Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

"Observing the day of small things" is a phrase that eighteenth-century friends used to describe their understanding that no behavior or deed was too small to be subject to God's guidance. This retreat will provide an environment for people to notice more fully and reflect upon the presence of God in their everyday lives. The idea basically focuses on listening to, waiting in and responding to the Living Silence. We will explore finding this rhythm of prayer in the hubbub of daily life -- synergy, harmony, love, perfection, and loss of innocence -- and where one has a potential to be the God of the Small Things around oneself -- by just following your purest feelings.

A Summary of the Plot

This first novel is written in English by a native Indian who makes her home in India. It is the tale of Esthappen (Estha for short) and his fraternal twin sister, Rahel, and their divorced mother, Ammu, who live in the south Indian state of Kerala. Ammu, a Syrian Christian, has had no choice but to return to her parental home, following her divorce from the Hindu man she had married--the father of Estha and Rahel.

The story centers on events surrounding the visit and drowning death of the twins' half-English cousin, a nine year old girl named Sophie Mol. The visit overlaps with a love affair between Ammu and the family's carpenter, Velutha, a member of the Untouchable caste--"The God of Loss / The God of Small Things." (p. 274)

Told from the children's perspective, the novel moves backward from present-day India to the fateful drowning that took place twenty-three years earlier, in 1969. The consequences of these intertwined events--the drowning and the forbidden love affair--are dire. Estha at some point thereafter stops speaking; Ammu is banished from her home, dying miserably and alone at age 31; Rahel is expelled from school, drifts, marries an American, whom she later leaves. The narrative begins and ends as Rahel returns to her family home in India and to Estha, where there is some hope that their love for each other and memories recollected from a distance will heal their deep wounds.

Set in a small town in Kerala, The God of Small Things is about a family, seen from the perspective of seven-year-old Rahel. She and her twin brother, Estha, live with their mother, Ammu, who was married to a Bengali, the children's Baba, but from whom she is divorced. Ammu and, therefore, the twins seem to live on sufferance in the Ayemenem house with their grandmother, uncle, and grand-aunt Baby. The family owns a pickle factory that comes into conflict with the Communists.

Children

It is the story of two fraternal twins, Rahel and Estha, caught in the entanglements of adult corruption, punished for the sins of a world out of their control. Roy relates the events that lead to this tragic end, where one mistake can spiral out of control and can implicate the most innocent. Much of the story is told through the eyes, the fragile perceptions, of these two children. They are struggling to secure a safe environment, the unconditional love of a parent and the promise of a livable future. Their struggle

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to safeguard themselves and the childhood ends one day, a day after which futures are abandoned and recovery is unthinkable.

"The book really delves, very deep I think, into human nature. The story tells of the brutality we're capable of, but also that aching, intimate love. And for me the twins are what that is about...the ability to actually dream each other's dreams and to share each other's happiness and pain. " - Arundhati Roy

The Idea

Wishing for one day, a single moment, that is free from suffering, boundaries and prejudice to last for a lifetime is a dream inverted and ultimately defeated in Arundhati Roy's first novel The God of Small Things. Simultaneous events combine and combust in one tragic day, a day of persecution and loss that is fated to last a lifetime: love lost, lives taken, families disjointed, childhood destroyed.

Love lost, such a cost, Give me things that won't get lost Like a coin that won't get tossed, Rolling on to you.

But when they get back to where they belonged they realize that things have changed. Twins become strangers, and I do not think that such strangers, esp. Estha , who is strangled with his past and cannot get his self to become "normal" , and Rahel being the reader of her brother,she does the perfect thing -- provides him love - for all the child in him needed was affection, perversion is just to the reader who would feel blasphemed because he does not realize that this is all A.R. has been trying to do in the book - to show the small world we live in - and how we become Gods of our worlds, where there are no worshippers, no takers, but only givers. And in a repressive society where truth has to be hidden for the sake of tradition , the real Gods come up and finally end up feeling gratified.

