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THE CONTEXTInterna�onal, Peer Reviewed & Indexed Journal of Arts & Humani�es

Guest Editor: Dr. Vinita Basantani

Chief Editor: Mr. Kumar Wani

UGC Approved Journal: S. No. 42344 | Volume 4 Issue 1, July 2017

ResearcherID: K-3783-2017

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The Context Volume 4 No. 1, July 2017 ISSN 2349-4948

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THE CONTEXT Quarterly journal of Arts & Humanities

UGC Approved Journal: S. No. 42344

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The God of Small Things as a Postcolonial Text Kirtika Singh

Research Scholar

Published online: 01 July 2017

Article Number: TCissn.2349-4948/4.1a120

Abstract The God of Small Things presents a realistic picture of the predicament of Indian women their pain, suffering, oppression, humble surrender and humiliation in a male dominated society. It can see through the characters like Ammu, Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Rahel and Margaret Kochamma. The discourse of marginality is one of the distinguishing features of postcolonial literature and this paper seeks to define The God of Small Things as a postcolonial text. The novel presents the aspects of socialism and feminism and the postcolonial conditions. Marginality is represented by such characters as Velutha, Ammu, Rahel and Estha. The God of Small Things incorporates such themes as marriage, divorce, separation, abuse, alienation and death. The text raises issues as gender, class, and division, political and religious conflicts- Marginality that which is based on gender, class, oppression, and cultural difference. The God of Small Things has an attempt to examine the nexus between colonization and decolonization. She presents the impact of global economy or global culture in a province like Kerala. Roy’s novel shows how globalization and colonialism are interconnected.

Keywords: postcolonial writers, realism, predicament, text, interpretation

© 2017 Author(s); licensee Magnus Publishing. The Electronic Archived Version (EAV) and permanent URL of this article is: http://www.magnuspublishing.com/thecontext/2349-4948-120.pdf

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The God of Small Things as a Postcolonial Text

Kirtika Singh

Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize for her very debut novel, The God of Small Things in 1997, is a genuine writer of Indian values and cultures. Though known for her innovative and vernacular writing style at the global level, the charm of the novel lies in the fact that it is unmistakably rooted in the native soil. She proclaims her artistic independence and gets inspiration from her own milieu, Indian values, Indian culture and Indian society endowed with its goodness and badness. In this context, the observation made by Judith Wright applies appropriately to Arundhati Roy:

Before one’s country can become an accepted background against which the poet’s and the novelist’s imagination can move unhindered, it must first be observed, understood, described and as it were absorbed. The writer must be at peace with his landscape before he can turn confidently to its human figures (Wright 11).

India has a long history of social inequality and oppression. Social activists time and again fight for justice and equality in the society. The God of Small Things also fights for such social causes. Mulk Raj Anand initiated the tradition of depicting social upheaval in Indian social system. M.K. Naik rightly observes:

At an impressionable age he had become aware of the religious hypocrisy and bigotry in Indian Society and of its injustice thriving on anachronistic practices such as untouchability, feudalism and economic exploitation of the have-nots by then haves (Naik125).

Roy’s mercy for the subalterns and her resentment at the exploitation of the feeble by the forces of casteism, capitalism and industrialism suffused her works with great power and she projects suppression of women, untouchability, feudalism, and political hypocrisy in a lively way. Ranga Rao in his article “The Booker of the Year” rightly observes: “Roy’s book is the only one I can think of among Indian novels in English can be comprehensively described as a protest novel. It is all about atrocities against minorities, small things children and youth, women and untouchables” (Rao13). Roy takes off from where Mulk Raj Anand left in his Untouchable; Anand suggested conversion to Christianity is the only solution for the lower class to free them from the blight of Hindu orthodoxy. In The God of Small Things, Roy successfully proves that conversion to Christianity also failed to relieve the lower caste of the society of their agony. The masters changed but suffering continued. Christians never allowed the converts to share their church rituals and maintained a distance in their personal interaction. Exposing their duplicity the novelist writes:

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When the British came to Malabar, a number of Parvarns, Pelayes and Pulayes, (among them Velutha’s grandfather Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to escape the bane of untouchability. It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate Churches with separate services, and separate priests. They were Christians and therefore casteless. It was like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all (74).

Roy thus thinks conversions to be a refined way of oppression of the weak and poor. Roy in The God of Small Things condemns the system of gendered oppression and problematizes the association among feminists, liberalists, ideologists, activists, and the ideas of modernity. She also gives a true picture of the Marxists, political situation in India in general and Kerala in particular. In her conversation with David Brasmian, she says:

Lot of the atmosphere in The God of Small Things is based on my experiences of what was like to grow up in Kerala. When you see all the competing beliefs against the same background, you realize how they all wear each other down. To me, I could not think of a better location for a book about human beings… (Brasmian31)

Roy talks in detail about the origin and progress of the communist party in Kerala. The party was founded upon the high ideology of abolishing the wrongs of history and giving equal rights and chances to all in a casteless and classless society. The God of Small Things stands for the life of the impoverished and the feeble whether they are small creatures like blue bottles, frogs, and ants or human beings such as the victims of Hollick’s lust or the woman who supply Chacko’s needs or children like Estha and Rahel. For instance: contrasted with the big things, The God of Small Things, accounts for the life and sufferings, even tragic hope and victory, of the downtrodden like Vellya Pappen and his sons Velutha and Kuttapen or the ex-communicated like Ammu. Urvashi Barat is very pertinent in her observation:

The God of Small Things is clearly related to what sociologists and cultural anthropologists in India today referred to as the little Gods of the Hindu, tradition, the deities of folklore and of everyday worship, as contrasted with the deities of Great Tradition, imposing, autocratic, awe-inspiring. (Barat 71)

She goes on to add:

The God of Small Things can at best bring about resilience and indifference to suffering, but big God is manifested in the evil of Pappachi and Baby Kochamma, the hypocrisy of Mammachi and Comrade Pillai, the anger of Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, the sense of superiority in Sophie Mole, the sodomizing Orange drink Lemon drink Man” (Barat 71).

