This presentation was given as Semester end Presentation of MA English Semester 4 at the Department of English, MKBU

1. Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Department of English
Date: 1st April 2023
Sem 4। Batch 2022-24
Presentation on
“The Depiction of Scavengers in
'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'”
Contemporary English Literature
Presented by
Ghanshyam Katariya

2. The Depiction of Scavengers
in
'The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness'

3. Introduction
Presented By: Ghanshyam Katariya
Roll NO. : 07
Semester: 4
Paper NO. : 207
Paper Name: Contemporary Literatures in English
Topic: The Depiction of Scavengers in 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'
Submitted To: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English
Email ID: gkatariya67@gmail.com
Date 01/04/2024

4. Table of content
● About the Author
● About the Novel ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'
● Scavengers depicted in the Novel
● The Vulture
● The Crow
● The Dung Beetle
● Conclusion

5. ● Born in 1960 in Kerala, India
● Studied architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture
● Worked as a production designer and has written two screenplays
● Her debut novel "The God of Small Things" won the Booker Prize for Fiction
in 1997
● "The God of Small Things" sold over 6 million copies worldwide and was
translated into 30 languages
● She is a prominent author of non-fiction books and essays, critiquing the
Indian government and exploring democracy in India
● Her non-fiction works include "The Cost of Living," "Power Politics," "The
Algebra of Infinite Justice," and "Listening to Grasshoppers"
● She was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2003
● Her second novel, "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," was published in
2017 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (Procter)
Arundhati Roy

6. ● It is Roy's second novel, released in 2017, almost two decades after her debut
"The God of Small Things" (1997)
● The novel explores life in India in the aftermath of the Partition through the
lives of two central characters:
○ Anjum, a transgender woman who finds refuge in a Delhi cemetery after
tragedy
○ Tilo, an architect who has a love affair with a Kashmiri separatist named
Musa
● It has a complex narrative structure with a large cast of secondary and tertiary
characters
● Major themes of the novel include Hindu nationalism, Kashmiri separatism,
and communal violence
● Roy takes her readers on a labyrinthine journey as chaotic and lively as the
streets of modern-day Delhi themselves. (Saini)
● It shines a light on the shortcomings of national leadership in India and
elsewhere. (Saini)
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

7. The Depiction of Scavengers
Vultures Crows
Dung Beetle

8. 1. The Vulture
The old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a
hundred million years, that have been wiped out. The vultures died of
diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow-aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle
relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked –
like nerve gas on white-backed vultures.Each chemically relaxed, milk-
producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture-bait. As cattle
turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream,
butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate-chip, as it drank more
mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were
tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from
their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead. Not many
noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. (Roy)

9. ● Diclofenac is a widely available veterinary drug in South Asia, where
it is used to treat domestic livestock. (Swan et al.)
● Widespread use of diclofenac in south Asian cattle was linked to the
deaths of millions of vultures that ate carcasses containing the drug,
causing some populations to decline by more than 99% since the
1990s. (Becker)
● Explicit estimates of the proportion of the excess mortality required
to cause the population declines that are attributable to diclofenac
range between 71% and 100%, depending on vulture population and
model assumptions, and confidence limits included 100% over all or
most of the plausible range of the assumed value for adult survival.
Hence, we conclude that diclofenac poisoning is at least the major
cause, and possibly the only cause, of rapid population declines of
OWBV and LBV across the Indian subcontinent. (Green et al.)
Use of Diclofenac

10. ● Given that diclofenac is widely used in Pakistan and India
(Risebrough 2005) and is produced and distributed by many
companies, it may take a considerable time to remove it from the
food supply of vultures. In view of this, and the continuing rapid
vulture population declines, it is probable that some or all of the
three threatened Gyps species will soon become extinct in the
wild, either completely or over large parts of their range. (Green
et al.)
● Three species of vultures endemic to South Asia are in grave
danger of extinction and are now listed as critically endangered
(IUCN 2004). Populations of Oriental white-backed (Gyps
bengalensis), long-billed (Gyps indicus) and slender-billed
vultures (Gyps tenuirostris) have declined by more than 95%
since the early 1990s (Prakash et al. 2003; Green et al. 2004).
Mortality caused by diclofenac, a non-steroidal anti-
inflammatory drug (NSAID), is the main cause of the observed
population declines. (Swan et al.)