Acculturation, Colonialism, Developing Countries, Freedom

The backdrop to this tragedy, set in India during the late 1960's, is an environment as beautiful as it is dangerous. Roy's unique and intense attention to detail pulls the reader into this lush, pulsating and ultimately deadly setting. Dwelling there within is a world of dysfunction: a government clumsily struggling to establish itself, a country cut off from its past and unable to clearly define its present, a people turning away from each other. It is the story of forbidden affections, of children abused and criminalized, and of families ruptured. The God of Small Things (the God of loss) presides over all of this, unable or unwilling to stop the suffering, offering no salvation even to the most innocent. A God as weakened and as weighted by tragedy as its victims. Great loss is not marked by ceremony. It is hardly even recognized. A loss is simply a loss, suffering is simply suffering. What occurs is an intensely personal loss which in turn becomes a loss of person, where lives continue but living ends.

The novel is rich with Indian family relationships, social custom and mores, politics, and the most universal of human emotions and behavior. At one and the same time, it

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is a suspenseful and tragic mystery, a love story, and an exposition of the paradoxes that exist in an ancient land whose history was forever altered by its British colonizers.

Reservations

Religion ? Sex ? Perversion ? False Exotic Images ?

Despite the fine writing, the evocative descriptions, there is something formulaic about it. The inter-caste affair and the death of a child that lies at the heart of the book are very predictable and the love affair is not plausible, it does not spring from either the characterisation or the needs of the story. There is a sense of manipulation by the author and I thought the incest scene at the end was unnecessary but probably, it was one of the things that people look for nowadays & which makes for a successful book. The masturbation of the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man by Estha is one of these so-called necessary components of a successful book.

In this connection it must be said that Roy handles the sex scene between Ammu and Velutha with artistry. Nevertheless, Ammu's affair with the untouchable is wholly implausible, the more so because Roy does not bother to develop the relationship, it is suddenly sprung on us and we cannot imagine the motivation. This could also be one of the drawbacks of using a seven-year-old as one's narrator.

The God of Small Things is often very amusing; there is a lovely passage where a child recites Lochinvar with a Malayali intonation and pronunciation.For those who know Kerala, it is all very interesting and for those who don't, it is certainly exotic and interesting, but despite all the fine writing, the bottom line is that one is left largely unmoved by the tragedy that unfolds. But perhaps that doesn't matter and the style's the thing.

The Style

That, as Rahel would say, is the purely practical way of looking at it. There is much more. The book is certainly well written and some comparison has been made with Rushdie. However, unlike Rushdie's work, this is easy reading and very accessible. There are some nice turns of phrase and very interesting images. A character dies aged 31 at "a viable, die-able age."

Like most first novels, it is heavily autobiographical and the child character Rahel is so clearly Roy herself that she is a completely plausible character with whom the reader can empathise. In fact, the book's strength lies in its portrayal of the family, its weakness is the story. In this sense, it might be analogous to reconstructing an illness from a chaotic patient narrative. The narrative structure is skillful, weaving back and forth from the present to the past, foretelling without revealing future events alert to signals but isn't immediately sure what they signify, and is drawn to return to earlier sections as the story unfolds, in order to derive full meaning from all of its parts.

The author's style is both poetic and whimsical. The larger story contains many smaller ones that stand alone as small gems of observation and insight. The perspective of childhood--of imagination and inventiveness, of incomplete

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understanding, fear, dependence, assertion of independence, vulnerability, comradeship, competitive jealousy, and wonderment--is beautifully rendered.

What is the god of small things?

"To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God's a big thing and God's in control. The god of small things...whether it's the way the children see things or whether it's the insect life in the book, or the fish or the stars - there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. This small activity that goes on is the under life of the book. All sorts of boundaries are transgressed upon. At the end of the first chapter I say little events and ordinary things are just smashed and reconstituted, imbued with new meaning to become the bleached bones of the story. It's a story that examines things very closely but also from a very, very distant point, almost from geological time and you look at it and see a pattern there. A pattern...of how in these small events and in these small lives the world intrudes. And because of this, because of people being unprotected.. the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest core of their being and changes their life." - Arundhati Roy

The novel is rich with Indian family relationships, social custom and mores, politics, and the most universal of human emotions and behavior. At one and the same time, it is a suspenseful and tragic mystery, a love story, and an exposition of the paradoxes that exist in an ancient land whose history was forever altered by its British colonizers.