A meticulous reader will able to find out what Arundhati Roy means in the text. All that leads to power, prestige, and money is widely held as big while the rest is associated with the position of small things. Roy’s zest of activism voicing in favor of small events

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and ordinary things becomes distinct. In her interview with Linden Thornton she admits:

To me The God of Small Things is the inversion of God. God is a big thing and God’s in control. The God of Small Things… whether it is the children see things or the fish or the stars there is no accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. This small activity that goes on is the under –life of the book. All sorts of boundaries are transgressed upon. (Thornton 178)

The life in the novel is divided into two sections of society, grappled in an unrelenting deadly fight. The higher section of society comprises the encumbrance of history, dead links of tradition, family culture and pride, patriarchy and political opportunism – the ‘God of Big Things’. The lower section combines children, insecure women, untouchables, and working people with their struggle for identity and independence, and natural impulses and desires-The God of Small Things. Indian society has practised an extreme form of patriarchy since the beginning of history. It is based on male predominance and female subservience. Thus it is laid down in the laws of Manu that,

No act is to be done according to her own will by a young girl, a young woman though she is in her own house. In her childhood a girl should be under the will of her father; in her youth under that of her husband; her husband being dead, she has to be under the will of her sons. A woman should never enjoy her own will. Though of bad conduct or debauched, a husband must always be worshiped like a god by a good wife. (Briffault 147-148).

A girl has to show her potentialities and to undertake a long test and inquiry by parents and guardians of the groom. The boy is rarely asked a question or required to prove his abilities. Arundhati Roy furnishes another piece of information which is relevant to understand her characters:

Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of one hundred Brahmins whom Saint Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he travelled east after Resurrect (Chaitanya 66).

The God of Small Things presents a realistic picture of the predicament of the Indian women, their pain, suffering, humble surrender, oppression, and humiliation in a male dominating society. The social structure of an Indian woman is full of dos and don’ts and ifs and buts. It can be clearly seen in some of the women characters like Ammu, Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Rahel, and Margaret Kochamma. Education in society should be given to both men and women without any gender discrimination. But what we find in this novel is very different. Here, Ammu did not get higher education. She became a victim of male dominated society. She just completed her school education when her father retired from his job at Delhi, and settled at Ayemenam. Her father Pappachi considered the education of women as unnecessary expense and so he stopped her education. Ammu had no other option but just to stay at Ayemenam and wait for marriage. At Ayemenam she feels like a captive lady, fettered in her household.

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Her frustration grew to such an extent that all day long she dreamed of escaping from Ayemenam and the grab of her ill-tempered father and long suffering mother. She hatched many plans for that and eventually one worked, Pappachi gave his consent to let her spend the summer with a distant aunt who lived in Calcutta. It is there she met a young man who proposed to her and she suddenly accepted the proposal of a man whom she had known very little and for such a short time not because she had really liked him but simply because in a fit of anxiety, ‘’she thought that anything anyone at all would be better than returning to Ayemenam’’ (39). But soon she realized her mistake when her husband suspended from job for alcoholism sought to bargain by procuring his beautiful wife for his boss Mr. Hollick, the English manager of the tea estate. Mr.Hollick suggested that he go on leave and ‘’Ammu ‘’ be sent to his bungalow to be looked after. (42). her husband grew uncomfortable and angry when he heard of Ammu’s refusal. He lunged at her, grabbed her hair punched her and then passed out from that effort.’’ (42.) Ammu also hit back as hard as possible. Now she had no option but to come back with her twins Estha and Rahel to Ayemenam. Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenam. To everything that she had fled from only a few years ago except that now she had two young children. And no more drama42).

At personal level she was now laden with the responsibility of two children and all her dreams had shattered. Her father would not believe that ‘’an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife’’ (42). And to her mother, her children were a nuisance. Mamma chi, Ammu’s mother thought that ‘’what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than inbreeding. She meant having parents who were divorced’’ (61).”Ammu quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy’’ (43). In short at the age of twenty four her life came to a cessation, nothing to hope for, nothing to happen, only to spend the long days indolently one after another. At this stage when she knew that she was already condemned, she became an unmixable mix combining the ‘’infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber’’ (44). She realized that she lived in her parental house with mother and brother she had no ‘’Locus Stand I’’ (159).

The mood of the patriarchal society is reflected in the views of Baby Kochamma who subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parent’s home. As for a divorced daughter – according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. What is interesting from the feminist point of view is that although Baby Kochamma is a woman, she is not in sympathy with another woman – her own kin – when she is in real misery. Even her own long suffering mother refuses to have any sympathy for her dejected daughter. So the irony here is that women in this novel are against the women. The real tragedy begins to take its toll when Ammu comes in contact with Velutha, a Para van untouchable caste, as the author observes: Para vans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their foot-prints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christian wouldn’t defile themselves by accidently stepping into a Para van’s footprints (74). Ammu loved Velutha from her very childhood but not so much for his talents but for his fiery spirit

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of dissent. She loved Velutha heart and soul for his indomitable spirit of protest which she also nursed in her heart. She hoped that under his careful clock of cheerfulness, he housed a living, sung ordered world that she so raged against (176).

