The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

1997

Introduction

Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things rapidly became a world-renowned literary sensation after it was published in New Delhi in 1997. Immediately recognized as a passionate, sophisticated, and lushly descriptive work, it won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize and launched its author to international fame. The novel tells the story of the Kochammas, a wealthy Christian family in a small village in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Based loosely from the perspective of Rahel Kochamma, who has returned to her hometown to see her twin brother, it pieces together the story of the dramatic events of Rahel’s childhood that drastically changed the lives of everyone in the family.

The God of Small Things is an ambitious work that addresses universal themes ranging from religion to biology. Roy stresses throughout the novel that great and small themes are interconnected, and that historical events and seemingly unrelated details have far-reaching consequences throughout a community and country. The novel is therefore able to comment simultaneously on universal, abstract themes, and a wide variety of ideas relating to the personal and family history of the members of the Kochamma family as well as the wider concerns of the Kerala region of India. Some of the novel’s most thoroughly developed themes are forbidden love, Indian history, and politics. It is in love and politics that Roy’s carefully constructed, multifaceted narrative tends to dwell, and it is when love, politics, and history combine that Roy is able to communicate her most profound authorial insights.

Author Biography

Born circa 1960, Roy grew up in Aymanam, a village in the state of Kerala, in southern India. Her father, a Hindu tea planter from Bengal, was divorced from her Syrian Christian mother when Roy was very young, and Roy was raised by her mother, who ran an informal school. Roy left home when she was sixteen and lived in a squatter’s colony in New Delhi, selling empty beer bottles for a living. She eventually went to architectural school and married a fellow student, Gerard Da Cunha. Both quit their studies and moved to Goa, which is in Southwestern India. Roy eventually left Da Cunha and moved back to New Delhi where she found a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs.

While living in New Delhi, Roy met the film director Pradeep Krishen (whom she later married) and accepted a small acting role that he offered. Soon afterwards, she traveled to Italy on a scholarship to study monument restoration. Roy began to write screenplays while she was in Italy, and she and Krishen later collaborated on a television series that was cancelled after they had shot several episodes. She then wrote two screenplays that became films, and she began to write prose until her critical essay of the celebrated film Bandit Queen caused considerable controversy. Roy withdrew to private life to work on her debut novel, which took her nearly five years to complete.

The God of Small Things rapidly became an international sensation, winning Britain’s Booker Prize. After its publication, Roy began to work as a political activist, writing essays and giving speeches on a variety of issues, including capitalist globalization, the rights of oppressed groups, and the negative influence of United States culture and governmental policy on the rest of the world. She has been imprisoned for her positions and activism, but she continues to fight for a variety of liberal causes. Roy received the Sydney Peace Prize in November of 2004.

Plot Summary

Chapter 1

The God of Small Things begins with Rahel returning to her childhood home in Ayemenem, India, to see her twin brother Estha, who has been sent to Ayemenem by their father. Events flash back to Rahel and Estha’s birth and the period before their mother Ammu divorced their father. Then the narrator describes the funeral of Sophie Mol, Rahel and Estha’s cousin, and the point after the funeral when Ammu went to the police station to say that a terrible mistake had been made. Two weeks after this point, Estha was returned to his father.

The narrator briefly describes the twins’ adult lives before they return to Ayemenem. In the present, Baby Kochamma gloats that Estha does not speak to Rahel just as he does not speak to anyone else, and then the narrator gives an overview of Baby Kochamma’s life. Rahel looks out the window at the building that used to contain the family business, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, and flashes back to the circumstances surrounding Sophie Mol’s death.

Chapters 2–4

The second chapter describes the trip in which Rahel, Estha, Ammu, Chacko, and Baby Kochamma travel to the town of Cochin in order to pick up Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol from the airport. They are on the way to see The Sound of Music, but they are delayed at a train crossing by a Marxist demonstration in which Rahel sees her friend Velutha, who is a Paravan, or Untouchable Hindu, employed by the Kochamma family. When she yells to him out the window, Ammu scolds her furiously.

A flashback describes Velutha and his relations with the Kochamma family, and then one of the protesters opens Rahel’s door and makes Baby Kochamma wave a Marxist flag. Before they drive away, Chacko says that Ammu, Estha, and Rahel are “millstones around his neck.” In chapter 3, which takes place in the present day, the narrator describes the filthiness of the Ayemenem House. Estha comes home, goes upstairs, and takes off his clothes to wash them while Rahel watches.

Chapter 4 continues the story of the family trip at the point when they arrive at the movie theater. Ammu makes Estha go to the lobby because he cannot resist singing along, and the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man at the refreshments counter forces Estha to masturbate him. The family leaves early because Ammu sees that Estha will be sick, and on the way out she comments on the sweetness of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. Rahel says “why don’t you marry him, then?” Ammu tells her that comments like these make people love you a little less. Rahel worries that Ammu will love Sophie Mol more than her. The twins fall asleep next to each other in Chacko’s room.

Chapters 5–7

Back in the present day, the narrator describes the filthiness of the river, just a stream now because of a saltwater barrage, and the five-star hotel that has taken over the “History House,” which was formerly the home of an Englishman who took on traditional Indian customs. Rahel then answers Comrade Pillai’s invasive questions and remembers his son Lenin.

In chapter 6, the family picks up Margaret and Sophie Mol from the Cochin Airport. Baby Kochamma tells the twins they are the ambassadors of India. Chacko happily introduces everyone, but Estha does not say “How do YOU do?” as Ammu requests, and Rahel hides behind a curtain. Ammu later scolds them angrily, and the twins talk with Sophie Mol.

Chapter 7 is in the present day, when Rahel finds her and Estha’s “Wisdom Exercise Notebooks” and reads the corrections that Ammu made in them. She remembers Ammu’s last visit before she died and the lonely circumstances of her mother’s death.

Chapters 8–11

When the family arrives at the Ayemenem House with Margaret and Sophie Mol, the narrator compares the situation to a play. Rahel escapes from the distribution of Sophie Mol’s cake to play with Velutha, and Ammu exchanges a meaningful glance with Velutha.

In chapter 9, Rahel remembers her and Estha becoming friends with Sophie Mol, and, in the present day, she walks into the abandoned factory. Chapter 10 describes Estha’s thoughts while he wandered from Sophie Mol’s reception at the house and into the pickle factory. He and Rahel decide to take a stockpile of things to the History House. The twins find a boat by the river and Velutha helps them repair it. In chapter 11, Ammu dreams of a one-armed man until the twins wake her, and she realizes that Velutha is the man of whom she dreamed, the God of Small Things.

Chapters 12–15

In the present day, Rahel goes to see the traditional kathakali dancing in the Ayemenem temple and Estha shows up as well. Chapter 13 recalls the story of Margaret and Chacko’s relationship and then describes the circumstances leading up to Sophie Mol’s drowning, beginning with Vellya Paapen’s visit to the Ayemenem House. Vellya Paapen tells Mammachi of Velutha’s affair with Ammu and offers to kill his son, and Mammachi shouts, spits at him, and pushes him to the ground. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma then manage to lock Ammu in her room, and the next morning they receive the news that a white child was found drowned in the river.

At the police station, Baby Kochamma lies to Inspector Thomas Mathew that Velutha threatened them and tried to force himself on Ammu. The inspector then interviews Comrade Pillai about whether Velutha has any political support and, discovering that he does not, instructs his men to attack Velutha.

In chapter 14, Chacko visits Comrade Pillai and asks him about Velutha. Comrade Pillai, because of his own ambitions in the Communist Party, tells Chacko that Velutha is a dangerous party member who should be fired. Velutha comes to see Comrade Pillai, after Mammachi screams at him and fires him, and Comrade Pillai tells Velutha that he has no support from the party. In chapter 15, Velutha swims across the river to the History House.

Chapters 16–20

The twins and Sophie Mol run away from home in chapter 16, and Sophie Mol drowns after their boat tips over on the way to the History House. Chapter 17, in the present day, describes Rahel and Estha lying in bed, remembering their childhood. In chapter 18, the Kottayam police find Velutha sleeping next to Rahel and Estha at the History House, they and beat him until he is nearly dead.

Inspector Mathew interviews the twins in chapter 19 and discovers that Velutha is innocent. He tells Baby Kochamma that if the children do not identify Velutha as their abductor, he will accuse Baby Kochamma of filing a false report. Baby Kochamma tells the twins that they and Ammu will go to jail unless they accuse Velutha, and Estha goes into Velutha’s cell to condemn him. It is not until the next morning, after Velutha has died, that Ammu goes to the police station to set the record straight.

Chapter 20 describes the scene at the train station when Estha is leaving for Calcutta, and then changes to the present tense, when Estha and Rahel begin to make love. Chapter 21 flashes back to the point at which Ammu finds Velutha at the river and she and Velutha make love for the first time.

Characters

Aleyooty Ammachi

Aleyooty Ammachi is Rahel and Estha’s great-grandmother. Her portrait hangs prominently beside that of Reverend Ipe in the Ayemenem House.

Baba

Baba is Estha and Rahel’s father. Ammu divorces him when the children are very young. He was a violent alcoholic who not only beat his wife and children, but attempted to prostitute his wife to his English employer. Baba has remarried, resigned from his job on a tea plantation, and “more or less” stopped drinking when, after Sophie Mol’s death, Estha moves in with him in Calcutta. When Estha is an adult, Baba sends him back to Ayemenem and emigrates to Australia.

Reverend E. John Ipe

Estha and Rahel’s great-grandfather, Reverend Ipe had been known as Punnyan Kunju, or “Little Blessed One,” since he was blessed by the Syrian Christian Patriarch at age seven.