11. 2. The Crow
A crow hung frozen in mid-air, one of its wings spread out like a fan. A feathered
Christ, hanging askew, on an invisible cross. The sky swarmed with thousands of
agitated, low-flying fellow crows, their distraught cawing drowning out every other city
sound. Above them in an upper tier, silent kites circled, curious perhaps, but
inscrutable. The crucified crow was absolutely still. Very quickly a small crowd of
people gathered to watch the proceedings, to frighten themselves to death, to advise
each other about the occult significance of frozen crows, and to discuss the exact nature
of the horrors that this ill-omen, this macabre curse, would visit upon them. What had
happened was not a mystery. The crow’s wing feathers had snagged mid-flight on
an invisible kite string that was laced across the branches of the old Banyan trees in
the graveyard. The felon – a purple paper- kite – peeped guiltily through the foliage of
one of them. The string, a new Chinese brand that had suddenly flooded the
market, was made of tough, transparent plastic, coated with ground glass.
Independence Day kite-warriors used it to ‘cut’ each other’s strings, and bring
each other’s kites down. It had already caused some tragic accidents in the city. (Roy)

12. Hundreds of birds die every year, including some rare species during the
January kite-flying season in western Gujarat state making it one of the
biggest man-made disasters in India. (“Kite-flying turns death trap for birds”)
Soham Mukherjee of the Animal Help Foundation (AHF) observes that,
“The use of razor-sharp Chinese nylon thread and string coated with
powdered glass led to whole wings of birds being cut off” (“Kite-flying
turns death trap for birds”)
Vultures, Kites, pigeons, dove, eagles, crows, sarus cranes and parakeets
were among those injured by kite flying. Some of these birds are critically
endangered criteria.
(“Kite-flying turns death trap for birds”)
WILDLIFE TRUST OF INDIA (WTI) in
the article “Kite-flying turns death trap
for birds” states that,

13. 3. The Dung Beetle
● “By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep.
Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake
and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case
the heavens fell. But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end.
They would, because they had to.” (Roy)
● Prominent in the sky, but not visible to humans, is a pattern of polarized skylight
formed around both the Sun and the Moon. Dung beetles are, at present, the only
animal group known to use the much dimmer polarization pattern formed around
the Moon as a compass cue for maintaining travel direction. (Dacke et al.)
● Dung beetles transport their dung balls along straight paths under a starlit sky but
lose this ability under overcast conditions. In a planetarium, the beetles orientate
equally well when rolling under a full starlit sky as when only the Milky Way is
present. (Dacke et al.)

14. ● The dung beetles deliver important ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, waste
removal, seed dispersal, and by removing dung from the surface, the flies and
parasites that breed in dung are not prominent. Burrowing, aerating and mixing the
soil increases its nutrient content as well as improves the water holding capacity of
the soil. This may be beneficial for agriculture too. (Nongmeikpam)
● If it were not for them we’d be assaulted by infections, disease, stench and filth. But
we regard them with disgust, turning up our noses at them and their work. (Lal)
● Ornithologists kept raising the alarm, yet very little attention was paid till the number
of vultures became alarmingly low. The struggle to protect them is turning out to be a
stupendous task. Now, the bugle for another species has been sounded – this time by
the entomologists. For dung beetles. Like the vultures, the dung beetles are
scavengers, coprophagous insects that feed on the faeces of animals (Iyer)
● In a 2005 paper, the scientist I.C. Mittal raised this issue: “Monitoring the diversity
and conservation status of dung beetles is important because they play a critical role
in recycling the organic matter in nature, but also because they are on decline now.”
(Iyer)
● In 2011, Simi Venugopal from Loyola College, Chennai, studied the diversity and
community structure of the dung beetles in the semi-urban agricultural lands of the
Malabar coast and found a decrease in diversity and a change in their community
status. A year later, Sabu K. Thomas, an associate professor from St Joseph’s
College, Calicut, and his students recorded species loss in five genera of dung beetles
in the moist slopes of the Western Ghats in South India. (Iyer)