This personal relationship between Ammu and Velutha leads them into an illegitimate sexual relation. Roy writes:

Ammu put out her tongue and tasted it, in the hollow of his throat, on the lobe of his ear. She pulled his head down towards her and kissed his mouth (335 … Clouded eyes held clouded eyes in a steady gaze and a luminous woman opened herself to a luminous man. She was as wide and deep as a river in space. He sailed on her waters. She could feel him moving deeper and deeper into her. Frantic, frenzied asking to be let in further (336-337).

One day Pappen, Velutha’s father secretly saw their lovemaking and informed this to Baby Kochamma. After that, Ammu was locked in a room. Mammachi thought;

She (Ammu) had defiled generations of breeding (The Little Blessed One, blessed personally by the Patriarch of Antioch, an Imperial Entomologist, and a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to its knees. For generation to come, forever now, people would point at them at Weddings and funeral sat baptism and birthday parties (258).

So having no “Locust stand I”, no help, no support, no sympathy, Ammu left the big Ayemenam house, and died in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for employment. ‘’She died alone’’ (161). In the morning, when the sweeper went to the room, he found Ammu dead and she was dragged outside. Ammu is an entirely tragic character anguished and maltreated by the police, family, and politics. Ammu’s character represents the true picture of women in the Indian male dominated society. She represents purity and chastity. She is a woman of great endurance and patience so that she is able to bear suffering upon suffering. Through the character of Ammu, Arundhati Roy mocks at the hypocritical moral code of society. Ammu challenges and ocentric norms of society when she refuses to write the surname of her husband after the divorce. Estha and Rahel have no surname because Ammu feels that choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name does not “give a woman much of a choice’’ (37).

On the other hand when we look at the male characters in the novel Pappachi centrifugally symbolizes the “entirely knowable and visibly” colonial subject Macaulay proposes, in his khaki jodhpurs and his ivory handled crop. The evidently artificial nature of Pappachi’s performance reveals that his mimicry is an apprehensive and hesitant one because the colonial stereotype also stages him as always and already antithetical to the colonizer, childlike, immature, weak, lacking in authority ; all of which variously situate him as “other’’.

Notwithstanding, the omnipresent shadow cast by Pappachi across family history as represented by Rahel’s fear of “Pappachi’s moth’’, it is Chacko who brings home to both children the real impact of the epistemic violence associated with India’s

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colonization. Epistemic violence refers to the way in which colonialism attacks and shapes colonized culture’s way of knowing itself, its value systems, ideas and its relations with the world. Chacko in his dissection of Pappachi’s particular brand of “Anglophile’’, offers a lens through which we can see how this epistemic violence operates:

Chacko said that the correct word for people like Pappachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Estha look up in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedic dictionary. It said person well-disposed to the English. Then Estha and Rahel had to look up disposed…Chacko said that in Pappachi’s case it meant (2) bring mind into certain state. Which Chacko said, meant that Pappachi’s mind had been brought into a state which made him like the English (52).

What Chacko and Roy are at pains to illustrate is the circumstance in which colonialism enabled a forced restructuring of relationships and knowledge that worked to split the colonized subject from his/her culture, leaving his/her relationship with the colonizing culture anxious and insecure . The concerns displayed in the description of Pappachi’s photograph and particularly the effort required for him to inhabit, however insecurely, the identity of Macaulayan Minuteman, further underlines the violence integral to the process. This violence is then relayed in the beatings taken by Mammachi and Ammu at the hands of Pappachi, summed up in Ammu’s remembrance of her flogging with the same whip Pappachi flourishes in his photograph (181).What this illustrates is that what happens to the individual has, in Roy’s text, distinct and indeed often shattering consequences for the family and wider community. Obscured and estranged, Pappachi remains to the end, as Ammu’s notes, ‘’an incurable CCP, which was short for chi-chi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper’’. The reason why she leaves her husband because he wishes her to license the plantation manager’s sexual requests, Pappachi refuses to believe her story; ‘He didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife ‘’ (42).Pappachi has so internalized the values, beliefs and ideologies of the colonizer that he cannot mien criticism or question of anyone he sees as representative of that system.

Chacko who on the one hand , astutely dissevers (dissects)the roots of his father’s Anglophilia, is on the other hand unable to banish himself of his own dream England and his life as a Rhodes scholar where he revels in the freedoms and the enthusiasms afforded by an elite education. Once out of Oxford, Chacko cannot translate or acclimatize itself to the changing worlds around him, whether it is the responsibilities that come with his marriage to Margaret or his return to India in a flux. He remains stuck in an Oxford that Roy, like Amit Chaudhari in Afternoon Raag (1993), constructs as dream-like; endlessly rehearsing in his reading aloud voice that fascinated period of “Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy” (118). Like Pappachi he is a man out of time. Once Mammachi’s liberator, on his return to Ayemenam via Madras, he becomes her tormentor. Chacko takes from Mammachi what was hers alone; the factory which is nameless, he immediately takes over and in Adamic fashion, names it “Paradise Pickles & Preserves”. Once get into the factory he starts exploiting sexually

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the secretaries and guarding the rights of factory. Ammu is agile to point out; Chacko’s self-proclaimed Marxism also fails to translate “Just a case of a spoiled prince ling playing Comrade! The Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality – a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood” (65), Chacko in his anguish and rather like his father before him, abuses his position in the family. He refuses to recognize that as in his love affair with Oxford and Margaret, Ammu too caught in an enchanted moment with Velutha. On the death of Sophie Mol, he assumes the role of resentful brother and while not exactly orchestrating the banishment of Ammu and Estha, he does little to stop it before fleeing the family and India altogether in his moves to Canada. There he reinvents himself somewhat as an antiques dealer, the irony of which is not lost on the reader.