Joe

Joe is Margaret Kochamma’s second husband, who dies in a car accident shortly before Margaret and Sophie Mol travel to Ayemenem.

The Kathakali Men

Karna and Kunti, the Kathakali Men, perform the traditional Hindu dancing that Rahel and Estha go to see.

Ammu Kochamma

Ammu is Rahel and Estha’s mother. She is a beautiful and sardonic woman who has been victimized first by her father and then her husband. While raising her children, she has become tense and repressed. Ammu grew up in Delhi but, because her father said that college was an unnecessary expense for a girl, was forced to live with her parents when they moved to Ayemenem. She met her future husband at a wedding reception. She later divorces him and returns to the Ayemenem House when he starts to abuse the twins.

Ammu’s latent “Unsafe Edge,” full of desire and “reckless rage,” emerges during Sophie Mol’s visit and draws her to Velutha. After the horrific climax to the affair, Ammu sends Estha to live with his father and leaves Rahel in the Ayemenem House while Ammu looks for work; but Ammu loses a succession of jobs because she is ill. Ammu dies alone in a cheap hotel at the age of thirty-one. Chacko has her cremated because the Syrian Christian Church will not bury her.

Baby Kochamma

Nicknamed “Baby,” Mammachi’s sister, Navomi Ipe Kochamma, is a judgmental old maid with tiny feet. Rahel thinks, “She’s living her life backwards,” because Baby Kochamma renounces the material world when she is young, but becomes very materialistic when she is old. Throughout her life, Baby Kochamma is an insecure, selfish, and vindictive person.

When she was a girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with a handsome Irish monk named Father Mulligan who made weekly visits to her father. Although they did nothing more than flirt while talking about the Bible, when he moved to Madras she became a Roman Catholic and entered a convent in Madras in the hopes of being with him. After her hopes were crushed, she left the convent and traveled to the United States to study, returning to India obese and devoted to gardening. During the time of Sophie Mol’s visit, Baby Kochamma is a nuisance who pesters the twins because she dislikes them and Ammu. She is later revealed to be cruel and insidious, because she is the one that convinces the twins to condemn Velutha; and it was due to her manipulations of Chacko that Ammu is forced to leave the house and Estha is returned to his father. In her old age, Baby Kochamma becomes a bitter and lonely woman addicted to television, after having locked herself inside the family house.

Chacko Kochamma

Chacko is Ammu’s intellectual and self-absorbed older brother. He was a charming but very unclean Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and he met Margaret while she was working in an Oxford café. Deeply in love with Margaret, in part because she never depended on him or adored him like a mother, he marries her without telling his family. She grows tired of his squalor within a year, however, and divorces him around the time that their daughter is born.

Between his divorce and Sophie Mol’s death, Chacko grew fatter and became obsessed with balsawood airplanes, which he unsuccessfully attempted to fly. He was also unsuccessful at running the pickle factory, which started to lose money as soon as he attempted to expand the operation. A “self-proclaimed Marxist,” Chacko attempts to be a benevolent employer and even plans to organize a union among his own workers. However, he is insistent that he is the sole owner of his factory, his house, and other possessions that he actually shares with women. Sophie Mol’s death is completely devastating for him. After her death, he emigrates to Canada.

Estha Kochamma

Estha, which is short for Esthappen Yako, is Rahel’s twin brother. He is a serious, intelligent, and somewhat nervous child who wears “beige and pointy shoes” and has an “Elvis puff.” His experience of the circumstances surrounding Sophie Mol’s visit is somewhat more traumatic than Rahel’s, beginning when he is sexually abused by the Orangdrink Lemondrink Man at the Abhilash Talkies theater. The narrator stresses that Estha’s “Two Thoughts” in the pickle factory, which stem from this experience (that “Anything can happen to Anyone” and “It’s best to be prepared”) are critical in leading to his cousin’s death.

Estha is the twin chosen by Baby Kochamma, because he is more “practical” and “responsible,” to go into Velutha’s cell and condemn him as their abductor. This trauma, in addition to being shipped to Calcutta to live with his father, contributes to Estha becoming mute at some point in his childhood. Estha never went to college and acquired a number of habits, such as wandering on very long walks and obsessively cleaning his clothes. He is so close to his sister that the narrator describes them as one person, despite having been separated for most of their lives.

Mammachi Kochamma

An elegant woman in her old age although she is nearly blind, Mammachi is Rahel and Estha’s grandmother. Brutally beaten by her husband, she nevertheless cries at his funeral and shares many of his values, including an extremely rigid view of the caste system. She began the pickle factory and ran it successfully, and she was an “exceptionally talented” violinist, although Pappachi disallowed her to take further lessons when he heard this. Mammachi loves Chacko with blind admiration and deeply dislikes Margaret Kochamma. Nevertheless, she tolerates and even facilitates Chacko’s affairs with factory workers, although she is so horrified when she hears of Ammu’s affair with Velutha that she attacks both Velutha and his father, and locks Ammu in her room.

Margaret Kochamma

Margaret is Sophie Mol’s mother and Chacko’s ex-wife. She is from a strict, working-class London family and was working as a waitress in Oxford when she met Chacko. Marrying him because of his uncontrolled personality that made her feel free, Margaret soon realized that she did not need him to accept herself, and she divorced him. When her second husband Joe dies, Margaret accepts Chacko’s invitation to Ayemenem for Christmas, and she is haunted by this decision for the rest of her life. When Margaret sees her daughter’s body, she feels an irrational rage towards the twins and seeks out Estha several times to slap him.

Pappachi Kochamma

Shri Benaan John Ipe, known in the family as Pappachi, is Rahel and Estha’s grandfather. He was an “Imperial Entomologist” under British rule and an Anglophile whose greatest setback was not having named a moth that he discovered because government scientists failed to recognize it as a new species until later. Seventeen years older than his wife, he was extremely resentful of her and beat her regularly with a brass vase until Chacko ordered him never to do it again. Pappachi Kochamma also beat his daughter and smashed furniture, although in public he convinced everyone that he was compassionate and neglected by his wife. In his old age, he rode around in his blue Plymouth that he kept entirely to himself.

Rahel Kochamma

Rahel is Ammu’s daughter and Estha’s younger sister by eighteen minutes. An intelligent and honest person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is something of a drifter, and several times the narrator refers to her as the quality “Emptiness.” When she is a girl, her hair sits “on top of her head like a fountain” and she always wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims.

Although Ammu often chastises Rahel for being dirty and unsafe, she loves her very deeply, and Rahel is equally devoted to her mother. Rahel also loves Velutha and her brother, with whom she shares a “single Siamese soul.” She is traumatized by Sophie Mol’s drowning, Velutha’s death, and Ammu’s death. Although these events do not seem to deprive her of her quirkiness or brightness, they contribute to her sense of sadness and lack of direction in later life. After Ammu dies, Rahel drifts between schools, receiving little attention from Mammachi or Chacko. Rahel then enters an architecture school but never finishes the course, marries an American named Larry McCaslin, and lives with him in Boston until they are divorced. She moves to Washington, D.C. and spends several years as a night clerk at a gas station before returning to Ayemenem to see Estha.

Kochu Maria

Kochu Maria is the Kochamma family’s “vinegar-hearted, short-tempered, midget cook.” She does not speak any English and, although she has always “noticed everything,” she eventually stops caring about how the house looks and becomes addicted to television.

Kochu Thomban

Kochu Thomban is the Ayemenem temple elephant. When Rahel sees him in the present day, he is no longer “Kochu Thomban” (“Little Tusker”) but “Vellya Thomban” (“Big Tusker”).

Kuttappen

Velutha’s older brother, Kuttappen is paralyzed from the chest down and confined to his house, which he shares with his brother and father.

Inspector Thomas Mathew

The Kottayam police chief is a practical, cynical, and brutal man who deals carefully with the scandal of Sophie Mol’s death and Ammu’s affair with Velutha. He taps on Ammu’s breasts and insults her when she comes to make a statement about Velutha because the police chief strongly believes in the conventional caste system.

Larry McCaslin

Larry is Rahel’s American husband, whom she met at the college of architecture in Delhi while he was working on a doctoral thesis, and with whom she moves to Boston. He holds her “as though she was a gift” and notices a hollowness in Rahel’s eyes that seems to contribute to their lack of understanding and eventual divorce.

Miss Mitten

Rahel and Estha’s tutor whom they dislike, Miss Mitten is a Born Again Christian who scolds the twins for reading backwards. She is killed by a milk van.

Father Mulligan

Father Mulligan was Baby Kochamma’s would-be lover. An Irish monk who came to Kerala to study Hindu scriptures “in order to be able to denounce them intelligently,” he flirted with Baby Kochamma while ostensibly talking about the Bible. Eventually, he converts to Hinduism, staying in touch with Baby Kochamma, and dies of viral hepatitis.

Murlidharan

Perched on the milestone of an intersection, Murlidharan is the “level-crossing lunatic” the family encounters on their way to Cochin.

Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad

Chacko’s hero and the leader of Kerala’s democratically elected Communist government, Comrade Namboodiripad is a moderate, particularly during his second term.

Orangedrink Lemondrink Man

The man who works behind the refreshments counter at the Abhilash Talkies movie theater forces Estha to masturbate him. He looks like an “unfriendly jeweled bear” and deeply traumatizes Estha, who believes the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man will find him in Ayemenem.

