Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)

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‘Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,’ Golam Gaus Al-

Quaderi and Muhammad Saiful Islam

JPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 2011

Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati

Roy’s The God of Small Things

Golam Gaus Al-Quaderi and Muhammad Saiful Islam

Introduction:

The God of Small Things inaugurated a career of activism and resistance against local and

global inequities in India by its Booker prize winning writer Arundhati Roy. In this novel

the predicament of Indian women is studied in depth along with the plight of dalits

(untouchables), lower class people, racial subalterns vis-à-vis global capitalism and neo-

imperialism masquerading as globalization. Reflecting the sentiments of Ranajit Guha of

the Subaltern Studies group fame, Roy sees the resistance against gender oppression to be

leading towards if not instigating resistance against caste, class oppression and spurring

on anti-colonial thought and actioni. Such variants of resistant rebellion are articulated

through the examination of the marital and inter-gender relations of Ammu, Mammachi,

Baby Kochamma and Rahel. Transgressions of these characters, openly subversive or

outside the boundaries of the institution of marriage as practiced in post-colonial India,

and the “Love laws” that predate Western colonialism lead to a scathing interrogation of

the basic values and structures of the post-colonial Indian society. Thus Roy shows a way

for the Indian women for resisting local as well as global inequities.

Ammu is the most important female character in The God of Small Things. A middle

class bourgeois woman, she is a divorcee with two children, Eshta and Rahel. Educated

and articulate, Ammu is not welcome on her return to her father‟s house. A kind of an

elite leftist, her brother Chacko marginalizes her. She is also cornered by the family

structure and inheritance laws customarily prevalent among the Syrian Christian



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community in Kerala. Ammu is enamoured of the untouchable labourer Velutha and

violates the “Love Laws” which her community has inherited from, among other things,

their Hindu past. Her transgression of the caste, class and religious boundaries mounts a

rebellion of a kind against her marginalization as a woman. Aijaz Ahmad calls her “a

woman of great grit” (Prasad, 2006, p. 39) and Murari Prasad comments thus about her

attempt at self-realization which is not unconnected with the fate of other subalterns:

“Ammu‟s rebellion against maternal and marital conventionality, and finally, her liaison

with dark-skinned and untouchable Velutha (ironically meaning white) constitutes a

violation against a determinate social order, sponsoring the immutable „love laws‟. Her

rebellion or her “quest for self-identity”, as Tirthankar Chanda points out is “an attempt

at repossessing, renaming, reknowing the world”, but it “appears doomed from the very

beginning because of the nature of the society where she has had to seek refuge with her

twins after her divorce and also because of the incapacity of her kin (mother, great-aunt

Kochamma) to provide an adequate model for redefining the Self” (Chanda 1997:40)”

(2006, p.16) Ammu is a victim of a marriage that does not work out. Her being treated as

an outcast in her own family clearly defines her position in the society.

But she rebels against such social structures and challenges marriage that rather seems to

be a disciplinary institution, as Michel Foucault would have called it, working towards

silencing and controlling the one who stands apart, as if a lunatic/non-conformist who

needs to be imprisoned/reasoned. Foucault discussed how asylums were being put up, in

the pretext to serve medical knowledge, to isolate and incarcerate dissidents in 17th

century Europe—a time that saw the rise of the continents imperial ambitions. “They did

not introduce science, but a personality, whose powers borrowed from science only their

disguise, or at most their justification. These powers, by their nature, were of a moral and

social order; they took root in the madman‟s minority status, in the insanity of his person,

not of his mind” (Rabinow, 1991, p.160). Ammu, a personality, has to be locked up too.

She, afterwards, dies exiled. But before her acceptance of such fate, in desperate attempts



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of self-realization, she becomes a symbolic personification of all subalterns, especially

women, who challenge power structures of the social order as is also pointed out by

Murari Prasad: “At the heart of Roy‟s astounding book is the conflict between the

characters excluded from institutional power and their hegemonic counterparts…Bose

points out that Ammu‟s conscious decision to embrace Velutha is a forbidden cross-caste

liaison of radical significance within the novel‟s given social imperatives… Bose links

these violations to Roy‟s robust commitment to the autonomy of the self-the freedom of

small things. Thus the feminist reconceptualization of politics in Roy‟s novel, as Bose

notes, is profoundly subversive.”(2006, p.21)