Characters

Estha

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 a man at a theatre. 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 (or "Returned") 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. He is repeatedly referred to as "Silent" in the book.

Rahel

Rahel is the partial narrator of the story, and is Estha's younger sister by eighteen minutes. As a girl of seven, her hair sits "on top of her head like a fountain" in a

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"Love in Tokyo" and she often wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims. An intelligent and starightforward person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is impulsive and wild, and, by implication, treated as somehow lesser than her brother by all but the Untouchable carpenter Velutha. In later life, she becomes something of a drifter, several times the narrator refers to her "Emptiness." After the incident which forms the core of the story, she remains with her mother, later training as an architectural draughtsman and engaging in a failed relationship with a European, elements of which parallel the author's own life story.

Ammu

Ammu is Rahel and Estha's mother. She married their father (referred to as Baba) only to get away from her family. He was an alcoholic, and she divorced him when he started to be violent towards her and her children. She went back to Aymanam, where people avoid her on the days when the radio plays "her music" and she gets a wild look in her eyes. When the twins are seven, she has an affair with Velutha, a Paravan (Untouchable). This relationship is the cataclysmic event in the novel. She is a strict mother, and her children worry about losing her love.

Velutha

Velutha is a Paravan, an Untouchable, who is exceptionally smart and who works as a carpenter for the Ipe family's pickle factory. His name means white in Malayalam, because he is so dark. He returns to Aymanam to help his father, Vellya Paapen, take care of his brother who has suffered from an accident. He is an active member of the Marxist movement. Velutha is extremely kind to the twins, and has an affair with Ammu for which he is brutally punished.

Chacko

Chacko is Estha and Rahel's maternal Uncle. He is four years older than Ammu. [2] He meets Margret Kochamma in his final year at Oxford and marries her afterwards. They have a daughter Sophie Mol, whose death at Ayemenem becomes central to the story.

Baby Kochamma

Baby Kochamma is the twins' maternal great aunt. She is of petite build as a young woman but becomes enormously overweight with 'a mole on her neck' by the time of the incident. She maintains an attitude of superiority due to her education as a garden designer in the US and her burning, unrequited love for an Irish Catholic priest which forms the only meaningful event in her life. The emptiness and failure of her own life sparks a bitter spite for the children of her sister driven by her prudish code of conventional values which ultimately condemn the twins, the lovers and herself to a lifetime of misery.

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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.

Class relations and cultural tensions

In addition to her commentary on Indian history and politics, Roy evaluates the Indian post-colonial complex, or the cultural attitudes of many Indians towards their former British rulers. After Ammu calls her father a "[shit]-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.

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-caste sexual relations. In part this reflects how Untouchables have internalised caste segregation. 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

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.

Social discrimination

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The story is set in the caste society of India. In this time, members of the Untouchable Paravan or Paryan were not permitted to touch members of higher castes or enter their houses. The Untouchables were considered polluted beings. They had the lowliest jobs and lived in subhuman conditions. In India, the caste system was considered a way to organise society. Arundhati Roy's book shows how terribly cruel such a system can be.

Along with the caste system, readers see an economic class struggle. The Ipes are considered upper class. They are factory owners, the dominating class. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma would not deign to mix with those of a lower class. Even Kochu Maria, who has been with them for years, will always be a servant of a lower class.

However, Roy shows other types of less evident discrimination. For example, there is religious discrimination. It is unacceptable for a Syrian Christian to marry a Hindu and vice versa, and Hindus additionally can only marry a Hindu from the same caste. In more than one passage of the book, the reader feels Rahel and Estha's discomfort at being half Hindu. Baby Kochamma constantly makes disparaging comments about the Hindus. On the other hand, there is discomfort even between the Christian religions, as is shown by Pappachi's negative reaction when Baby converts to Catholicism.