Comrade K. N. M. Pillai

Comrade Pillai is “essentially a political man” who plots to become the leader of the Communist Party in Ayemenem. With many connections and building influence, he is involved in a number of business ventures, including making signs for the pickle factory. After he betrays Velutha because he wants to rid himself of any competition in the party ranks, Comrade Pillai lays the seeds for dissatisfaction among the workers of Paradise Pickles and organizes the unionization that contributes to the factory’s collapse. This does not help him rise to power in the party, however.

Kalyani Pillai

Kalyani is Comrade Pillai’s quiet wife.

Latha Pillai

Comrade Pillai’s niece, Latha, recites a poem by Sir Walter Scott for Chacko.

Lenin Pillai

Lenin is Comrade Pillai’s son. He is a slightly awkward boy who grows up to be a secretary in Delhi.

Kari Saipu

Kari Saipu is the “Black Sahib,” the Englishman who took on traditional Indian customs. The twins know his house, which was unoccupied after Kari Saipu shot himself, as “the History House.” This house is the location of Ammu and Velutha’s meetings.

Sophie Mol

Sophie Mol is Chacko and Margaret’s daughter. She is a frank and spirited English girl characterized by her bellbottoms and her go-go bag. Although the twins are prejudiced against her because they have been so insistently instructed about how to behave when she arrives, she manages to win them over. This is partly because she is charming and outgoing, and partly because she rejected the advances of Chacko, Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma in favor of befriending Rahel and Estha.

One reason Sophie Mol’s death is so important to the book’s main themes is that she represents a combination of Indian and British identities. The narrator is careful to call her “Sophie,” her English name, combined with “Mol,” the phrase for “girl” in the local language of Malayalam. Although Sophie Mol never takes to Indian culture, she does make a great effort with the twins before she accidentally falls into the river and drowns.

Vellya Paapen

Velutha’s father, Vellya is an “Old-World Paravan” who feels he is indebted to Mammachi for paying for his glass eye. He is tortured about his son’s affair with Ammu and tells Mammachi about it.

Velutha

An Untouchable worker at the pickle factory and a close friend to Rahel and Estha, Velutha is blamed for killing Sophie Mol and raping Ammu. In fact, he has nothing to do with Sophie Mol’s death, and he carries on a brief and voluntary affair with Ammu until Inspector Thomas Mathew’s police officers beat Velutha until he is nearly dead.

Velutha’s name means “White” in Malayalam, so-called because he has such dark skin. Mammachi noticed his prodigious talents in making and fixing things when he was young and convinced his father to send him to the Untouchables’ School founded by her father-in-law. Velutha became an accomplished carpenter and mechanic, and acquired an assurance that scared his father because it was unacceptable among Untouchables. Velutha disappeared for four years and was hired by Mammachi upon his return to Ayemenem. A member of the Communist Party, he never quite fits into his role as an Untouchable, and he begins an extremely passionate affair with Ammu when Sophie Mol arrives in Ayemenem. After Comrade Pillai refuses to help him, the police officers beat him, and Estha identifies him as their abductor. Velutha dies in jail.

Themes

Indian History and Politics

Indian history and politics shape the plot and meaning of The God of Small Things in a variety of ways. Some of Roy’s commentary is on the surface, with jokes and snippets of wisdom about political realities in India. However, the novel also examines the historical roots of these realities and develops profound insights into the ways in which human desperation and desire emerge from the confines of a firmly entrenched caste society. Roy reveals a complex and longstanding class conflict in the state of Kerala, India, and she comments on its various competing forces.

For example, Roy’s novel attacks the brutal, entrenched, and systematic oppression at work in Kerala, exemplified by figures of power such as Inspector Thomas Mathew. Roy is also highly critical of the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the conventional, traditional moral code of Pappachi and Mammachi. On the opposite side of the political fence, the Kerala Communist Party, at least the faction represented by Comrade Pillai, is revealed to be much more concerned with personal ambition than with any notions of social justice.

Class Relations and Cultural Tensions

In addition to her commentary on Indian history and politics, Roy evaluates the Indian postcolonial complex, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians towards their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a “[sh——t]-wiper” in Hindi for his blind devotion to the British, Chacko explains to the twins that they come from a family of Anglophiles, or lovers of British culture, “trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps,” and he goes on to say that they despise themselves because of this.

Topics For Further Study

• Roy has published a great deal of political writing, has worked as an activist, and has been imprisoned for her political beliefs. Research her political views and activities, and read some of her political writings. How would you characterize Roy’s position on issues such as globalization and terrorism? What have been the results of her activism in India and around the world?
• As an Indian novel written in English, The God of Small Things is part of a genre of literature stretching back to the days of the British Raj. Research the ways in which Roy’s novel relates to this tradition, which includes authors such as R. K. Narayan and Salman Rushdie. In what ways does Roy’s novel fit into this tradition, and in what ways does it belong outside of it? What innovations does Roy bring to Indian literature in English, and why are they important? How does Roy’s novel relate to Indian politics, and how is this similar or different to the ways in which the novels of her predecessors have related to Indian politics?
• Some readers and critics have found elements of The God of Small Things offensive or controversial. Research the nature of the outcry against the novel, particularly in India and in Britain. Which aspects of the work were controversial, and why? What were the results of the controversy? Describe your reaction to moments of the novel such as when Estha is forced to masturbate the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, when Ammu and Velutha make love, and when Rahel and Estha make love. Discuss how elements of the forbidden and the taboo relate to the central themes of the novel.
• Communism has been a uniquely prominent force in the state of Kerala, India. Research the activities of the various factions of the Communist Party in Kerala. How did communism develop and spread in the region? What are the key ways in which communist thought has affected Kerala’s history? How does the history of the communist parties in Kerala relate to the history of communism throughout South Asia? Discuss the state of communism in Kerala today.

A related inferiority complex is evident in the interactions between Untouchables and Touchables in Ayemenem. Vellya Paapen is an example of an Untouchable so grateful to the Touchable class that he is willing to kill his son when he discovers that his son has broken the most important rule of class segregation—that there be no inter-class sexual relations. Nearly all of the relationships in the novel are somehow colored by cultural and class tension, including the twins’ relationship with Sophie Mol, Chacko’s relationship with Margaret, Pappachi’s relationship with his family, and Ammu’s relationship with Velutha. Characters such as Baby Kochamma and Pappachi are the most rigid and vicious in their attempts to uphold that social code, while Ammu and Velutha are the most unconventional and daring in unraveling it. Roy implies that this is why they are punished so severely for their transgression.

Forbidden Love

The many types of love in Roy’s novel, whether they are described as erotic, familial, incestuous, biological, or hopeless, are important to the novel’s meaning. However, Roy focuses her authorial commentary on forbidden and taboo types of love, including Ammu’s love for Velutha and Rahel’s love for Estha. Both relationships are rigidly forbidden by what Roy calls the “Love Laws,” or “The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. / And how much.” Although breaking these laws is the worst of taboos, and those who break them are brutally punished, desire and desperation overcome the Love Laws at the key moments of Roy’s novel.

One interpretation of Roy’s theme of forbidden love is that love is such a powerful and uncontrollable force that it cannot be contained by any conventional social code. Another is that conventional society somehow seeks to destroy real love, which is why love in the novel is consistently connected to loss, death, and sadness. Also, because all romantic love in the novel relates closely to politics and history, it is possible that Roy is stressing the interconnectedness of personal desire to larger themes of history and social circumstances. Love would therefore be an emotion that can be explained only in terms of two peoples’ cultural backgrounds and political identities.

Style

Non-sequential Narrative

The God of Small Things is not written in a sequential narrative style in which events unfold chronologically. Instead, the novel is a patchwork of flashbacks and lengthy sidetracks that weave together to tell the story of the Kochamma family. The main events of the novel are traced back through the complex history of their causes, and memories are revealed as they relate to each other thematically and as they might appear in Rahel’s mind. Although the narrative voice is omniscient, or all-knowing, it is loosely grounded in Rahel’s perspective, and all of the episodes of the novel progress towards the key moments in Rahel’s life.

This non-sequential narrative style, which determines the form of the novel, is an extremely useful authorial tool. It allows Roy a great deal of flexibility as she chooses which themes and events are most important to pursue. The author is able to structure her book so as to build up to the ideas and events at the root of the Kochamma family’s experience.

Foreshadowing

Throughout Roy’s novel, the narrative voice emphasizes that it is building towards a mysterious, cataclysmic, and all-important event. Roy even provides details and glimpses of the event, which she refers to as “The Loss of Sophie Mol,” and quotes characters remembering it and referring to it vaguely far before the reader discovers what has happened. Because of this technique, called foreshadowing, Roy builds considerable tension and intrigue into The God of Small Things, and she is able to play with the expectation and anticipation that the reader feels.

Historical Context

Because of the efforts of the political and religious leader Mohandas Gandhi, India became independent on August 15, 1947 at the stroke of midnight, after more than three hundred years of a British colonial presence. The British partitioned the former colony into the nations of India and Pakistan (comprised of East and West regions), but this was unsuccessful in quelling agitations between Hindus and Muslims. The borders were only rough designations of religious majorities, and millions died as Hindus in Pakistan moved to majority-Hindu India, and Muslims in India moved to majority-Muslim Pakistan. Ammu was five years old in 1947, living with her family in the Indian capital of New Delhi.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India from Independence until his death in 1964, struggled to foster economic growth and became involved in various territorial disputes. In Kerala, the Communist Party of India (CPI) was elected to power in a state government led by E. M. S. Namboodiripad in 1957, but Nehru dissolved it in 1959. In 1962, the year Rahel and Estha were born, India fought a limited war over a border dispute with China. As a result of the Chinese conflict, the CPI split between a pro-Russian faction, still called the CPI, and a faction that grew to be less influenced by foreign governments, called the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In the mid- 1960s, a further split in the Indian communist parties formed the Naxalites, who advocated an immediate communist revolution, while tensions between Pakistan and India flared into war in 1965.

After Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died of a heart attack in 1966, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas Gandhi) assumed the post amidst a severe draught and growing unemployment. These conditions contributed to the major losses that Gandhi’s Indian National Congress Party suffered in the 1967 elections. As Gandhi’s intentions for the Congress Party became clear, tensions arose between liberal and conservative members of the party, and in 1969, the year of Sophie Mol’s visit to Ayemenem, the Congress Party split. Although Indira Gandhi remained in control of the larger, liberal faction, she was forced to forge alliances with left-wing parties in order to maintain control of the government.

Compare & Contrast

• 1969: E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s communist government of Kerala falls for the second time, and the Indian National Congress Party dissolves into two groups.
  
  1990s: Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated in 1991 and is succeeded by P. V. Narasimha Rao. A series of leadership struggles begins in 1996, when Rao is forced out of power.
  
  Today: Manmohan Singh is appointed prime minister of India in May of 2004, after the Congress Party unexpectedly wins the election and its leader Sonia Gandhi, widow of Rajiv Gandhi, declines the post in order to appease Hindu nationalists. Communism remains a powerful force in Kerala politics.
• 1969: Kerala is a lush and warm region of southern India with a uniquely high literacy rate. Public welfare systems have become much more substantial since independence, but the agricultural economy remains similar to the economy in the days of the British Raj.
  
  1990s: Kerala’s economy is still based on rubber, coconut, and spice production, but economic reforms are placing much more emphasis on large private corporations, and India is opening up to foreign investment.
  
  Today: India has one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in the world, and the trend towards privatization continues. Kerala has a literacy rate near ninety percent, which is the highest of any state in India.
• 1969: Post-colonial Indian literature written in English is becoming a popular genre of its own, developed by writers such as R. K. Narayan.
  
  1990s: Salman Rushdie has been a dominant force in the Indo-British literary scene since he published Midnight’s Children in 1981.
  
  Today: Indian writing in English is a wide and diverse genre of literature, and Roy is one of its most successful stars, even though she has published only one novel.

Further tensions with Pakistan led to India’s involvement in a conflict between East Pakistan and West Pakistan in 1971, which led to the independence of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan). Indira Gandhi was convicted of minor election law violations in 1975, but she declared a state of emergency in order to stay in power. Widely unpopular, this move allowed her to arrest opposition leaders and censor the press, and she was defeated in the 1977 elections. Gandhi was elected once again in 1980, however, and began to meet with foreign leaders while dealing with several insurgencies in India. In 1984, she sent Indian troops to storm a Sikh temple, killing the Sikh guerillas inside, and this event led to her assassination by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, succeeded her to the leadership of the Congress Party and was elected prime minister in 1985. Rajiv Gandhi sponsored economic reforms, but he was criticized as an indecisive leader and lost the 1989 election.

Roy wrote her novel in the early 1990s, during a period in which Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Sri Lankan Tamil in 1991 while campaigning for an election that political analysts believe he would have won. The present-day events in The God of Small Things occur in 1992, when Congress/I (formerly the Congress Party) leader P. V. Narasimha Rao was prime minister. Rao became known for his sensitive handling of Hindu- Muslim tensions, his economic reforms, and his progressive foreign policy in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He lost power in 1996 amidst charges of corruption, however, and this began a series of leadership struggles that continued through India’s announcement in 1998 that it was a nuclear power; Pakistan made a similar announcement shortly thereafter.

Critical Overview

The God of Small Things was an unprecedented international success for a first-time author. It won a publishing advance reputed to be near one million dollars, and it won Britain’s most prestigious writing award, the Booker Prize, in 1997. Reviews in the United States were very positive, often including high praise such as that of Ritu Menon in her review for Women’s Review of Books: “The God of Small Things is a seduction from start to finish.” Although the novel was generally well-reviewed in Britain, there was some controversy about its success, and a minority of critics, including the previous Booker Prize Committee Chairperson Carmen Callil, said on television that it did not deserve the prize. The novel has also caused some controversy in India, where it was first published. Communists, including E. M. S. Namboodiripad, took exception to Roy’s portrayal of communist characters, and the lawyer Sabu Thomas filed a public interest petition claiming that the novel was obscene.

Critics generally group the novel into the genre of post-colonial Indian literature that takes Indian politics and history as its subject. For example, the anonymous reviewer in the March 15, 1997 edition of Kirkus Reviews characterizes Roy’s style as “reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s early work.” Like the novels of the influential Indian-British author Salman Rushdie, The God of Small Things is written in English, for a Western readership as much as an Indian readership, and it takes on a variety of historical and political themes.

Criticism

Scott Trudell

Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses the significance of the sexual encounters between Rahel and Estha, and Ammu and Velutha.

The God of Small Things builds an incredible amount of anticipation and expectation for the definitive moment of the story. With all of its foreshadowing, its emphasis on tracing one’s steps, and its insistent suggestion that everything, from politics to erotic desire, is intimately connected, Roy’s novel places a great deal of emphasis on the central event of the twins’ childhood that caused the momentous changes in the Kochamma family. The reader comes to expect, because of the narrator’s many references to “the Loss of Sophie Mol,” that everything will boil down to one key moment, and that this moment will involve Sophie Mol’s death.

It eventually becomes clear, however, that Sophie Mol’s actual drowning is an accident, an understated tragedy in which she simply vanishes in the river. Like all of the characters’ lives and the events of the plot, Sophie Mol’s death is intimately tied to many other elements, including Estha’s sexual abuse, Sophie Mol’s relationship to the twins, and the host of factors that led to the tragedy. But the actual loss of Sophie Mol does not reveal much about the deep historical forces at work in Ayemenem, and it does not explain what truly causes or defines the Kochamma family’s experience.

Instead, Roy’s trajectory of foreshadowing and anticipation leads to the two forbidden, taboo erotic relationships of the novel—between Ammu and Velutha, and Estha and Rahel. These are the episodes at the core of the unraveling plot and the crux of the book’s meaning. All of the tension, desire, and desperation beneath the surface of the narrative converges into these expressions of love, which are examples of perhaps the greatest, most unthinkable taboos of all. This essay will discuss why the two forbidden sexual episodes in the final two chapters of The God of Small Things are so crucial to the history of the Kochamma family and the emblematic of the meaning of the novel.

Before discussing the significance of these episodes, however, it will help to establish how and why they are so closely connected. It is immediately clear that they have much in common as doomed, forbidden love trysts, and it is no coincidence that they are revealed and described next to each other, at the end of the narrative. However, there are other, less obvious connections. During Estha and Rahel’s erotic encounter, for example, there are repeated references to Ammu such as calling Rahel’s mouth “Their beautiful mother’s mouth” and there is the statement that the twins are at the “viable die-able age” of thirty, Ammu’s age between her affair with Velutha and her death. Equally important is the phrase, “They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter,” because it is more applicable to Velutha and Ammu than to the twins. Also key at this point, late in chapter 20, is the narrator’s statement about Rahel and Estha that “once again they broke the Love Laws,” which uses the term that had previously been applied to Ammu and Velutha and implies that the twins’ situation is a reoccurrence of the affair of 1969.

By closely connecting Rahel and Estha’s sexual relationship to Ammu and Velutha’s, Roy suggests that present-day events converge with the events surrounding Sophie Mol’s death, and that each strain of the plot has the same thematic resolution. The two instances of breaking of the Love Laws form a key to understanding the rest of the book; they are both the result and the cause of the novel’s action. This is why the narrator writes that the story “really began in the days when the Love Laws were made,” back through the colonial and pre-colonial history of Kerala. The Love Laws represent the strict confines on human behavior—the caste systems, social pressures, and political restrictions that horrify people beyond expression when they are broken. The central action of the novel is about breaking them, and the tragedy that results from breaking them.

For one thing, therefore, the forbidden love affairs at the end of the novel are crucial because they reveal the disgust and horror with the lovers that is at the root of the violence and tragedy directed against them. Present-day Western readers probably do not consider inter-caste romance repulsive, but they are quite likely to be shocked and offended by incest. Incest is as taboo in twenty-first-century Western society as an inter-caste sexual affair would have been in the 1960s, and probably still is, in Kerala. The reader’s reaction to such violations of the Love Laws allows him/her to understand how and why such drastic social and political consequences could have resulted from the transgressions at the end of The God of Small Things. Roy allows the reader an insight into the emotional basis behind the careful, planned brutality of those dedicated to Kerala’s social code, such as the Touchable Policemen who believe that in beating Velutha to death they are enforcing the Love Laws and “inoculating a community against an outbreak.”

However, the love affairs also allow the reader to identify with the transgressor, and they inspire a sympathetic reaction for four people who are abused, tortured, and betrayed by their society’s most fundamental rules. The reasons for Ammu’s turn to Velutha are sharply drawn and inspire a great deal of sympathy when she studies her body, the body of an “inexperienced lover,” in the mirror and peers “down the road to Age and Death through its parted strands.” Ammu’s love affair is, in a sense, the cause of the novel’s tragedy because it shatters her family, condemns Velutha to a brutal death, traumatizes Rahel and Estha for the rest of their lives, and results in her own decay and death. It is also, however, the result of an entire lifetime of abuse, confinement, and imprisonment in a stinting social code. This code not only fails to protect Ammu against her father beating her with a brass vase, her father imprisoning her in the house even when she is an adult, and her husband beating her; it actually leads to these consequences. When she recognizes that Kerala’s social code is in the process of forcing her down Baby Kochamma’s path of bitter, joyless confinement to the house until death, she acts in perfectly understandable desperation and attempts to find some brief joy with Velutha.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Guide (1958) is R. K. Narayan’s popular tale of Raju, a former convict who is mistaken for a holy man upon his arrival in Narayan’s fictional universe of Malgudi.
• Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is a multifaceted and ambitious work about India’s history since its independence from Britain. Focusing on the story of Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of midnight marking Independence, it includes elements of magic and fantasy, and it is highly allusive to classic texts including the Bible and Arabian Nights.
• Roy’s third volume of nonfiction, War Talk (2003), is composed of fluent and engaging arguments about the negative impacts of globalization, the danger of nuclear proliferation, and the devastating impact of the Bush administration’s foreign policy on the Third World.
• E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) is the classic modernist text about the clash of British and Indian cultures during the British Raj. The plot centers around the Indian Dr. Aziz, who is accused of raping an English woman.