15. Conclusion
● Through the depiction of the scavengers like Vultures, Crow and Dung Beetle, Arundhati Roy presents her
concern of these endangered species.
● It also presents a symbolic representation as Chakraborty tries to connect and says about the novel that,
○ Like the vultures who die of diclofenac poisoning – good birds, old friends, scavengers them vultures
dying of cow-aspirin consumption – in the preface, in the same way, the guardians of our memory, the
writers, the artistes, the scribes, the journalists, the painters, the singers, the dancers and the musicians –
they are dropping dead from the sky. (Chakraborty)
● “ Very quickly a small crowd of people gathered to watch the proceedings, to frighten themselves to death, to
advise each other about the occult significance of frozen crows, and to discuss the exact nature of the horrors
that this ill-omen, this macabre curse, would visit upon them” (Roy)
● “He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world “
“But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end.” (Roy)

16. References
Becker, Rachel. “Cattle drug threatens thousands of vultures.” nature.com, 6 January 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19839.
Accessed 31 March 2024.
Chakraborty, Angshukanta. “Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a literary castration of the hypermasculine nation.” dailyo, 9
November 2017, https://www.dailyo.in/arts/arundhati-roy-the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-review-hypernationalism-toxic-masculinity-
17667. Accessed 1 April 2024.
Dacke, M., et al. “How dim is dim? Precision of the celestial compass in moonlight and sunlight.” PubMed, 12 March 2011,
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21282173/. Accessed 1 April 2024.
Green, Rhys E., et al. “Diclofenac poisoning as a cause of vulture population declines across the Indian subcontinent.” British Ecological Society,
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0021-8901.2004.00954.x. Accessed 31 March 2024.
Iyer, Geetha. “Why Dung Beetles Are the Unsung Heroes of Our Environment.” The Wire, 18 April 2017, https://thewire.in/environment/dung-
beetles-habitat-ivermectin. Accessed 31 March 2024.
“Kite-flying turns death trap for birds.” Wildlife Trust of India, 9 November 2017, https://www.wti.org.in/news/kite-flying-turns-death-trap-for-birds/.
Accessed 31 March 2024.

17. Lal, Ranjit. “The Clean-up Crew | Eye News.” The Indian Express, 18 October 2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-
eye/scavenger-species-dung-beetle-the-clean-up-crew-6765164/. Accessed 1 April 2024.
Nongmeikpam, Vatsala. “[Explainer] The beetles that roll dung and follow the stars.” Mongabay-India, 1 March 2021,
https://india.mongabay.com/2021/03/explainer-the-beetles-that-roll-dung-and-follow-the-stars/. Accessed 1 April 2024.
Procter, James. “Arundhati Roy - Literature.” British Council Literature, 2002, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/arundhati-roy. Accessed
31 March 2024.
Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
Saini, Angela. “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, book review.” The Independent, 21 June 2017,
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-by-arundhati-roy-book-review-
a7791941.html. Accessed 1 April 2024.
Swan, Gerry E, et al. “Toxicity of diclofenac to Gyps vultures - PMC.” NCBI, 2006, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618889/.
Accessed 31 March 2024.
Webb, Lisa. “The Dung Beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae and Hydrophilidae) of Ayrshire, Scotland, featured Bulletin article.” Amateur
Entomologists' Society, 2004, https://www.amentsoc.org/publications/bulletin/articles/dung-beetles-of-ayrshire.html. Accessed 31 March
2024.

18. Thank You