Chacko suffers more veiled racial discrimination, as it seems his daughter also did. His English wife's parents were shocked and disapproving that their daughter should marry an Indian, no matter how well educated. Sophie Mol at one point mentions to her cousins that they are all "wog," while she is "half-wog."

The Ipes are very class conscious. They have a need to maintain their status. Discrimination is a way of protecting one's privileged position in society.

Betrayal

Betrayal is a constant element in this story. Love, ideals, and confidence all are forsaken, consciously and unconsciously, innocently and maliciously, and these deceptions affect all the characters deeply.

Baby Kochamma is capable of lying and double-crossing anyone whom she sees as a threat to her social standing, as a consequence of her loss of respectability after becoming a Roman Catholic nun to be close to Father Mulligan, despite her father's disapproval. This fear is reminiscent of that of Comrade Pillai, who betrays both Velutha and Chacko to further his own interests, and that of his political party.

The true tragedy is that of Velutha, the only true incorrupt adult in the story, who becomes the repeated victim of everyone's deception, from Comrade Pillai to Baby Kochamma, to his own father, and, most heartbreakingly, Estha, who at seven-years-old, is fooled into accusing Velutha of crimes that he did not commit.

With this in mind, the novel asks the question: up until what point can we trust others, or even ourselves? How easy is it to put our own interests and convenience over loyalty?

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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 Ipe 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, 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.

Point of view

The book is narrated in the third person. However, during a great part of the narrative, the reader sees everything through Rahel's eyes. This gives the reader a very special insight into the happenings and characters. There are various moments which cross each other all through the book. One moment is in 1969 when Rahel is a seven-year-old child. At these moments everything is seen through a child's eye with a child's feelings and rationale. Facts, objects and people are seen in a completely different light.

Setting

The story is set in the village of Ayemenem in the Kottayam district of Kerala, India. The main part of the plot takes place in 1969, a time of changes in ideology and influence.

India is a very complex society with various cultural and religious habits and beliefs. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims share the same space. Society is divided not only by the very strict caste system but also by class consciousness. There are a number of languages spoken in India, but the higher classes make a point of speaking English, sending their sons to study in England and adopting certain English habits. Kerala, where the story is set itself has a complex social setup with Hindus, Muslims and Christians having lifestyle and traditions different from each other. It also has the largest number of Christian population compared to other parts of India, predominantly Saint Thomas Christians or Syrian Christians. Kottayam is a district where the Christians are a majority.

Arundhati Roy describes her book as "an inextricable mix of experience and imagination."

Techniques

As this story focuses on and their impressions of the world, Roy uses various techniques to represent the children's viewpoint and their innocence. One technique that Roy employs is the capitalisation of certain words and phrases to give them certain significance. Similarly, the children will restate things that the adults say in a

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new phonetic way, disjoining and recombining words. This echoes the children's way of looking at the world differently from the grown-ups that surround them. They place significance on words and ideas differently from the adults, thereby creating a new way of viewing the world around them. They pick up on certain feelings and ideas that the adults around them either fail or refuse to recognise, and give new significance to things that the adults may or may not ignore for their own purposes. The children use and repeat these phrases throughout the story so that the phrases themselves gain independence and new representational meanings in subsequent uses.

Roy also employs a disjointed, non-sequential narrative that echoes the process of memory, especially the resurfacing of a previously suppressed, painful memory.

The uncovering of the story of Sophie Mol's death existing concurrently with the forward moving story of Rahel's return to Aymanam and reunion with Estha creates a complex narrative that reiterates the difficulty of the subject of the story and the complexity of the culture from which the story originates. Time is rendered somewhat static as the different parts of the one narrative line are intertwined through repetition and non-sequential discovery. This is also part of the way in which Roy uses real life places and people that she has shifted and altered for use within this story. All of the multifarious elements come together to construct a diverse look at one instance of Indian culture and the effect of the caste system on life and love during a time of postcolonialism. As the children attempt to form their own identities, naming and renaming themselves in the process, Roy places in parallel the effect of the process, by intertwining the past and the present.

Similarly, this process echoes the progression of the Indian people, like all other cultures that attempt to find ways to maintain their traditions within a time of increasing globalisation.

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