The wobbly edge of the overbearing order on which the family rests, can, as Ammu and her children find out, be a place for liberation; it can offer a space for experiment, to explore alternate options and try out new identities. However, this experimentation and the pushing of inherited boundaries and tagging can equally be a shattering experience as both Ipe and Pappen family discover in that fateful fortnight in 1969; the moment when as Roy suggests “Edges, Borders , Boundaries, Brinks, and Limits” begins to appear on the “horizon “and make their “size and shape” known (3) This is the crux of the novel as indicated by its title –The God of Small Things- which sets out to retrace how the size and shape of the known world can change in a day . The novel asks how the small events, the accidents, omissions, calculations and betrayals of everyday individual histories – the small things – relate to the larger God, the wider order and pattern of life. What happens when “personal turmoil” drops by “at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation” (19)?

The excavation of these relations between the small and the large, the private and the public, governs the ostensible plot of The God of Small Things, focused as it is on a teasing out of the flimsy threads which link family community and nation. It is also what governs its approach to what Roy describes as India’s more “public turmoil” it’s fractured and fractious history across several centuries. In her approach to public as to private history, Roy’s approach can best be described as archeological. Just as the archeologist must revive and filter through the buried remains to put together a narrative of the past, So Roy unearths and rearranges the scattered potsherds of family history in order to reveal the wider pattern or order they suggest, for in the moment of crisis or catastrophe. Itself, there is only incoherence. As though meaning had slack out of things and left them fragmented. Disconnected (225).

In both Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Roy’s The God of Small Things pickling and pickle factories acquire a symbolic significance related as both are to discussions of history, time and memory. In Midnight’s children, Rushdie uses pickling as a metaphor for his attempt to preserve in fiction the distinctiveness of Indian history. For his protagonist, Saleem, every pickle jar contains therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time (459). Pickling is Saleem’s attempt to immortalize and as such his

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pickles are also tempered, colored, salted by the very moment of pickling. The opening chapter of Roy’s novel “Paradise Pickles &Preserves plays on that earlier alignment of fiction / pickling as metaphors for the preservation or chutnification of history. Of course “Paradise Pickles & Preserves” is the name that Chacko belatedly and with some family dissention attributes to Mammachi’s large kitchen turned factory.

Roy’s archeology is a form of excavation that can be said to be characteristic of the work of the postcolonial writer who returns to the historical archive precisely in order to disturb, to reclaim, rewrite, reinvent, and understand one’s emplacement therein, and it marks a wide body of writing from Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing to Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. The Canadian writer and critic Robert Kroetsch, for, talking about his own attempts to understand the relations between this emplacement in the archive and the particulars of place that characterize his experience of Alberta in Robert Kroetsch: Essays (1983) argues:

It is a kind of archeology that makes this place, with all its implications, available for us for literary purpose. We have not yet grasped the whole story; we have hints and guesses that slowly persuades us towards the recognition of larger patters .Archaeology allows the fragmentary nature of the story, against the coerced unity of traditional history. Archaeology allows for discontinuity. It allows for layering. It allows for imaginative speculation. {….} {Even} the wrong –headed histories… become, rather than narratives of the past, archaeological deposits (42).

The layered histories and remains of the past unearthed Roy’s text are replicated in the layered nature of her writing; short sentences, fragmented images , lives , memories, songs, rituals, traditions, piled up one against the other , that are all part of a wider pattern or “deposit”. Sometimes the connecting thread is thin, flimsy, and arbitrary and used to highlight the very formality of the layering as with the sentence which links chapter one and two and with which Roy chooses to restart her story. That understanding of her project in The God of Small Things is a kind of archaeological retrieve is further developed by her characterization of the adult Rahel and Estha as “frozen two egg fossils “suspended in the amber of childhood, trapped in the bog of a story that was and wasn’t theirs”(230).

If Roy’s archaeology can be understood as characteristic of the postcolonial project of liberating from the archive the many dampened voices therein , it can also be approached in terms of the wider questioning and skepticism towards the master narratives of “History” or “Myth” prescient in postmodernism and the postmodernist return to history. Indeed Roy’s usage of epigraph of a quotation from John Berger (“Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”) automatically focuses our attention on one of the important themes in the novel, the constructed and partial nature of all narratives that parade as or assume the authority of “History “and the necessity of finding a way to write in the differing perspectives and voices, the multiple histories. Roy redoubles our attention on this human urge to make order, to find pattern while pointing out that the orders we create are just that; human constructs, ways of understanding the diverse elements that shape our own placement

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and emplacement in the world. For as Roy writes, in relation to the tragedy that transpires the Ipe family in that fateful fortnight in 1969, to suggest that “it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenam is only one way of looking at it. Equally it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago …. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The Laws that lay down who should be loved, and how” (33). This questioning of historical perspective or point of view is one that Roy returns to time and again, in her narration of the action from multiple points of view , especially through Rahel and Estha , but also through the eyes of Ammu , Velutha, Vellya Pappen and Baby Kochamma. It is another way of demonstrating the project of salvaging fragments .The redoubled focus on order and the ways in which it is ruptured by the outbreak of other orders is apparent in the structure or patterns that Roy, as author, rather self-consciously imposes on the stories she wants to tell. The long opening chapter presenting a précis of events to come is followed by the orderly patterning of interweaving chapters. Past events are detailed in even numbered chapters and present events in odd –numbered ones.

