Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

Parama Sarkar states that

Indian writing in English has always had to deal with accusations regarding its authenticity.

Many Indian academics have fulminated over the imposition of the English language on Indians, first by the British colonial rulers and then by the postcolonial Indian establishment.

Others have argued that in most Indian-English texts, there is a move towards an essentializing and fetishizing of India in compliance with the demands of the western market.

In a collection of essays entitled Shifting Boundaries/Colliding Cultures, Makarand Paraqjape alleges that the western media and publishing houses dominate the creation and dissemination of images about the third world: "Only a devalued and abused India is marketable in the West.

This is an India of poverty, violence, urban chaos, rural exploitation, cast conflict, political instability and insurmountable corruption" (239).

This novel has been studied by many and approach in very different ways.

However, what becomes most relevant, in my opinion, and beyond the quality of her writing and the form of the novel, are its political implications.

In fact Roy herself has address this aspect of her novel:

Now, I've been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist? True, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction, but it's no less political than any of my essays.

And this is the aspect I would like to focus on, since I believe that is indeed the most substantive of the novel.

Now, when I say political, I mean two things: The clashing of past and present cultural traditions, the

complex relations between Touchables and Untouchables, the confrontation of cultures: India and England, First World and Third World, etc.

The novel speaks of much ingrained customs deeply rooted in class history and caste biases, which produce a deterministic social environment.

Arundhati Roy's novel tells a story of forbidden, cross-caste love between Ammu, the divorced Touchable, and Velutha, the Untouchable handyman who works for her mother, Mammachi, and brother, Chacko.

Roy uses the motif of performance to construct a critique of a society caught between the colonial legacy and the constant onslaught of trans-national rhetoric.

  But her overt critique of globalization, which she

believes to be a kind of neo-colonialism, effectively sidelines the representation of a strife, class-ridden Kerala, something that could have otherwise drawn charges of misrepresentation and cultural fetishism.

 

A contextualization:

Kurshid Alam’s article entitled, 'Untouchables in The God of Small Things' says that

Castes are ranked and membership comes through birth. According to the Hindu sacred texts of the Rig Veda there are four main castes, each of which performs a function in sustaining social life.

Untouchables, those who do not belong to any of these four castes, are generally associated with professions such as, butchers, launderers, and latrine cleaners.

Since 1935 Untouchables have been called 'scheduled castes. They are also called by Mahatma Gandhi's name for them, 'Harijan', meaning 'the children of God'.

More recently these groups began to refer to themselves as Dalits, a Hindi word which means oppressed or downtrodden.

Despite some improvements in certain aspects of Dalit life, 90% of them still live in rural areas and more than 50% are landless labourers. In many parts of India, land is still held by the upper castes which use the ideology of the caste system to exploit the low-ranking landless labourers. The caste system is alive and well in India today, despite its being illegal.

The caste system in South Asia is a system of social stratification] which historically separated communities into thousands of endogamous hereditary groups called Jātis or castes in English while it did not exist before because of the diverse population and ethnicities of South Asia.

The Jātis are thought of as being grouped into four varnas or classes: Brahmis (priests, teachers and preachers), Kshatriyas (kings, governors, warriors and soldiers), Vaishyas (cattle herders, agriculturists, businessmen, artisans and merchants), Shudras (labourers and service providers). END

Further, she disrupts possible allegations of inautbenticity because of writing in English by:

merging the English language to a specific cultural context and

by casting her narrative in the traditional Indian oral epic mode, thus signaling a metaphoric return to indigenous traditions.

The events are largely seen through the eyes of Ammu 's twin son and daughter, Rahel and Estha, first while they are still children, then as adults, twenty-three years later with the return of Rahel from the United States to her home in Ayemenem in the state of Kerala.

The Events Unfolding and the Traditions

Ammu and Chacko's family is traditionally Syrian Christian, although Chacko proclaims himself a Marxist.

However, both Christians and Marxists come under Roy's rigorous critical eye for their collusive support of the caste system.

  Events unfold from the day when the twins' cousin,

Sophie Mol, daughter of Chacko by his marriage to the English woman, Margaret, arrives with her mother for a Christmas visit.

  Sophie Mol's drowning, the culmination of an escapade

planned by all three children, and the revelation by Velutha 's father of his son's illicit love affair, are the pivotal crises for the later tragic developments:

Yelutha's death after a brutally punitive police assault,

  Ammu 's expulsion from the family home, and in the

long term, serious damage to the possibility of adult fulfilment for both twins.