Ammu‟s roles as a divorced woman, a single mother and as an educated woman denied

of her rights of inheritance [“She, as a daughter, has no claim to any property, no locus

standi..”(Navarro-Tejero,2006,p. 104)], as a sexually sentient being who is deprived by

the pre-colonial “Love laws” the freedom to choose her partner and is penalized for it,

stands on different issues side by side with other subalterns, whether of caste, class or

gender. She is emblematic of them all in the schema of things Arundhati Roy creates ,

more than Velutha , who is the protagonist or may be the “God” of The God of Small

Things”(Surendran, 2000, p. 7). Khurshid Alam in his article “Untouchables” in The God

of Small Things” situates Ammu vis-à-vis Velutha and clarifies the role of Ammu: “Roy

expresses her disillusionment with the social conditions of the postcolonial world in

which the untouchables of the past still face a hostile society that does not let them live as

free and independent individuals. Velutha, the God of small things, the outcast can never

co-exist peacefully with the “touchable” communities for as long as the stigma of

untouchability is attached to him and countless others like him. Ammu, another

“untouchable” within the “touchable” cannot pursue happiness because doing so

threatens the existing order, and the society takes every possible step to stop change.”



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Ammu, craving to take control of her life that is so much suppressed by a social order, is

faced against a system where her “Marxist” brother Chacko exploits the poor women

labourers in his factory, both financially and sexually, and goes unchecked. She sees

characters like Mammachi, being appropriated by patriarchy and be asphyxiated and

distorted by it. She sees Velutha being accused of the accidental drowning of Sophie Mol.

Ammu‟s father is incredulous of the fact that her Bengali Hindu husband wanted to

prostitute her in order to please his white boss. The colonial rulers‟ authority is

challenged by a subaltern woman in the novel who is economically and socially

marginalized. Smothered by social injustice, Ammu rebels against the very social norms

that constitute the Syrian Christian community in Kerala. This rebellion is an act of

resistance against the very foundations of this society. Her most significant act of

becoming sexually involved with the “Untouchable”, lower class Velutha, cannot be

taken at its face value as an act of sexual transgression only.

This is an act of resistance aimed at bringing about change in and around her. That is why

she goes to the police station and argues against the detention of this lower caste, lower

class subaltern, denying supposed “womanly” qualities typical of an Indian woman. This

prefigures Roy‟s proffered post-colonial Indian woman, who has regained her right to be

an “Indian woman”, with the end of colonialism. Amitabh Roy‟s words thus do have

strong evidential basis: “Ammu, on the other hand, is the rebel who represents the

defiance of the present [neo-colonial] state of society from educated[though marginalized

and proleterianized], passionate and thinking women. She stands for those women who

are aspiring for freedom and equality. This section of women is challenging traditional

[pre-colonial] ideas and conventions. The hopes for the [post-colonial] future lie with this

section only.”(2005, p.77-78) In short Ammu as a subaltern/woman resists oppressive

and repressive social and political structures. She does not succeed in bringing about any

tangible change but puts up a brave fight for realizing her dreams. Although she may not

consciously have worked for other subalterns, her actions contribute to the emancipation

of different kinds of subalterns and there lies her exceptionality.



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The second most important female character is Mammachi who puts up a kind of

resistance against patriarchal oppression and marginalizing apparatuses. Mother of

Ammu and Chacko, Mammachi is also a physically and psychologically abused wife

alike so many women in different societies who undergo torture and trauma and never

speak out. Roy situates Mammachi in a strategically significant position between the

caste, class and gender-subalterns and the feudal-capitalist patriarchal social structures

that are inflicted with age-old complexities. She is not only a passive victim but is also

the target of the jealousy of her entomologist husband. Amitabh Roy explains this issue.

As Mammachi‟s music teacher Launsky Tieffenthal makes the mistake of informing her

husband that Mammachi was “exceptionally talented” and “potentially concert class” her

music lessons stop abruptly. (Roy, 2005, p.67) Mammachi is also denied help from her

husband, the supreme patriarch in the family, although she is practically blind. The work

at the pickle factory is not “a suitable job for a high-ranking ex-Government official”.