The discourse of marginality is one of the distinguishing features of postcolonial literature. “Marginality” says Ashcroft, is the condition constructed by the posited relation to a privileged centre (Ashcroft etal, 2002:102). The postcolonial condition of the characters in the novel is manifested in the issue that concerns marginality. The novel presents the aspects of socialism and feminism and the postcolonial conditions suggested by putting forth the limitation of being an untouchable or a woman. Marginality is represented by such characters as Velutha, Ammu, Rahel and Estha. They are the small things and the protagonist of the story. They occupy an outlying position either in their family or in the framework of the society. In this sense, The God of Small things incorporates such themes as marriage, divorce, separation, abuse, alienation and death. The text raises the issue of gender, class, division, political and religious conflicts. Marginality that which is based on gender, class, oppression, cultural difference or differential experiences of powerlessness has shaped the content of a flourishing range of recent postcolonial narratives.

The picturisation of the dispossessed and exploited groups seems to form a kind of interconnection or bond among themselves. They signify towards the cultural realities compounded of such ingredients as dispossession, anxiety, moral entropy and hypocrisy in the social and so called material practices of the postcolonial arena. Bill Ashcroft says [b]y appropriating strategies of representation , organization and social changes through access to global system, local communities and marginal interest groups can both empower themselves and influence those global systems [Ashcroft, 2006, n . page (online)].The God of Small Things is a writing of resistance where the subaltern section has been represented Nagesh Rao say; Roy in her discourse has a postcolonial nation as both ‘the material referent ‘and the ‘condition of production’ [Rao 2004, n. page (online)].

The novel of Arundhati Roy is an intersection of many discourses and marginality like feminism, caste segregation and untouchability Roy has projected in her writings the conflict between power and powerlessness. The novel deals with the subaltern groups

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and individuals, the oppressed and marginalized class of people. This is highlighted by a confined and constricted woman who is contained by her pains and sufferings, her children dislodged and a low caste skilled carpenter up against the norms of the society and power. The story of the novel is the story of Ammu’s marginalization and Velutha’s silence surrounded by the absence of power and the absence of self-determination. The use of language is such that it builds and assists dissolve the strong and rigid ideological structures. These structures have been historically woven into the ‘smell’ victims and sustained marginalization. Further in. the novel, Roy suggests a clear connection between narrative strategies and the domineering restraints, the socio historical realities that the protagonist has to contend against. The God of Small Things also highlights in more than one way the suppression of the woman folk represented by Ammu by the traditional male authority. The text enhances the sense of marginality among its characters. Ammu, sister of Chacko is a major character in the novel. She decides to marry a man of her own choice; a Bengali- Hindu who is an assistance manager in a tea-estate in Assam, this very act of her is something ‘un-Christian’. She goes against those who are in control of the Ayemenam house, but her transformation was almost destined from the very beginning. She is divorced and returns to the Ayemenam house with her twins. Here, the illegal is made legal by her act of having an affair with the untouchable Velutha. This affair with a Para van constitutes an indiscretion. Ammu’s relationship with Velutha leads to tragedy that leaves her twins Rahel and Estha ‘doomed waif’ with a wobbly life and away from her.

Velutha is placed by the author at the fringe of the caste-ridden, feudal Ayemenam house; his name suggests (‘white’) quite a symbolic link of blackness with dirt, and white with that of purity is just a kind of reversal with his representation .According to Tabish Khair, who puts it in a different way altogether, his body ‘exceeds subalterneity’ (Khair, 2000:14); he states that his body is poised in opposition to hegemonic control.

Arundhati Roy has also tried to showcase the issue of ‘subdued biology’ (Roy, 1997:107) this happens to be the main concern in the novel The God of Small Things. The term biology is used metaphorically to highlight the union with nature for the lovers; it is kind of attraction that gives them the momentum to transform the social dispositions. The concern of the author is highlighted in chapter 11 The God of Small Things. Ammu’s ‘subdued biology’. It was not what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mist rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful deed because she wasn’t the kind of woman who wanted her future told….And what Ammu knew….Smelled of the vapid, vinegary fumes that rose from the cement vats of Paradise Pickles. Fumes that wrinkled youth and pickled futures. Hooded against her own hair, Ammu leaned against herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to weep.

For herself. For the God of Small Things For the sugar-dusted twin midwives of her dreams (224).

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The phrase The God of Small Things sums up all the impressive transactions in this text. According to M.K. Naik, ‘it is Velutha who gives the novel its title The God of Small Things. It is he who is that kind of a god ‘(2003:66).Although Velutha has the remarkable gifts of manual adroitness, skills, humor, ingenuity and the strength to overcome social inequalities, he remains a Paravan by birth. According to Devon Campbell –Hall:

Although Velutha has control over the entire process of manufacturing his creations, his lack of caste status prevents the empowerment usually associated with the real artisan. Certainly he enjoys far more social freedom than most skilled laborers of his social status, but Roy’s is a bitter critique of the hypocrisy of the fictional Syrian Christian world. In her native Kerala, this clearly highlights her frustration with the injustice of an ancient caste system that condemns certain citizens to lives of drudgery simply because of an accident of birth. Roy’s representation of Velutha as an artisan pushing against the restrictive boundaries challenges not only the traditional caste distinction but also postmodern distinctions of globalized class system and systems of production (Mishra 129).

Postcolonial texts like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things depict the stories of the struggle against imperialism. These texts also bring out the incongruity in the nationalist movement. India was not a free country and it was ruled by the Britishers. After independence the leaders of the freedom struggle took charge of the nation but post colonialism showed the entire picture into a different light altogether which people did not expect. The ruling classes were similar to the colonial rulers. The nationalist leaders were using the language of independence and the clash for freedom to hide their real self. They continued their attacks and exploitation of the working class and the peasant community. Arundhati Roy in her novel, shows how the marginalized have become victims of the politics of nationalism. Postcolonial literature examines this problem and brings out the effects of decolonization. This is one of the distinguishing themes of the postcolonial literature which projects the subject of nationalism and its failures.

