Margins to Movements: Social Innovation and Diffusion of AlternativeCommunities in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness through the lens of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory, focusing on how marginalized communities generate and disseminate social innovations that challenge dominant power structures. The novel portrays alternative communities—formed by hijras, political dissidents, Dalits and Kashmiri voices—as innovative social systems that resist exclusion and reimagine belonging. These communities function as grassroots innovations that emerge from lived experiences of oppression, gradually diffusing their values of care, coexistence and resistance across hostile social environments. Applying key concepts of diffusion theory—innovation, communication channels, opinion leaders, time and social systems—the study analyses how narrative acts as a medium for transmitting counter-hegemonic ideas to wider audiences. Characters such as Anjum and Tilo operate as change agents, facilitating slow but transformative social adoption. The paper argues that Roy’s novel redefines innovation not as technological advancement, but as ethical, communal and political imagination, demonstrating literature’s potential to mobilize social change from the margins to collective movements within postcolonial India’s fractured public sphere. Such narratives invite readers to rethink justice, citizenship, empathy, solidarity and inclusive futures globally.

Keywords: Survival, Hijra, Culture, Identity, Community