Dr. Shwet Nisha

Patna, Bihar, India

Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things has proven to be no “small thing”. Since achieving its phenomenal success, Roy who was trained as an architect, has turned her attention to political activism in India. Roy has objected to sharp distinction made between her political activism and her literary writing, arguing that while The God of Small Things is a work of fiction it’s no less political than any of my essays”.¹

Roy focuses on a central enduring cultural trauma: the issue of the caste system, and, more particularly, the plight of untouchables. The novel circles around one brutal, unspeakable trauma: the state-sanctioned murder of Paravan Velutha, and the impact of his death on an already fragile and therefore vulnerable family unit, particularly the two small children, friends of Velutha, who are forced to participate in this horrifying drama.

Arundhati Roy has forged her literary universe in The God of Small Things out of experience and from her own “postage stamp of native soil”. Roy was raised in the city of Ayemenem in the predominantly Christian Marxist-dominated Kerala province in Southern India where the novel is set, and its main character Rahel shares similarities in background to the author. In The God of Small Things, Roy tests and judges her society, in a setting as historically overdetermined as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha country; by the way it reacts to those who violate its codes. Threaded like beads through a highly intricate structure, the essential plot of the novel focuses on the struggle against the vestiges of conservative, patriarchal control in a society that pays only lip service to radical change, a society that remains at its core stubbornly traditional in its values.

The events of the central plot occur in a very short period of several weeks in December, 1969, and are viewed primarily through the eyes of seven-year old twins, Rahel and her brother Esthappen, Chacko rules both home and business–the Padma pickle Factory–with a distracted, benevolent tolerance that underscores his absolute male privilege. His status as head of the household is unchallenged despite his own divorce status. Teressa Goddu argues “that articulates objection”, the gothic “serves as a primary means of speaking of the unspeakable”. And of “registering cultural contradictions.”² In choosing to register these cultural contradictions by charting a course between the Scyla and Cheribdis of misintegration and incest, Roy suggests not only the tragic dilemma of these laws themselves. Although these violations of normative codes, particularly the crossing of caste lines, may be seen as revolutionary only at the political level, the transgression of those who are politically weakest in Roy’s novel are punished severely, one might way out of all proportion.

The beauty and strength of Roy’s novel lies in the fact that it is unmistakably rooted in the native soil. She proclaims her artistic independence and gets inspiration and insight from her own milieu i.e. Indian values, Indian culture and Indian society with its beauty and ugliness. Judith Wright rightly asserts: “in fact, she assumes her identity by relating herself to Indian tradition and culture……   The writer must be at peace with his landscape before he can confidently turn to its human figure.³

Roy is deeply rooted in her native and national culture and it is evident from her themes, style, landscape, images and of course, in her experimentation with English language. Roy’s Indian sensibility is reflected almost in every page of this novel. The locale, Indian landscape, has inspired not only the English poets but the novelists also. Roy vividly describes Ayemenem with its climate, customs, caste, conventions, food habits, religious affiliations, occupations and professions of its inhabitants. The novel begins with the description of geographical and climatic conditions of this place in the month of May: May in Ayemenen is hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks… dust green trees. Red bananas ripen. The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.⁴ The regular phenomenon of the onset of the south-west monsoon which provides much needed respite to the local inhabitants is described in detail “Brick walls turn moss green…..  Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appears… on the highways.⁵ Roy weaves small things into the texture of her novel. She describes the jewellery worn by Mammachi. Her sari was starched and perfumed. Her diamond earrings shone in her ears like tiny chandeliers. Her ruby rings were loose.⁶

The people cultivate their food habits according to the crops grown in a particular area and are fond of food items made from banana, fish, rice, coconut etc. Roy’s Indian sensibility is also reflected in the choice of her themes. The novel is powerful indictment of those ugly social forces which crush an innocent young man Velutha, who belongs to an untouchable class Paravan. The immediate cause of Velutha’s death is police torture and subsequent custodial death for his alleged involvement in the abduction of children and the drowning of Sophie Mol in the river. But the in-depth study of the novel shows that Velutha is a victim of many ugly social forces. His victimization and marginalization begins the day when he was born in an untouchable caste. Velutha is sharp minded because of his carpentary skill.⁷ It induces a sense of respect in Velutha and does not behave the way an untouchable should behave. To escape his father’s nagging Velutha disappears from the village for a couple of months. On his return, he is employed as the factory carpenter and in-charge of general maintenance⁸ much to the dismay and disappointment of workers belonging to upper caste. In Annihilation of Caste B.R. Ambedkar vehemently decries the degrading practice. “I do not believe that we can build up a free society in India so long as there is a trace of this ill-treatment and suppressions of one caste by another”.⁹ Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar waged a relentless battle against the practice of untouchability.

Velutha’s custodial death also exposes the unholy nexus between the police and the politician. Velutha’s case is a grim reality of Indian society. The police victimize the poor and the marginalized and the unprivileged section of the society. The novel reflects the Indian society with its dehumanizing institutions dwarfing the human beings. Roy also records her protest against the male-dominated society, which renders woman into a dependent and deprived being.

Gender inequalities are neither culture specific nor country specific. The evil is as old as human civilization on the earth and it has travelled down from the primordial period to our times. Roy highlights the disturbing and disquieting feature of Indian society. Her protest against male dominated society and its degrading institutions is as strong as Simon De Beauvoir in France and Virginia Woolf in England. The society as Roy present in The God of Small Things is very callous to those women who defy the established codes of social morality. These women loose their respect and recognition first in the family and then in the society. The patriarchal bias against women is evident from the fact that Chacko, Ammu’s brother, could be sent to Oxford for further studies. Pappachi insisted that a College education was an unnecessary expense for a girl, so Ammu had no choice. Since her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry, no proposal came Ammu grew desperate.¹⁰

A woman is never allowed to grow as an independent and autonomous human being. She is always given a secondary and subservient place in society. Wife-beating is a deplorable and dehumanizing practice of Indian society. Roy’s Indian sensibility is further seen in the Indianisation of English language. She does not ape the Standard English or the Babu English as used by the British writers. She does not imitate the Indian writers either. By evolving Indian idiom, which is best suited for the expression of Indian experience, Roy has accomplished the task, which was initiated by creative writers like Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. Roy further enriches Indian English in her own way. This is Roy’s queer experiment with English Language which makes it more flexible and more pliable to express the wide range of experience of characters living in a pluralistic and multi-cultural society of India.

The God of Small Things reverberates with a feel of Indian life and ethos. The very India is brought live on the pages by evoking economical, religious, cultural, social, political, geographical atmosphere of the country. The idiom that she employs perfectly matches with the themes she is concerned with. In her experimentation with the medium of expression, she does not initiate any Indian writing in English. She need not imitate because her styler is Indian and it is genuine and individual rather than merely correct and competent.¹¹

References:

1. Arundhati Roy, “The Ladies Have Feelings, S6 I…I Shall leave it to the experts” Power Politics (Cambridge: South End Press, 2001), 11
2. Teressa A. Guddu, Gothic America: Narrative History And Nature ( New York: Columbia UP, 1977)10
3. Quoted by Devindra Kohli, “Landscape and Poetry”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XIII No. 3, April 1979, p. 54
4. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, (New Penguin Books, 1977), p. 1
5. , P. 1
6. , P. 79
7. , P. 75
8. Arundhati Roy, op.cit., p. 77
9. R. Ambedkar, op.cit., p. 30
10. A Roy, op.cit., p. 38
11. Meenakshi Mukherjee, Twice Born Fiction, (London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1971), p. 201.