The post colonialist clings to the nationalistic politics of the anti-imperialist struggle. To put it another way, he still clings to capitalism. In India the nationalist ruling parties enforce the inhuman caste system; render the country to a police state and relentlessly attack the rebels, the ruling working class. Arundhati Roy severely criticizes the post independent Indian government for its deficiency in fulfilling the needs of the common mass. She ornately focuses on the national, caste and religious issues and treats the Syrian Christian community as a marginalized section in postcolonial India. Roy’s novel shows how globalization and colonialism are interconnected. She brings out the impact of globalization and colonialism on India.

As a postcolonial text, The God of Small Things presents the idea of how India as a nation is shaped by globalization and colonial policies. Arundhati Roy raises a pertinent question: is globalization about the eradication of world poverty or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled or digitally operated”? Thus such

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issues as India’s economy and the Indian Diaspora are presented in the novel. It also suggests the way in which caste and colonialist ideals have greater impact on the emergence of identity during the time of globalization. In one sense India’s colonial history cannot be ignored, because it has given rise to complex issues of the postcolonial society. For example, the British East India Company started its ventures in 1600 especially for commercial purposes. But after that, it became a tool for colonial rule and power. So the connection with the global market was structured long before India’s independence in 1947. In fact, postcolonial theory concentrates on the issues of power, economy, politics and culture. Moreover, it shows how these elements function in relation to colonial hegemony. In Roy’s The God of Small Things, there has been an attempt to examine the nexus between colonization and decolonization. At the same time, the novel brings out the process of globalization and its connection with post-independence. She presents the impact of global economy or global culture on a province like Kerala. Ultimately, she presents the idiosyncratic effects of globalization. In the beginning of the text, she brings out a commentary on globalization, when Estha walks around Ayemenam. The same chapter shows the impact of globalization on Ayemenam’s waterways and how it has totally transformed the life of Rahel’s family. The following lines also bring out the impact of globalization on the life of Baby Kochamma:

It wasn’t something that happened overnight ….They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenam, where over the loudest ….picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so… Baby Kochamma followed American NBA league games…. Tournaments. On weekdays…. Santa Barbara…. Baby Kochamma loved their shiny clothes and the smart, bitchy repartee. During the day disconnected snatches of it came back to her and made her chuckle. Kochu Maria, the cook, still wore the thick gold earrings that had disfigured her earlobes forever. She enjoyed the WWF Wrestling Mania shows, where Hulk Hogan and Mr. Perfect, whose necks were wider than their heads, were spangled Luca leggings and beat each other up brutally. Kochu Maria’s language had that slightly cruel ring to it that young children sometimes have (27-28).

All day they sat in the drawing room , Baby Kochamma on the long –armed planter’s chair or the chaise lounge (depending on the condition of her feet )Kochu Maria next to her on the floor (channel surfing when she could ), locked together in a noisy television silence. One’s hair snow white, the other’s dyed coal black. They entered all the contests , availed themselves of all the discounts that were advertised and had , on two occasions , won a T-shirt and thermos flask that Baby Kochamma kept locked in her cupboard. Baby Kochamma loved the Ayemenam house and cherished the furniture that she had inherited by outliving everybody else. Mammachi’s violin and violin stand, the Ooty cupboard the plastic basket chairs, the Delhi beds, the dressing table from Vienna with cracked ivory knobs. The rosewood dining table that Velutha made. She was fascinated by the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered while she channel –surfed. Her old fear of the Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist

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menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture. Instead of taking care of garden, she is deeply engrossed in watching satellite television in her drawing room.

The God of Small Things opens with a return journey by one of its central protagonists Rahel, from America to Ayemenam. In the southern state of Kerala, India, Return journeys are a unifying theme of the novel through which Roy explores a matrix of social and cultural anxieties. This physical act of return facilitates other returns. Emotionally and psychologically, Rahel revisits the tessellations of family and family history and in doing so reopens India’s colonial and postcolonial histories to new scrutiny. weaving between past and present, most obviously the 1960’s and the early 1990’s but with same casting glances across centuries of Indian history, the novel traces in an episodic manner tragic events in the childhood of Rahel and Estha; naming the accidental drowning of their English cousin Sophie Mol and the less than accidental death of their mother’s lower-caste lover, Velutha. Although the death of Sophie Mol and Velutha takes place on the same day ,the novel traces the series of events in the fortnight previous and relate their repercussions into the 1990’s, the point of Rahel’s return. In the process it explores the structure of the Ipe family and the subterranean connections between individual family history and local, national and world histories. The tragic events in Ayemenam are, for example, narrated against the background of the brief return to power of Kerala’s second state Communist government in the 1960’s under the ostentatious E.M.S. Namboodripad.

Rahel returns to Ayemenam, ostensibly to visit Estha who for the first time in twenty three years has himself returned to the family home. Estha had been banished to live with their father in Calcutta in the aftermath of the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, after being forced to falsely accuse their mother’s lover for the manufactured crime of kidnapping the children and what is seen by the family and community as the real social crime of an affair with their mother Ammu. An impassioned exploration of blood and belonging unfolds as the novel retraces the tangled web of desires, conflicts, alliances, vexations and betrayals that characterizes the build up to those early tragic events that lead to the break of the family.

