transgender character in "The Ministry of
Utmost Happiness" offers a poignant exploration of identity and
resilience. Through her journey, Arundhati Roy challenges societal
norms and prejudices, inviting readers to empathize with the struggles
faced by transgender individuals. Anjum's courage in embracing her
true self underscores the importance of acceptance and compassion in
fostering a more inclusive society. Overall, her story serves as a
powerful reminder of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual,
regardless of gender identity.

17. Works Cited
KUMAR, RAJESH, et al. “TRANSGENDER PERSPECTIVE IN 'THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS.'” PUNE RESEARCH, JUNE-
AUG 2020, http://puneresearch.com/media/data/issues/5ed5caf0afd8e.pdf. Accessed 1 April 2024.
PETER, RIYA MARRY. “Transgender Marginalization and Exclusion in Arundathi Roy's The Ministry of the Utmost Happiness.”
IJCRT.org, 3 March 2020, https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2003418.pdf. Accessed 1 April 2024.
Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Penguin Books Limited, 2017.
Accessed 1 April 2024.
Siddiqui, Mariyam Ilyas. “The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness: Roy's Attempt To Represent India's Struggle With Social Issues.”
Quest Journals, 23 July 2018, https://www.questjournals.org/jrhss/papers/vol6-issue6/E06062124.pdf. Accessed 1 April
2024.
“The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019.” PRS Legislative Research,
https://prsindia.org/billtrack/the-transgender-persons-protection-of-rights-bill-2019. Accessed 15 March
2024.

18. Thank
You