The article examines the multilingual poetics of Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, focusing on the historically strained relations between English and India’s other languages. As a contribution to the project of “unforgetting English” (Walkowitz, 2015), the close reading of Roy’s novel reveals how English is construed and posited as a language within India’s multilingual environment. The use of English in Roy’s novel is tinged with a peculiar ambivalence: while it is marked as an alien language that is inimical to India’s linguistic plurality, English nevertheless serves as a literary and linguistic mediator that makes possible the encounter between different Indian languages in the first place. My article argues that the novel’s uneasy multilingualism navigates the possibilities (and impossibilities) of producing a literature that espouses ex-centric and small worlds in the hyper-central language of English.

本文考察了阿隆达蒂·罗伊（Arundhati Roy）的小说《最幸福的部》的多语言诗学着重于英语和印度其他语言之间历史上紧张的关系。作为对“难忘的英语”项目的贡献（Walkowitz，2015年），对罗伊小说的仔细阅读揭示了英语在印度的多语种环境中是如何被解释为一种语言的。罗伊小说中英语的使用带有一种特殊的矛盾性：虽然它被标记为对印度语言多元性不利的外来语言，但英语仍是一种文学和语言调解者，使印度不同语言之间的相遇成为可能。第一名。我的文章认为，小说不安的多语制引导了创造一种文学的可能性（和不可能），该文学拥护以英语为中心的前世界和狭小世界。