Similarly, Rahel’s affair with Estha can be interpreted as the result of a social code, both in Kerala and in the United States, that has traumatized her and deprived her of her childhood. The “Quietness and Emptiness” that characterize Estha and Rahel stems from Velutha’s death and their parents’ difficulties in raising them, but also stems from a society that is cruel, harassing, and violent towards a single mother and her children. From Baby Kochamma to Chacko to the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, people are prejudiced towards Ammu and her children, and take advantage of them. Rahel and Estha’s incestuous contact is their attempt to find comfort in each other, although, unlike Ammu and Velutha, they are not even able to reach a joyful release from their problems, and “what they shared that night was not happiness but hideous grief.”

In addition to what they reveal about the cultural and political content of Roy’s novel, the two affairs communicate a great deal about the novel’s psychological subtext. In the course of the book, both Ammu and Rahel experience identity crises whose primary goals are, in a sense, discovering who and what they are in relation to their culture and family. Rahel travels back to Ayemenem to see her brother, but her journey is perhaps better described as a quest, through her memories, to discover herself and the roots of her history. The third-person narrator of The God of Small Things is omniscient, and not strictly confined to any particular perspective, but the narrative voice is grounded in Rahel’s memories. Events and remembrances weave into the story as they might appear in Rahel’s mind, and the novel is structured around her search to understand herself and her past.

Rahel’s incestuous contact with Estha is so crucial and definitive in this identity search because, as the narrator stresses insistently, her brother is herself. In opening passages of the novel, the narrator relates that, during their childhood, “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.” The twins’ love-making is a metaphor for their search for this fractured and traumatized joint identity in their adulthood, and it is a real, physical and emotional expression of their grief and longing.

Ammu’s affair with Velutha is also, in a sense, a search for herself; this is clear from the lengthy passages in which the narrator describes the desperation in Ammu’s strictly confined life and her need to live and experience joy. When Ammu studies herself in the mirror and tests whether a toothbrush will stay on her breast, she reveals that she understands herself through her body and her sexual identity, and she seeks out Velutha in order to discover the beautiful part of herself.

The forbidden love affairs that come at the end of Roy’s novel, therefore, work together to provide a single metaphor for the key struggles and meanings of the novel. The twins’ incestuous contact and Ammu’s affair with Velutha are metaphors for, and physical enactments of, the psychological identity struggles of the novel’s protagonists. These struggles extend, by implication and because they are so closely connected to the political subtext of the novel, to the wider political and psychological identity struggles of all those afflicted by the oppressive social code of southern Indian culture.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on The God of Small Things, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Joyce Hart

Hart is a freelance writer and author of several books. In the following essay, Hart goes behind the story contained in The God of Small Things to study Roy’s poetic language and unique writing style.

Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things has many excellent qualities. The setting is exotic; the voice is unique; the characters are complex; and the plot line is mysterious. Any one of these, done as well as Roy’s skills have provided, might have been enough for the author to win the Booker Prize, one of the most distinguished literary awards; but with one more distinctive characteristic added to the mix—Roy’s poetic and imaginative writing style—there is no question that this book will long remain one of the most fascinating novels of the twentieth century.

Upon the first read of The God of Small Things, one cannot help but be drawn into the story that Roy has created, wondering, with each succeeding chapter, what could possibly happen next. There are questions about who these characters are; where the plot line is going; and what the missing details are that the author has purposefully left out, taunting the reader to hurriedly move forward. Even the setting of the story is alluring with its freshly conceived scenery, unusual town names, striking tropical flora and fauna, as well as the strange social customs. The storyline twists around unsuspecting corners, as the narrator takes readers into the dark depths of the characters’ souls. And even though, after reading this book, one might sense the quality of writing of this gifted novelist, it might take a second, and maybe even a third, reading before one can actually pay attention to the underlying style that makes this novel so invigorating to read. The purpose of this essay is to do just that: to examine not the story but Roy’s unique writing technique; and to point out the poetic qualities of her writing.

One of the first elements of the author’s writing that readers confront as they begin this novel is Roy’s creative vocabulary—creative in the sense that she makes up new words. In the first pages, for example, Roy uses the words “dustgreen trees” and later portrays a smell as “sicksweet.” Two things happen when she puts two words together like this (which she consistently does throughout the novel). First, she captures the attention of the reader. There are no such words as “dustgreen” and “sicksweet,” which her audience will immediately realize, and yet readers will know exactly what the author has intended by using such new words. Secondly, the words not only make sense, they describe the objects they are referring to with much greater depth than most single adjectives and metaphors could possibly do, and the author accomplishes this with minimum verbiage. “Dustgreen,” for instance, is used to describe both a color and a condition, and with this one inventive word, Roy gives her readers a fully sensual image. Dust is gritty and dry, like the weather she is trying to depict. So in using a word such as “dustgreen,” Roy helps readers not only to visualize the setting but also to feel it. A similar double sense is created with the word “sicksweet.” Readers not only can taste and smell it, they can feel it in the pit of their stomachs, just as Rahel and Estha feel when they think about the world that Roy has created for them in her novel. The sweetness of the odor has attracted these characters to explore their world; but the consequences and the reactions of their world have made them sick. Thus, these “double words” are more than the sum of their parts. They are not just two words haphazardly added together, but rather they are almost like short poems. They offer the reader vivid images through short expressive words.

Other examples of combining words appear when the narrator pulls readers into the funeral of Sophie Mol, a flashback that occurs at the beginning of the novel. When a baby bat climbs up Baby Kochamma’s sari, making the woman scream, Roy provides her readers with a sample of the noises of confusion in the congregation, which she represents with the words: “Whatisit? Whathappened?” and “a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.” With these new words, readers are given a complex picture of the bewilderment that is occurring inside the church. Not only do these words refer to sounds, they also provoke a sense of movement. People are turning their heads back and forth, searching for the source of the yelling and its cause as they try to figure out what is happening (“Whatisit? Whathappened?”); bats are beating their wings, trying to escape (“Furrywhirring”); and women are flapping the material of their costumes to make sure that there are no bats climbing on them (“Sariflapping”). Once again, Roy has created vibrant descriptions in using her newly conceived words. It is as if she has captured a whole movie scene, filled with motion and sound, with just a minimum use of syllables.

There is another form of creative vocabulary that Roy makes up. This one reflects children trying to make sense of the adult world through little bits of information that they receive. For instance, again at Sophie Mol’s funeral, the protagonist Rahel attempts to repeat words that she has heard during the religious ceremony. But in a child’s world, not only is it hard to grasp the full meaning of language; it is also sometimes difficult to take hold of the full word. So in repeating the Biblical quote that refers to the body decomposing and returning to the dust from whence it came, Rahel tries to mimic the priests. But instead of saying “dust to dust,” she says: “Dus to dus to dus to dus to dus.” This is what the words sound like to her. And by Roy using this phrase (as well as other similar, child interpretations throughout the novel), she places her readers inside the mind of the very young. Readers thus are provided with a different view of reality, one that is seen through the eyes of her young characters, children who must face some very tragic circumstances very early in their lives. Rahel, in this instance, cannot fully comprehend death, so she repeats the priests’ words as best she can, twisting her tongue around them, attempting to make a kind of song out of them, hoping that eventually the phrase might help her understand. “Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe,” Rahel believes. “Her funeral killed her.” And it is Roy’s creative use of language that makes readers not only mentally visualize what is happening inside Rahel’s mind but to feel the confusion, the struggle with her conflicts, and the great challenges that confront her.

In the middle of the story, the narrator shines more light on Roy’s understanding of how children perceive the world through language that they do not fully understand. While the family is awaiting the arrival of Sophie Mol and her family at the airport, Estha and Rahel are misbehaving. Their uncle suggests that their mother deal with them “later,” a word that plays with Rahel’s mind. “And Later became a horrible, menacing, goose-bumpy word. Lay. Ter. Like a deep-sounding bell in a mossy well. Shivery, and furred. Like moth’s feet.” This passage sums up the foundation upon which Roy has built her literary vocabulary, her creative construction of language for this story. It explains why she is so focused on language, especially when dealing with her youngest of characters. Roy is sensitive to the distorted world that children must plow through, hoping to find their way. She remembers how difficult language was to understand and yet at the same time how powerful words could be for children. Even when words are not fully comprehended, or at least not identified with proper dictionary meanings, they are felt. Words for children have more than sound; they have lives of their own. And the tone of them can be frightening. Roy knows that sometimes words that children hear are creepy, furry insects. Other times they are slimy wells that threaten to swallow all who hear them.