(Roy, 2005, p.67) She does not acquiesce in these acts of insolent marginalization and

remains till the end of the novel a steadfast character even assimilating many of the

features of an Indian patriarch. Binayak Roy in his article “The Title of The God of Small

Things: A Subversive Salvo” comments on her thus: “Mammachi is another Big Woman

who deifies her son Chacko and despises her daughter Ammu. When Chacko stops

Pappachi‟s beating of Mammachi, his action has unexpected consequences: “From then

onwards he became the repository of all [Mammachi‟s ] womanly feelings. Her Man. Her

only Love” (168) In the presence of Chacko‟s British wife Margaret, Ammu perceives

with womanly instinct “the undercurrent of sexual jealousy that emanated from

Mammachi” (329)” (2009)

Mammachi‟s strategy of utilizing patriarchal authority herself does not help her in the

end in dealing with her son Chacko. He takes away the pickle-factory from her; as if as a

kind of a consequential sequel to his saving Mammachi from her husband‟s beatings.

Chacko replaces her and reclaims the role of the patriarch as it belongs only to the men in

the family. Mammachi is made a sleeping partner. Chacko becomes a businessman, the



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“Marxist” owner of the pickle factory—a capitalist enterprise. Amitabh Roy comments:

“Thus, despite his professed Marxism, Chacko follows Manu and the tradition in

asserting the son‟s domination over mother in old age. Mammachi submits to it as such

ideas are so familiar to her.”(2005, p.67) Mammchi becomes an instrument of patriarchal

domination despite being a victim herself. As a post-colonial Indian woman she

succumbs to the lures of pre-colonial caste rules and “Love laws” and at the same time

tries to be in an interrogative mode regarding both the colonial past as well as the neo-

colonial present in her interactions with her daughter Ammu.

In India, even today, evils of caste and class and patriarchal oppressions feed and depend

on each other. Mammachi‟s daughter Ammu resists patriarchy and caste and class bigotry

in public and pays with her life. Obviously, the web of neo-imperialism masquerading as

globalization supports such social structures in place. Chacko‟s British wife is the

colonial apparition who although allowed little space in the novels, contributes,

coincidental as it may seem, to the demise of Velutha. Her half-Indian-half-British

daughter drowns, releasing Chacko of all fatherly responsibilities. Although both her

children are divorcees, Mammachi does not resist her tyrannical and manipulative son.

She concedes to his “Men‟s Needs” as Chacko‟s flirts with “pretty women who worked

in the factory” (Roy, 2005, p. 57). Mammachi does not condone the mutually consensual

relation between Ammu and Velutha. Her caste and class bias, though not openly

expressed, plays a part. Mammachi‟s complaint against Velutha assists his murder in the

hands of the police, a colonial institution that plays the role of the state rouge. Velutha

being the son of nature, being the subaltern meets death and becomes the god of small

things.

But Mammachi‟s family faces disaster. The marriages do not work. Wedlocks,

relationships with the Westerners never work out and probably understatedly show the

novelists scepticism about and around marriages with the people from the West. But what

about values that are imported: uncritically speaking, Chacko‟s being the small world



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Casanova and Rahel‟s desire for her brother apparently seem Western borrowings.

However, springing in the fertile nature of Ayemenem, these are local cravings that haunt

a disciplinary society which only costs human happiness and penalizes in return. Ammu

and Velutha (both subalterns in terms of class, caste, gender and social positions) are

probably the only heroes/rebels/unconscious resistant activists that challenge such

systems and accept death.

Ammus mother Mammachi, however, is not totally complicit in social injustice. She

continues to hold on to her dominating role falsifying the idea that women should only

obey orders. As a post-colonial Indian woman she is riven by the pulls of pre-colonial

tradition, the desire for freedom and equality born at least partially as a result of India‟s

encounter with the West and the neo-colonial present which connects the local

inequalities of caste, class and gender with the global ones of an unequal and grossly

unjust economic and political order epitomized on a micro-scale by a character like

Chacko. Although, Mammachi succumbs to the pulls of these forces we retain sympathy

for her for the depredations she had to suffer in life and the “resilience” of her character.

O. P. Dwivedi in his article titled “The Subaltern and the Text: Reading Arundhati Roy‟s

The God of Small Things”, utilizes the concept of “the subaltern” by going back to

Ranajit Guha: “In the Preface to Subaltern Studies, Vol.1, Ranajit Guha propounded a

working definition of “subaltern”. “The word “subaltern”… stands for the meaning as

given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that, is of inferior rank. It will be used as a

name for the general attitude of subordination in South Asian Society whether this is

expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way.”…” (2010)

The question that arises in considering the case of Mammachi is whether she is a

subaltern in sympathy with other subalterns in the novel? In losing her factory to her son,

Mammachi is marginalized in terms of class and gender. A descendant of upper class

Brahmins, she, however, is not a victim of caste prejudice. Marginalized by her son in old

age and facing an economically disadvantaged position, Mammachi is a subaltern in

more than one way.