In The God of Small Things, the idea of hybridity engenders the primal fear that unleashes violence against Velutha, the Untouchable lover of the twins' mother.

Estha and Rahel inhabit a world in which traditional boundaries have been blurred.

The constant movement of the characters travelling from one place to another, from one country to another, tends to erase former limits.

The relationships that are formed outside the community and the caste-system are a threat to existing social borders.

  Ammu, the twins' mother, escapes from a patriarchal life

in Ayemenem to spend the summer in Calcutta, where she marries a Hindu against her parents' consent.

She thus illustrates the migrations and relations at play. 

Estha and Rahel were born in Assam at a time of war with China, when there were rumours of Chinese occupation, therefore a possible redefining of borders (p. 40).

  Thus the twins emerged as the hybrid children of an

intercommunity marriage.

  When they moved to Kerala with their divorced

mother, they were looked upon as outsiders.

Baby Kochamma, their great-aunt, did not like them: “she considered them doomed, fatherless waifs. Worse still, they were Half Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (p. 45).

Their birth questions, the integrity of their mother's community and they stand for the visible trace of her breaking the laws her father imposed on her.

The twins symbolise on-going change inside a society that is growing more and more heterogeneous, as opposed to the chronic inbreeding that plagues the Syrian Christian community Ammu was born in.

However the pervasive feeling of rejection Baby Kochamma has for Ammu's children does not concern Sophie Mol, Estha and Rahel's half-English cousin.

As Chacko, Sophie Mol's father and the twins' uncle, puts it, 'they were all Anglophiles' (p. 52).

They all look up to England and Englishness. Even after Margaret Kochamma, Chacko's English wife, has divorced him, he cannot bring himself to forget her:

'He spoke of her often and with a peculiar pride. As though he admired her for having divorced him' (p. 249).

When Margaret and Sophie Mol come to India, Estha and Rahel are told that they will now be Ambassadors of India (p. 139).

Their English cousin's arrival dispossesses them of the place where they live, forcing them into a position of self-effacement.

Baby Kochamma suddenly turns them into ambassadors, as if they had left India to go to England, which highlights the particular position England occupies in her vision of the world.

  It is not only intercommunity marriages that erase

boundaries, the family's relationship to the English also contributes to a complex layout of the world.

Baby Kochamma regards Estha and Rahel as the outcast children of a divorcee and, as she is full of admiration for what is English, she ranks them far below.

Velutha is placed even further down towards the bottom of this hierarchy, where Sophie Mol is at the top, because she is half-English.

  However this social order is not only represented in a

vertical way, through Baby Kochamma's appraisal of the characters according to the position she ascribes to each of them.

 

In the chapter where the three cousins are brought together, what is going on inside the family is referred to as 'the Play' (p. 177) while Velutha's presence outside is described as 'off stage' (p. 175) or 'on the periphery of the Play' (p. 184).

  A horizontal vision of the social order is apparent here,

with the predominance of the centre over the periphery.

Velutha stands outside the inner circle, a marginal but one of the partners of a relationship, that is made of genuine friendship, as opposed to all the acting implied by such expressions as the 'Play' or the 'stage'.

The feeling existing among characters that are not supposed to socialise is highlighted as true and authentic, contrary to what goes on inside the family circle, once Margaret and Sophie Mol have arrived.

Their presence seems to force the family into a false and artificial mode of communication.

  "Love Laws' which 'lay down who should be loved. And

how. And how much' ( 177).

The immediate agent of History in ensuring submission to the Love Laws is ironically Velutha's own father, Vellya Paapen, who comes some days later to inform Ammu 's mother, Mammachi, that he has seen his son and Ammu intimately together.

  Grotesquely ironic is the way in which Mammachi, in her

fury on hearing Paapen 's news, loses control and not only touches Paapen, but pushes him backwards.

  His collapse into the mud below the back door steps

or the house is an ultimate degradation, a sinking below even his customary polluted caste level.

In this pathetic state he shows how fully he has internalised the caste laws, by actually offering to kill his son in order to protect the touchable family from further disgrace.

And Baby Kochamma, for her own devious reasons (and having incited Chacko to assist her), is only too ready to destroy Velutha and banish Ammu.

The story ends revealing a sad state of affairs in Modern India, one that will take a long time to change. END