"Hope and grief woven together": Consolation in a queer reading of Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

This article analyzes the role of consolation in Arundhati Roy's novel *The Ministry of Utmost Happiness* (2017) through a biopolitical and queer theoretical lens, focusing on its critique of contemporary Indian politics, Hindu nationalism, casteism, and neoliberalism. It argues that the novel's liberatory potential emerges from its depiction of liminal identities—such as the Dalit-Muslim character Saddam Hussain and the intersex hijra Anjum—who inhabit a queer counterpublic centered around Jannat Guest House, a cemetery refuge that challenges dominant socio-political hegemonies. By embodying Agamben's concept of *homo sacer* (bare life excluded from political recognition) and Butlerian precarity, these characters subvert normative categories of caste, religion, gender, and citizenship, offering alternative modes of existence and hope amid marginalization. The article also discusses the novel's linguistic politics and readership limitations, suggesting that its reformative potential lies more in its representation of marginalized lives and queer dissent than in its accessibility to those it depicts. Ultimately, the novel envisions precarity as a site for utopian possibility and consolation for the "Unconsoled" in New India.