One more way that Roy adorns her story is through the use of poetic images which are as colorful as the tropical paintings of Paul Gauguin. The author obviously does not paint with oils to do so but rather with vibrant words, such as when she is describing the first raindrops of the monsoon season when she writes: “Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire.” The first component that makes this sentence so beautiful is the alliteration with the letter s, which sounds slippery just like the rain she is portraying. Then there is the overall image of hard raindrops falling on the dry earth. The rain is so hard and the earth is so dry that when the water first hits the dirt, dust flies up into the air as if the earth is being shot at. This sentence is poetically powerful on many different levels. But besides creating an image, it also provides a psychological reference. Rahel has just returned in Ayemenem as the narrator describes this scene. Change is in the air as the edge of the monsoon season pushes the dry weather away. But there is also a sense of danger presented here. The author uses the word gunfire in her metaphor, as if a warning is being given. The timeframe of this novel is contorted, moving from the present to the past and back again, over and over again. So when the above sentence appears in the story, the damage to Rahel has already happened; but the reader is still in the dark because the story has just begun. So the warning is not given for Rahel’s sake but for the reader’s. It is as if the author is alerting the reader that this is not going to be an easy, entertaining story. There are many events that will be hard to take, and Rahel’s return is but one of the markers for these difficult changes.

There is another passage that serves a dual purpose. It appears on the first page of the novel. The narrator is describing the landscape as the monsoon season begins. “Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom.” Here there is another reference to great change, as dried out branches that once looked like a fence are now blossoming and thus fading into the rest of the vegetation around it. Whereas fences normally standout as rigid boundaries, in this instance the boundary itself becomes part of the garden. Besides creating a poetic image, Roy foreshadows a theme that will prevail throughout the story, one in which boundaries between sex, race, social status, and rational and irrational reality will cease to exist. As a matter of fact, the whole first chapter provides a foreshadowing of the rest of the novel. Roy either cleverly hints at events that will come, or else she completely throws her readers into very specific events but only gives readers quick, short glimpses, teasing them forward.

Examples of how Roy gives hints and glimpses into the future of the novel include her reference to the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” and her mentioning that he did something to Estha; but she does not say what that was. And Roy describes Rahel as being “brittle with exhaustion from her battle against Real Life,” although readers have no idea what this battle entailed. Then later in the first chapter, Inspector Thomas Mathew toys with Rahel’s mother, Ammu, when the woman goes to the police station: “He tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket.” There is a lot suggested in this phrase. First there is the superior stance of the inspector. There is also the sexual overtone. And then there is the reader’s curiosity, which is aroused by questions such as why has Ammu gone to see the policeman? And why is he intimidating her? Then shortly after this encounter, Ammu says: “He’s dead.” Readers do not know who has died nor what all these passages mean. Roy is fully aware of keeping her readers in the dark, but she does not worry about the confusion. The author does not rush to fill in all the gaps. This is because she is a profoundly confident and creative writer. Roy tells her story the way she wants to relate it. And she does it in a language that suits her characters’ minds. And it is her confidence, creativity, and poetic style that make Roy’s writing so refreshing, make her story so enticing to read over and over again.

Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on The God of Small Things, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Laura Carter

Carter is currently employed as a freelance writer. In this essay, Carter considers the social malaise present in Roy’s version of contemporary Indian society as a function of Western influence.

Permeating Arundahti Roy’s The God of Small Things is an India devoid of a sense of history, one that has laid waste to the Western world. It is a desolation foreshadowing what lies, even eats away at, the core of the novel—when a people, in this case, the people of India, lose their sense of history, the results are devastating to all. In the opening chapter of her work, Roy introduces the reader to world of what was. Relationships are broken, gardens go asunder, homes lay waste, victims of abject filth fueled by apathy and neglect. It is a circumstance Roy paints aptly and repeatedly from the opening pages until Sophie Mol’s tragic end.

The British influence of the Indian culture insidiously lurks at the heart of the novel. Baby Kochamma appears at the beginning of the novel to Rahel to be a caricature of her former self, defined by her dyed jet-black hair along with its by-product, a pale gray stain imprinted on her forehead. She has also begun to wear makeup, that when applied in the dark confines of her home, appears to be slightly off, “her lipstick mouth having shifted slightly off her real mouth.” The silence between Baby Kochamma and Rahel when they are reunited, both now as adults, mirrors this strangeness, described as sitting “between grandniece and baby grandaunt like a third person. A stranger. Swollen. Noxious.” Conversation is stilted, and the two struggle to find words. But the reader soon learns that circumstances were once different. The narrative recalls a past featuring a different Baby Kochamma, one who had previously spent her afternoons in a sari and gumboots, where she tended to an ornamental garden fantastic enough to attract attention from neighboring towns.

But much has changed. The garden is as toxic as the reunion between relatives, abandoned, having “grown knotted and wild, like a circus whose animals have forgotten their tricks. The reason for Baby Kochamma’s neglect, stems from her “new love,” a satellite dish antenna. This event generates “impossible excitement” in Baby Kochamma literally overnight, hypnotic in its intrusion into her existence. She abandons her love for gardening for the sake of the WWF and other televised amusements. “In Ayemenem,” says the narrator, “where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants.” This newfound attraction, the reader also discovers, is the catalyst for Baby Kochamma’s absurd new look, defined by badly dyed, brittle hair and painted lips, influenced by television programming the likes of The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara.

The social malaise framing the events of the novel is aptly described by Chacko, an India-born, Oxford educated man who sees, yet cannot transcend, the hypocrisies of his westernized culture. It is Chacko who is quick to point out that the family’s desire to see The Sound of Music is “an extended exercise in Anglophilia.” He tells the twins that they are all Anglophiles, “pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.” He explains to them that history is “like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.” To understand one’s history is to enter this house, to understand and hear the whispers, to see the books, pictures and smell the smells that linger within its walls. Yet in the next breath, he is apt to express himself in what is characterized as his “reading aloud voice,” an affectation developed during his studies at Oxford. His fondness for his Oxford days culminates not only in his affinity for literature, but for the reverence he holds for both his American-born ex-wife and their daughter.

No one character seems to escape the tentacles of Western culture. An element of violence punctures the novel, first, in Baby Kochamma’s husband, Pappachi, who beat her regularly yet fancied himself to be a proper English gentleman within the context of his own arrogance and exceedingly destructive nature. Then there is Ammu, his daughter, mother of Rahel and Estha, who returns home after surviving a violent attack from her drunken husband. The cause for the assault, the reader learns, stems from a request by her husband’s British employer to sleep with Ammu as a way to preserve his position with the company. Ammu’s refusal to comply spurns the attack from her spouse. When she decides to leave her husband, her family’s response is surprisingly negative, according to the narrator. In the Kochamma family, Ammu’s integrity takes a backseat to preconceived notions of British values. “Pappachi would not believe her story—not because he thought well of her husband, but simply because he didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife.” It is this Western influence that further polarizes the family. As a result of this influence, Ammu is osterisized by her own people, as are her innocent children, predicated or based on a sort of high-flying, false perception of English decorum as having transcended Indian culture.

Velutha is in a similar, if not worse position in modern Indian society. When the British came to his town, his, among other Paravans, Pelayas and Pulayas, wanted to avoid “Untouchability” by Christian conversion and membership in the Anglican church. Rather than escape persecution, these groups found that they had instead relinquished any claims to government benefits, their Christianity rendering them “casteless” outcasts in their own society. Recalling Chacko’s own lesson in histrionics, Roy says of the fate of Velutha’s people, “It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.” In so much as Velutha is loved, and even admired by Baby Kochamma, he remains a social outcast. Because of this imposed status and its perceived impact on the Kochamma family, i.e., the affair between Velutha and Ammu, Velutha is eventually betrayed by Baby Kochamma to preserve the family name. In the end, authorities misuse this information to their advantage to subdue the Indian community. A brutal beating meant to send a message to quiet rebellious rumblings results in Velutha’s death.

Sophie Mol’s death remains at the heart of the story, and weighs heavily on Estha and Rahel. It functions as a leveling force for all concerned. It is the pivotal point at which familial bonds are permanently severed. Her life is symbolic and central to the novel. She epitomizes all that is British, described upon her arrival: “She walked down the runway, the smell of London in her hair.” Her father, Indian, her mother, American, Sophie Mol is a product of a biracial marriage. Ironically, despite these familial ties, she has little or no connection with India. She has instead been raised in England by her American-born mother, well-removed from the influences of the India people. Ironically, Sophie Mol’s British affectations have elevated her status, somehow overshadowing her Indian origins. Her cousins, Estha and Rahel, stand in her shadow. Rather than being elevated or embraced for their Indianness, they are overlooked in Baby Kochamma’s home. And when Sophie Mol tragically dies, the event tears apart core relationships in the Kochamma household. The family puts all of their energy into Sophie Mol, and her death, even though their history with the child suggests she is more or less a stranger, admired more for her golden hair, western mannerisms and dress. Instead of accepting responsibility for their part in the accident, tragically, both Chacko and Baby Kochamma blame Rahel and Estha, and begin to treat them as outcasts.

Roy speaks of India’s history as if it were creeping in the shadows, represented by “History House” looming in the “Heart of Darkness” at the other side of the river. History House is haunted by an Englishman who had gone native, the “Black Sahib” who it was intimated had committed suicide after his family was permanently separated by his young lover’s parents, presumably Indian and perhaps, ironically so, bent on the child’s Anglicization. Driven by their need to escape from a hostile family life, the twins look to History House as a way to escape the constraints of their own world. What happens when they decide to cross the river, to be with Velutha, the man they “weren’t supposed to love” on that fateful day on the back veranda changes the course of their lives, and their affinity to the world forever. Adds Roy, “While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.” Both of the twins hear history’s “sickening thud,” they in fact “smell its smell and never forget,” a smell described as “old roses on a breeze.”