Estha and Rahel’s family are from the beginning characterized as on the edge of the dominant order of society in Kerala in the 1960’s. This vulnerable situation on the margins is signaled to the reader in two significant ways. First of all the twins are brought in a family that is of a Syrian Christian ancestry, although they have a Bengali Hindu father, which means as their acerbic Grand aunt Baby Kochamma points out, that they are “half Hindu hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry “(45). Syrian Christians are a sizeable minority with a long history in Kerala but less so with regards to the predominantly Hindu status quo installed in the post –independence India painted by Roy. As children of mixed ancestry and divorced parents Estha and Rahel fall between traditions (Hindu and Syrian Christian) and are afforded no real recognition or what the novel calls ‘Locusts Stand I’(legal standing) This point is signaled by their mother’s refusal to confer on the twins a surname .

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Estha notes how it is “postponed for the time being, while Ammu chose between her husband’s name and her father’s” (156). This means that the twins are in effect unclaimed and nameless. One’s name is an index of one’s identity and the instability of naming, what Rahel identifies as a “more general difficulty “that the family has with “classification” (31) as such indicates that there are certain fissures or gaps in the twin’s identity.

The children’s confusion about their own identity is showed out early in the novel by the very fact of their compound entity: “Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities “(2). This confusion is further amalgamated in a family situation replete with exuberant play on names and identities. The “Baby “ in Baby Kochamma , for ex. Ostensibly relating to her diminutive stature , comes to describe her general stagnation and failure to go forward in life , marked by her inordinate and lifelong attachment to the impossibly attainable Father Mulligan . At the same time, the pet name masks her real name, Navomi Ipe, and thus part of her independent identity. The damaging nature of this fissure in the twins’ identity is poignantly reiterated in their desire to claim as surrogate father figures both their Uncle Chacko and Velutha, their mother’s lover. When Velutha reaches out across the boundaries of caste to the children he does so by openly conspiring with and extending the exuberant play on names and the mobility of identities in his renaming of Estha, “Esthappappychachen Kuttappen Peter Mon ...[a name that ]became a delighted , breathless, Rumplestilskin-like dance among the rubber trees” (191).

Second the family are on the edge because in post-independence India generally and communist Kerala specifically, the Ipes are remnants of the old colonial elite. They are descendants of that class of persons whom Macaulay predicted in “Minute on Indian Education” (1857) would be the backbone of the project of administering and maintaining Britain’s Indian empire. This class would be, for Macaulay, “Indian in blood and color, but English in opinions, in morals and in intellects [and would act as] interpreters between [the British] and the millions whom [they] govern”. The Ipe family are the descendants then of those Indians who were part of the steel frame of British rule in India , the Indian Civil Service , most potently represented in the text by Estha and Rahel’s grandfather , Bennan John Ipe , familiarly known as Pappachi , who once claimed the grand title of Imperial Entomologist. His job of collecting, preserving and indexing India’s fauna for the colonial archive put him at the centre of the colonial enterprise. On the one hand, Pappachi fulfills this role as interpreter, as entomologist he translates India for the world. On the other hand, his role in translating India represented by his discovery of a new species of moth like the Indian Civil Service after the departure of the British, translated or transformed over time.

In Roy’s Kerala in 1969, amid the general flourishing of Communist sentiment, the tremors from the Naxalite revolt of peasant against old zamindar (landlord) class begun in the northern state of West Bengal in 1967 are felt further south. Amidst this new social unrest, the Ipe family still sporting the outmoded and ill-fitting armor of

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their imperial connections like Uncle Chacko (with his Oxford education, his “Balliol Oar “and his “Reading Aloud voice”) or Baby Kochamma (with her attachment to Shakespeare over Mao) are socially and financially vulnerable, threatened with still further eclipse. Chacko like Pappachi before him finds himself caught between masters between newly independent India represented by Mammachi’s Paradise Pickles & Preserves and the model of England and Englishness inherited via Pappachi and his own Oxford education. He is caught between India which is in revolt against tradition and represented by the popularity of (Marxism, Communism) and a now imagined England, first absorbed through and represented by tradition, by his elite education. Like Pappachi, his attempts to take up and maintain a position in either camp, tradition (England) or modernity (India), restitutes him on the margin of both.

This insecurity is heightened in his acts of impersonation, in his melodramatic donning of what the children call his “Reading Aloud Voice”. It is immediately comparable with the kinds of impersonation suggested by the photograph of Pappachi in pride of place in the Ayemenam house during the twins’ childhood. In this Pappachi’s role in the colonial project as Macaulay’s Minuteman is always and already rendered problematic:

In the photograph [Pappachi] had taken care to hold his head high enough to hide his double chin, yet not so high as to appear haughty. His light brown eyes were polite, yet maleficent as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on the centre of his upper lip that dropped down over his lower lip in a sort of effeminate pout – the kind that children who suck their thumbs develop. […] He wore khaki jodhpurs though he had never ridden a house in his life … An ivory handled crop lay neatly across his lap (51).

Photograph is a way of looking, a generalized representation of Pappachi as colonial subject. As such it suggests how in the discourse of colonialism, colonized subjects are split between contrary positions. Discourse here refers to the structures of thinking that dominate how the colonizers imagine colonial subjects and their relations with them. One such structure of thinking is the stereotype. The colonial stereotype works to establish and maintain the authority of the colonizers while fixing the colonial subject in a particular set of relations with the colonizer. As Homi Bhabha in the Location of Culture (1994) writes:

The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction …. Colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an “other” yet entirely knowable and visible (Bhabha70).

The concept of hybridity as developed in The God of Small Things is relevant to its postcolonial study. But when there is a discussion with regard to hybridity, obviously issues such as migration and return are to be raised. The consequence of migrating is the composition of hybrid identities, when the migrants interact with the local

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population. From a biological point of view a hybrid is an offspring with parents, who belong to different races. In this sense Sophie Mol is the lone hybrid in the novel, because her father is an Indian and her mother Margaret is an English woman. Another form of hybridity is reflected by Baby Kochamma herself: “Baby Kochamma disliked the twins, for she considered the doomed fatherless ragamuffin worse still, they were half –Hindu hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry.”(45) She calls the twins hybrid in connection with their religion, because their father baba is Hindu and their mother Ammu is a Syrian Christian.