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Her acquiescence in many patriarchal mores and values are a defensive gesture rather

than an honest agreement with hegemonic powers. As resistance can be passive or active,

public or subterranean, unequivocal or ambivalent, she should be allowed the status of

being in the circle of resistance. The following words of Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

rings true to us in the case of both Mammachi and Baby Kochamma: “In Small Things,

then, Roy does not present subordination as a stable, unproblematic condition from which

resistance, necessarily, proceeds. Instead, in mapping varying degrees of rebellion and

defiance against, and collusion with the dominant, she seems to be on the side of those

critics of subaltern studies, who complain that because „subaltern mentalit‟e‟ is

recuperated as „the mentalit‟e of the subaltern at the time of opposition, at the moment of

their action against domination‟ (Masselos 2001:192), the „dialectics of collaboration and

acquiescence on the part of the subalterns and the wide range of attitudes between

resignation and revolt have been underplayed‟ in this mode of historiography (Das Gupta

2001:110)”. (2005)

Baby Kochamma is the daughter of Reverend John Ipe and is in love with the Roman

Catholic priest, Father Mulligan. To win over him Baby Kochamma converts to the

Roman Catholic faith. However, she does not dare to challenge the traditional ideas of

love and marriage prevalent in post-colonial India. Baby Kochamma does not run away

to fulfil her dreams and upholds very reactionary ideas. Amitabh Roy comments

succinctly: “It is a pity that she submits in the name of decency and honour to the very

sexist, casteist and communal prejudices that have stood in her way and denied fulfilment

to her.”(2005, p.62) She hates the Hindus, does not think that a married or divorced

daughter has any position in her parent‟s home and is vehemently against inter-

community marriage. In the case of Ammu, she thinks that sexual promiscuity can only

be allowed to a man like Chacko as he has his “Men‟s Needs”. Baby Kochamma is a

hypocrite to a great extent but is she totally complicit in the patriarchal, casteist, classist,

and sexist social order of Kerala? Is her desire for Father Mulligan, “an elitist

indulgence”?



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Brinda Bose in her article titled, “Eroticism as Politics in The God of Small Things” deals

with the transgressive love of Ammu for Velutha and comments that “sociological studies

have repeatedly proven that the idea that love and desire are elitist indulgences is a

myth”(2006,p. 97). While it is true that Baby Kochamma does not emblematize any kind

of rebellion against the social order, her love for Father Mulligan does lead to definite

changes in her life, many of which are subversive of the established social order. For

example, despite her verbal and actual conformity she transgresses the borders of

religion, community and caste. Her conversion to Roman Catholicism is not just a change

of denomination but implies a rejection of her own history, the history of Syrian

Christians. Her life changing admiration and love for Father Mulligan, continuing even

after his death, implies a subversion of the “Love laws” coming down from pre-colonial

times which prescribed marriage, and only marriage, for women. In this case we have to

remember that celibacy for women was not an option for the Syrian Christian

community, in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic community whose arrival in India

was connected with the Western colonial endeavour in South Asia. These actions of Baby

Kochamma, to a certain extent speak of a kind of ambivalent resistance against patriarchy

and other indigenous repressive and oppressive social structures still intact in the post-

colonial India of not so long ago.

Mammachi and Baby Kochamma apparently seem to submit without any hesitation to

patriarchal social norms as pointed out by Antonio Navarro-Tejero in her article titled,

“Power Relationships in The God of Small Things”: “The first generation of women in

the novel give extreme importance to patriarchal social norms, indeed they succumb to

them….” (2006, p. 105). But if we probe beneath the surface and consider the actions of

characters like Mammachi and Baby Kochamma in tandem with our knowledge that

power is diffused and “wherever there is power there is resistance” a la’ Foucault we see

that even woman characters like Mammachi and Baby Kochamma put up a kind of

resistance against the iniquitous socio-political and economic order in post-colonial India.

Baby Kochamma, complicit in the patriarchal, casteist, classist, sexist society of Kerala,



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manages her relationships with different characters in an apparently ambivalent kind of

way.