Estha and Rahel’s lost innocence culminates in the tragic events on the veranda at history house. It is there that Velutha’s blood is spilled. He is violently beaten in front of the children as the result of lies Baby Kochamma has told merely out of vanity, to protect her “good name” and reputation. His death is also a function of the social climate in the area. Velutha is used as an example by the authorities of those who remain out of step with the new regime or the British way of life. He is beaten and killed, so preaches Roy, in an account as seen through Rahel’s and Estha’s eyes. What they witnessed in History House, the author contends, was “a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions” of “human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy.” She goes on to explain, “Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.” Ultimately, it is the influence of outside political and social forces that kill Velutha both spiritually and physically, as well as permanently scar Estha and Rahel’s psyches.

The author, when asked just what the god of small things is, simply stated that it is “the inversion of God,” a “not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries.” Roy asserts that throughout the course of the narrative, “all sorts of boundaries are transgressed upon.” It is, according to Roy, small events and ordinary things “smashed and reconstituted, imbued with new meaning to become the bleached bones of the story.” Subsequently, it is these small events and ordinary things that form a pattern for her narrative. “A pattern,” says Roy, “of how in these small events and in these small lives the world intrudes.” She believes that because of these patterns, and what they imply, that people go virtually unprotected, “the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest core of their being and changes their life.”

Returning to the story, it is easy to identify the psychological undercurrent Roy speaks of. All of the events in the story are a by-product of Western influence in what has become, more or less, a British colony. Tepid river waters bloated with dead finish mirror the encroachment of the industrial machine, as does the hypnotic quality of the satellite dish holding the Kochamma house hostage. Throughout the novel, the twins are encouraged to speak English rather than their native language, to covet whiteness instead of their Indian heritage, yet they cannot transcend who they are and fail miserably. Compounding their failure is Sophie Mol, their English cousin, who manages to capture Baby Kochamma and Chacko’s attention immediately with her Western affectations. And when Ammu’s affair fails miserably, she expresses her sorrow by directing her rage towards her own children, as did her husband and parents towards her. Like dominoes, these circumstances and others stack up, then collapse, setting into motion a tragic chain of events that cannot be controlled.

By the author’s own admission, she does not attempt to define what modern day India is or what it means to be Indian. What she does do so aptly, is to weave a subtle tale of circumstances that collectively, permanently shape and form the lives of her characters, leaving an indelible mark that no doubt will be transferred, one generation to the next. Remarks the narrator of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,

Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.

Source: Laura Carter, Critical Essay on The God of Small Things, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Douglas Dupler

Dupler is a writer and has taught college English courses. In this essay, Dupler explores the relationship between individuals and the cultural forces acting upon them within the novel.

Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things reveals a complex relationship between individuals and the historical and cultural forces that shape them and their society. In Roy’s novel, a so-called Big God presides over the large happenings of the world, the “vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.” In contrast, it is a Small God that resides over the individual lives caught up in forces too powerful and large for these individuals to understand and to change. This Small God is “cozy and contained, private and limited,” residing over people for whom “worse things” are always happening. Individuals ruled by the symbolic Small God adopt resignation and “inconsequence” in the face of mass movements, while at the same time their oppression makes them “resilient and truly indifferent.”

The novel takes place in modern India, in the state of Kerala, during a time of social change and upheaval and as television is just beginning to broadcast “television-enforced democracy” into an insular world. The characters in Roy’s novel exist in a culture of strict rules. There is a caste system and a class system that exert much force upon the characters. Conflict is created for the individuals who can’t adhere to these systems of social organization and control. Indeed, the greatest conflict in the story, a love affair between Ammu and Velutha, is the result of individuals rebelling against the historical and cultural structures of caste and class; this is an affair between a Touchable and an Untouchable. In the beginning of the novel, the tragedy is foreshadowed and explained when the narrative states, “They all broke the rules… . They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how.” As an entire culture strains against ancient laws and customs, Roy’s novel brings this struggle down to the level of individuals, in a “time when the unthinkable became thinkable.” That is, individuals have begun to question and act against the laws that had rigidly remained for so long.

The novel ranges in scope from the epic to the minute. The narrative gives lush detail of the everyday life in India, and contains colors, textures, and many characters. At the same time, the narrative also shifts to expose the larger forces that drive the characters. For instance, the narrative gives broad details about the trajectory of the lives of some of the characters, including Rahel, Ammu, Chacko, Margaret, and others. The novel also gives details about some of the political movements of the days, as when it describes the workings of Communism within the state of Kerala. The novel weaves several layers of perspective of the social order, including the simplicities of individuals in their everyday lives; broad views of character’s lives and how they arrived at their places in the story; and larger events that provide glimpses of the historical and cultural forces at play in the world. The relationship between these levels of existence is complex and subtle, and the narrative states that this relationship is tenuous and that “things can change in a day” for any of the characters.

The narrative shows in several instances how casual comments and decisions can have deep repercussions, showing the power of choice that individuals have within their social lives. For instance, when Ammu angrily scolds Rahel by telling her, “When you hurt people they begin to love you less,” this moment has far-reaching effects in the lives of the characters. This off-hand remark is instrumental in making Rahel run away from the family, an event that also brings about the death of Sophie Mol and then Velutha. In another example, when Margaret Kochamma decides to return to India after the death of her husband, this decision leads to the death of her daughter Sophie and will haunt her “for as long as she lived.”

The narrative utilizes shifts in time to illustrate how the world for the characters has changed. The present moment of the novel occurs as Rahel returns to Ayemenem at the age of thirty-one. The narrative uses broad flashbacks to show the world that Rahel remembers as a young child, when the tragedy occurred that changed her life forever. When Rahel meets Comrade Pillai as an adult, there is an underlying tension in the meeting, because Pillai had played a role in the death of Velutha. This history will not go away and pervades the moment. This is recognized when the narrative states, “she and he knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot.”

One of the historical forces that shaped modern India is its colonial past under British rule. For the characters in the novel, this past is still alive. Chacko, who received his education in England, educates the twins Estha and Rahel on the ways of the world. He tells them that their family is “all Anglophiles… . Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.” This allusion to their footprints relates to the caste system in India. The narrative mentions a time, within memory, when Untouchables, or the lowest caste of people, were required to sweep away their footprints in public for higher caste members. When the British ruled, yet another form of class structure was imposed upon the society. This structure, according to Chacko, “locked out” Indians from their world, because of a war that made them “adore [their] conquerors and despise [themselves].” From Chacko, the twins “learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.” For Chacko, Indians in relation to the English will always be “Prisoners of War.”

Colonialism affects other characters in the novel as well. Baby Kochamma, in her youth, had defied her family’s wishes and converted to a Roman Catholic, mainly due to her infatuation with a priest named Father Mulligan. Throughout the story, Baby Kochamma’s bitterness and treachery plays a role in the tragedy, as though she is unwittingly making other people suffer for her own unrequited longings and heartache. There is also tension between Mammachi and Margaret Kochamma. Margaret is a British woman who married and then divorced Chacko. Mammachi “despised” her and refers to Margaret as the “shopkeeper’s daughter,” an insult containing the ring of class snobbery. Another telling collision of the two cultures occurs subtly during the scene in which Estha is molested, when the family had gone to see the film The Sound of Music.

The narrative states that the story being told, including the tragedy, began “thousands of years ago… . Before the British … the Dutch … [and] Christianity.” The story actually “began in the days when the Love Laws were made.” Indeed, the story, and the tragedy therein, show that it is human passion that cannot be controlled and contained by cultural rules. In their love affair, Ammu and Velutha are well aware of the dangers and taboos of their relationship, and yet they are powerless to stop their desire. Desire, or the force of life, overpowers the cultural forces that would deny it; the narrative declares that “biology designed the dance.” One day, as Ammu is watching Velutha play with Rahel, she begins to feel her desire for him. In this scene, “centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment.” Likewise, when Velutha notices that “Rahel’s mother was a woman,” in a brief moment he notices things that “had been out of bounds.” In their attraction, the “cost of living climbed to unaffordable heights,” and Velutha was about to “enter a tunnel” that would lead to his “annihilation.” In the end, cultural forces would have their say over the individual’s breaking the rules.

The relationship between Velutha and Ammu is symbolic of the conflicts in the culture. Velutha is from the Untouchable caste, but his many positive qualities cause Ammu to fall in love with him, while the twins Rahel and Estha adore him and play with him often. Velutha’s excellence as a person illuminates the unfairness of the caste laws. When Velutha is seen marching in a Communist parade, it illustrates the changing structure of political power in the culture. Velutha’s grandfather had converted to Christianity, but even the new religion could not overcome the entrenched caste laws of the society, and the churches became segregated for the Untouchables.

Velutha is hardly an obsequious slave. He is described as a handsome, kind, intelligent, and clever man. He has an “unwarranted assurance” about him and he bothers people because of the “way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel.” Velutha’s qualities, the narrative states, might be desirable in Touchables, but in an Untouchable they could be “construed as insolence.” With Velutha, the cultural laws are seen as restricting excellence. There is something about Velutha that represents escape for Ammu, who is from a higher caste. When she sees him, he represents something other that the “smug, ordered world that she so raged against.”

The individual freedom represented by the love between Velutha and Ammu is short-lived, and other characters in the story act their parts in continuing the cultural constraint of such displays of rule-breaking. Baby Kochamma lies and betrays Velutha, as does the Communist Pillai, which leads to the murder, by official forces, of Velutha. Indeed, it is betrayal by individuals that sends Velutha on his “blind date with history,” in which he is murdered unjustly for breaking the Love Laws. Estha gets caught up in the situation as well, when he is manipulated by Baby Kochamma into lying against Velutha. For Estha, this event has long-reaching effects in his life, as he loses his voice and lives numbly thereafter.