In her essay ‘Language Hybridity and Dialogism in The God of Small Things’, Anna Clarke explains why discussion with regard to hybridity is relevant to post colonialism: ‘hybridity as a critical concept has had a privileged place in postcolonial studies. This is because contact and intermixture between different cultural groups have taken place in the historical context of colonization. Since colonial relationships were relationships of power between what the colonizers saw as the privileged ‘enlightened’, ‘civilized’, ‘rational’, and ‘advanced’, colonizers and the subaltern ‘barbaric’, ‘superstitious’, ‘backward’, colonized hybridity in such contexts has often taken on a politicized dimension (Mishra 130).

In his celebrated work The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha looks for the space where culture can actually be found. Anna Clarke explains this, ‘to put it simply, the location of the meaning of culture is the contact zone between cultures; the space of culture’s hybridity’ (Bhabha1994:138).Homi Bhabha calls this space the ‘Third Space’, in addition to the first two spaces or the two separate sides. Actually, it depends on the hybrid himself to define exactly what the third space looks like or where it is. In The God of Small Things, Chacko says, ‘we belong nowhere, we sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore’ (53) Salman Rushdie had a similar idea in Imaginary Homelands: ‘our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures, at other times that we fall between two stools ‘(Rushdie 1991:15). In The God of Small Things this is specifically applied to Chacko, because he has lived through English habits and culture and at the same time, he also follows the Indian moral values.

Hybridity happens to be the most significant theme of the novel. This hybridity of the twins later in the novel becomes instrumental in leading the tragedy of the twins and their mother. The interreligious marriage of Ammu vitiates the twins, whereas the same thing does not apply to Sophie Mol, who is the issue of inter-racial marriage of Chacko and Margaret. Ammu’s relationship with Velutha raises all possibilities of yet another hybrid child. Velutha is an untouchable and therefore his union with Ammu is perceived as a real threat to the social order. The twins though belong to a higher class are still considered as inferior because the Indian system does not completely recognize it. Estha and Rahel’s case does not apply to Sophie Mol, Chacko’s own daughter. Both Chacko and Ammu went against the social norms by marrying out of their own caste or group but had to pay a heavy price by the crumple of their married life. Ammu the main character lives on sufferings with her children. ‘Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house’, she said ‘there you can break as many beds as you

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like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house,’ (83). She has to face and bear all this in spite of her diligence at the pickles factory. Hybridity also affects another person whom Ammu terms ‘God of Small Loss’. Velutha is debilitate by the symbol of power (police) for two reasons, first for jealousy and for having sex with a woman of high caste, this is what galvanized discussion in the society. The relationship of Velutha was a mere possibility of a hybrid child; and a history lesson for future offenders’ (336), this offence is in accordance with the hatred, the feared or the despised other. Homi Bhabha has rightly remarked:

The paranoid thrust from the hybrid is finally uncontainable because it breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside. The untouchable are always placed at the periphery. The upper-caste families always guard themselves and their houses which are away from the reach of those untouchables. The attitude of the people towards caste system is rigid as these untouchables have a separate church from that of the higher classes. ‘When the British came to Malabar, a member of the Para vans, Pethyas Pulayas (Among them Velutha’s grandfather, Kelan) converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church to escape the scourge of untouchability (Bhabha 152).

As added remuneration they were given a little food and also money. They were known as the Rice-Christians. It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate priests. As a special favour, they were given their own separate Pariah Bishop (74). In this novel we trace a display of hypocrisy on the part of the people, including Mammachi herself; when she allows Velutha to enter her house to fix up something. There are instances when orthodox Brahmins though employ untouchables to work and also scatter water over their dishes which the untouchable servant had cleaned. Arundhati Roy very suitably through images places the high caste family on the same platform as the Para van. Velutha is the Paravan who was killed for having ‘entered’ a forbidden place. Chacko faced the same failure as his father Pappachi, who had struggled to get recognized by the English for his discovery of the moth and thus also failed to get a promotion. It was Ammu and the other two women; Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, who had given their part for the factory. It is therefore found that hybridity has on many occasions pulled down the characters in the novel.

Works cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffen. Ed. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practices in Post-Colonial Literature. 2nd Ed, reprint. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Barat, Urbashi, “Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: Great Stories and Small ones”, Explorations Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Ed. Bhatt Indira and Nityanandan. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1999, Print.

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Bhabha, Homi. K., “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.

Briffault, Robert. The Mothers: A Study of the Sentiments and Institutions, New York, 1952. Print.

Brasmian, David. “The Shape of the Beast in conversation with David Brasmian” Arundhati Roy: The Colonization of Knowledge. New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2008. Print.

Mishra, Amar. Writing Nation’s History A Study of Three Postcolonial Texts, New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2014. Print.

Naik, M.K. and Shyamala Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A Critical Survey. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001. Print.

Rao, Ranga. “The Booker of the Year”. The Hindu. (Sunday, Nov. 16, 1997). Print.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things, New Delhi: Penguins Book Ltd., 2002. Print.

Thornton, Linden. “Interview with Arundhati Roy” Kunapipi, 19.123 (October 1997). Print.

Wright, Judith. Preoccupation in Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965. Print.

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THE CONTEXT - Magnus Publishing · The Context Volume 4 No. 1, July 2017 ISSN 2349-4948 MAGNUS...

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