In the end, the novel shifts and the cultural forces begin to exert their power over the individuals. Baby Kochamma performs her machinations “not for Ammu,” but to “contain the scandal” that has occurred when the Love Laws were broken. When the narrative notes that the characters are living in “an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it,” it shows that the God of Big Things is again residing over the God of Small Things. When the cultural powers decide that Velutha must be held responsible for breaking the rules, the story provides a glimpse of the men in power, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Mathew. These men are “without curiosity” and are “terrifyingly adult” in the way they operate. So controlled are they by the rules of their culture, they have become “mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.” When the police beat Velutha to death, it is an impersonal event, as the caste laws had severed “any connection between themselves and him … long ago.” Later, many years after the incident, the culture protects the men who uphold its prejudices and injustices. When Rahel meets Comrade Pillai, she notices that he “didn’t hold himself in any way personally responsible for what had happened. He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics.”

Source: Douglas Dupler, Critical Essay on The God of Small Things, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Ritu Menon

In the following review, Menon declares that The God of Small Things “is about childhood and the loss of innocence.”

The God of Small Things is a seduction from start to finish. The cover photo, a grey-green lily pool with three luminously pink waterlilies, compels you to pick up the book almost as you would pick a flower; the paper’s texture and shade evoke clotted cream; a satisfying weight and pleasing typeface make its physical crafting as elegant as its literary craft is inspired. Arundhati Roy’s loving and meticulous attention to detail is evident in both. (At the launch of the book in Delhi, Roy explained that she had insisted on complete design control over the book.)

It almost makes you wish Roy hadn’t issued so many disclaimers in the interviews she has given to the media: I don’t read, she insists, so I don’t know what my literary influences are; I don’t know the rules of writing so I can’t say I’ve broken them; I don’t ever rewrite because writing for me is like breathing how can you rebreathe a breath?

Yet, effortless as it might appear, it is clear that heart, soul and intellect have gone into the making of this book, and any writer worth her salt knows how much work, and reworking, that entails. When Roy is excavating her own past and ransacking memory, how to tell the story, more than the story itself, is the real challenge. In this she has succeeded splendidly and spectacularly.

The God of Small Things is about childhood and the loss of innocence. The fear of it, the terror and love of it, the deep scars it leaves. Estha and Rahel, seven-year-old twins in south India’s Kerala, grow up in their grandmother’s home with their divorced mother and an odd assortment of relatives. Mammachi, the grandmother, has a way with pickles; after her husband’s death, she sets up a prosperous pickle factory. With Mammachi, the twins and their mother, Ammu, live uncle Chacko, once a Rhodes scholar, and Baby Kochamma, their maiden great-aunt. Ammu is trying to manage her life and children, Baby Kochamma is trying to manage her single state (by living her life backwards, Rahel says) and Chacko manages the pickle factory. This factory is the focus of a subplot which takes in the Communist politics of Kerala, trade unionism, and the illicit relationship between Ammu and Velutha, a low-caste employee in the factory—whom Estha and Rahel love with the unconditional love that only children can have.

Into this world of slow, meandering rivers and thick foliage, heavy furniture in dark rooms decorated with stuffed animals who peer down benignly, enters Sophie Mol, the twins’ half-English cousin, Chacko’s daughter. Sophie drowns while the children are out alone on the river. This is death number one. Her dying is the unexpected trigger that turns Estha’s and Rahel’s world upside-down and insideout, and is more or less directly responsible for the deaths of Velutha and their mother. Deaths apart, there are pederasty, a hint of incest, the tempestuous and utterly transgressive affair between Ammu and Velutha, the kind of violation of Love Laws that can only bring doom. In a sense, this is a chronicle of deaths foretold; the only problem is, they’re the wrong deaths. But I’ll return to this later.

The novel itself covers one day in the life of the children, the day that opens with Sophie Mol’s funeral. The very first chapter tells the whole “story,” as it were. It is a mark of Roy’s brilliant structuring of the book that the story then unfolds, and crosses over, and flashes back, and weaves in and out of the minds and hearts of its two protagonists with breathtaking virtuosity. Roy has said in more than one interview that the architecture of the book is plain to see: she “drew” the book as a series of graphics and “saw” its pattern emerging. After that, it “revealed itself sentence by sentence.” What it revealed is what forms the “deep substance” of her story—the really real story, that is, of a fragile world under threat, of the impossibility of ever again knowing the security of absolute trust. Long before the end of the book, long before the deaths have taken place, you know that Rahel and Estha will never be the same again.

The gradual contamination of relationships by the perfidy of the adult world is exquisitely presented through a series of vignettes and revelations: the trip to meet Sophie at the airport; the drive to Abhilash Talkies to see The Sound of Music, and What Happened There to Estha; the [reason] why Baby Kochamma can only live in the past and why Estha withdraws into silence; why Pappachi’s moth hovers with such menace at the edge of Rahel’s consciousness; why Uncle Chacko and Ammu are at daggers drawn… .

Roy’s portrayal of Kerala and the Syrian Christian community she herself grew up in are evocative and telling; her ability to climb into a child’s skin is remarkable. Listen to Rahel, for example, after Ammu has told her that she “loves her a little less” for having said something she shouldn’t have.

“But what about my punishment,” Rahel said. “You haven’t given me my punishment?” “Some things come with their own punishments,” Baby Kochamma said… .

Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

… “Goodnight Godbless,” Ammu said. But she said it with her back. She was already gone…

Rahel Alone watched them walk down the hotel corridor like silent but substantial ghosts… . The red carpet took away their feet sounds.

Rahel stood in the hotel room doorway, full of sadness.

She had in her the sadness of Sophie Mol coming. The sadness of Ammu’s loving her a little less. And the sadness of whatever the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man had done to Estha… . (pp. 109–110)

But as one reads on, the deceptively simple style, the mannerisms—stand-up capital letters, words run into each other or broken apart—make one a little uneasy. A bit too self-indulgent? Perhaps. And perhaps, too, a reluctance to outgrow the child and inhabit the body of an adult.

The novel proceeds along two timetracks: the time of the child, Rahel, and of the Rahel who returns to Ayemenem 23 years later, at 31, the age at which her mother died. The deadly accuracy and unself-consciousness of the child give way to opacity, a dissembling, almost an inability to relate to the family of her childhood. The triadic relationship between Ammu, Estha and Rahel is so full of ambiguity that it cries out for development. Yet it remains at best static, at worst silent or simply absent. The novel doesn’t end; it just peters out.

The other thing which makes me uneasy is the overlap between autobiography and fiction. Much fictional writing proceeds from autobiography, and Roy’s adoption of this tactic is not unusual. What it does to the novel, however, particularly to those bits that feature the adult Rahel, is to blur the distinction between Roy and Rahel almost completely, down to the diamond in the nose and the feathery collar-bones. In itself this can be quite disarming, making for unexpected transparency. But it does have other consequences, because gradually the reader realizes that Rahel’s real twin is not her brother Estha, but Roy herself.

This unacknowledged twinning first pushes Estha to the edge of the frame and then silences him altogether; it also, I suspect, lies behind the death of Ammu. Neither plot development seems warranted, even though Roy provides some ostensible reasons for both. Ammu’s death is quite gratuitous, and Estha’s silence a ploy to allow Rahel the sole privilege of speech. By the end of the novel, Rahel has transmuted into Roy; Velutha, Ammu and Sophie are dead; Estha is speechless. Of the five main characters only Rahel, quite literally, lives to tell the tale.

Of course, one can argue that there is nothing reasonable or orderly about dying and that any death is arbitrary. Nevertheless, in a story that has been so carefully and intelligently “constructed” in every sense of the word; it does seem as though the narcissistic impulse triumphs over what would have been a logical, brilliant and profoundly tragic conclusion—the death of Rahel herself. In the absence of that denouement, The God of Small Things remains a dazzling first novel of rare accomplishment, but it is not one of the Great Stories that Roy herself refers to in the book, even though it has been written with her life.

Source: Ritu Menon, “The Age of Innocence,” in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 12, September 1997, pp. 1–3.

Laura Shapiro

In the following review, Shapiro describes The God of Small Things as “a banquet for all the senses we bring to reading.”

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Source: Laura Shapiro, “Disaster in a Lush Land,” in Newsweek, Vol. 129, No. 21, May 26, 1997, pp. 76–77.

Sources

Menon, Ritu, “The Age of Innocence,” in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 12, September 1997, pp. 1–3.

National University of Singapore, Postcolonial and Post Imperial Literature online, www.postcolonialweb.org, March 29, 2005.

Review of The God of Small Things, in Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1997, p. 412.

Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, Random House, 1997.

Further Reading

Dodiya, Jaydipsinh, and Joya Chakravarty, The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things,” Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 1999.

This collection, published in New Delhi, is the earliest book-length volume of criticism on Roy’s novel.

Eder, Richard, “As the World Turns,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 1, 1997, p. 2.

Eder provides a mixed review of Roy’s novel, praising her evocative depiction of the story and characters but arguing that she loses control over the narrative.

Thornmann, Janet, “The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things,” in Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall 2003, pp. 299–307.

Thornmann’s psychoanalytical interpretation of Roy’s novel includes an argument about the applicability of the Oedipal complex to the work.

Truax, Alice, “A Silver Thimble in Her Fist,” in the New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1997, p. 5.

Truax’s descriptive review of The God of Small Things is an example of the very positive response to Roy’s work in the United States.