Baby Kochamma does not overtly believe in the rights of women as well as subalterns

and makes a distinction between her self-interest and those of other women. In stark

contradiction to her personal subversion and transgression of patriarchy and oppressive

structures, Baby Kochamma concurs in the repressive actions against Ammu. She is

responsible for: poisoning the minds of Mammachi and Chacko, concoction of a false

case against Velutha, tricking the children into betraying Velutha, advising Chacko to

return Estha to his father and forcing Ammu to leave. Baby Kochamma hates Estha and

Rahel as they are half-Hindus born of a love marriage outside community. She hates

Velutha because he is dalit. He, along with Ammu, violates the “Love laws” too. All

these connivings isolate Baby Kochamma to a pathetic life where TV (used as the most

successful machine in the spread of globalization) is her only companion. As a subaltern,

she can be said to be of the lower middle class, in terms of her power and has unstable

class loyalty. Her actions of personal dissidence like abandoning the Syrian Christian

community and joining the Roman Catholic community, for her love of Father Mulligan,

and sticking with that faith even after Father Mulligan‟s newly appropriated avatar of a

Hindu Sadhu as well as her adoption of celibacy, speak of her interrogation of the post-

colonial Indian social order as manifested in Kerala. Though, she is not an active resistant

force against local and let alone global inequities , her actions do make her a kind of

agent of change in the novel, who through not fully acquiescing to the existing iniquitous

social, political and economic order also resists . This is so, especially if we remember

the feminist dicta: “The personal is political”.

The zygotic twins Estha and Rahel are subalterns in the sense of being rootless

economically, financially, in terms of family, lineage and culture. Being deprived of a

“normal” nuclear family, fatherly love and a stable economic base, these two children

have to fall back upon each other most of the time. Amitabh Roy is right when he writes:



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“The novel can be viewed as a tale of “terror” that destroyed the lives of Velutha and

Ammu, but also as a tale of how Estha and Rahel survived.”(2005, p. 90). Estha and

Rahel do not come from poor background. They had a bourgeois background. But when

their parents get divorced, they are subjected to adversity. They, along with their mother

were unwanted in their grandmother‟s place. Despite this, they do acquire a good

education. They have a battered childhood, because of their father‟s “drunken violence

followed by post-drunken badgering”, when they were barely two. “When his bouts of

violence began to include the children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her

husband and returned, unwelcome to her parents in Ayemenem.”(Roy, 1997, p. 42).The

two children and especially Rahel, as a girl, had a double stigma of mixed parentage

attached to them, both “religious (because their father was Hindu and mother Syrian

Christian) and ethnic(their father being a Bengali and mother, a Keralite).” (Roy, 1997, p.

91) Moreover, they were the children of divorced parents. Rahel was disliked by Baby

Kochamma, Kochu Maria and even Chacko. Deprived of conventional parental love,

Ammu is both father and mother to her. She also derives pleasure from the company and

intimacy of her brother. Finally, she considers Velutha, to be a father figure on whose

back she rides.(Roy, 1997,p. 73) Being disliked by her elderly relatives , she feels

resentment against them. When her mother‟s liaison with Velutha is discovered, she is

locked in the bedroom. Rahel, along with her twin brother, tries to find out the reason at

the tender age of seven and their mother calls them: “millstones round my neck”. (Roy,

1997, p. 253)

The twins plan to escape in a boat, accompanied by their cousin, Sophie Mol, who

accidentally drowns. The police arrest Velutha and Rahel has to go to the police station

with her brother Estha to identify Velutha as a criminal. Ammu is forced to leave the

room in which she had locked herself and has to leave Ayemenem House and dies shortly

afterwards. Estha is sent back to his father and the twins face the trauma of separation.

The novelist puts it thus: “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



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break its laws.” (Roy, 1997, p. 55) Rahel has a hard time in school and is expelled three

times. The first time, she is caught outside her Headmistress‟ garden gate decorating a

knob of fresh cow dung with small flowers. Later, she is expelled from Nazareth Convent

after repeated complaints from senior girls. The second time, she is expelled from school

for smoking. She is expelled the third time “for setting fire to her Headmistress‟ false bun

which, under duress, Rahel confessed to have stolen”. (Roy, 1997, 17) Thus, Rahel

refuses to be co-opted by the school as she refused to be co-opted by her

relatives/family/society. Being, marginalized because of her religion/community, gender,

class and age, she fits the category of the subaltern and her acts of non-conformity can be

considered as acts of resistance through which she wants to bring about some kind of

change. The most important act by Rahel is that of consummating her incestuous love for

her twin brother, Estha, which though an act of personal self-assertion, is also deeply

political, challenging indigenous /local inequalities in post-colonial India.

So, Ammu, Mammachi, Baby Kochamma and Rahel, four women in The God of Small

Things, interrogate pre-colonial/indigenous norms, customs, laws, values and structures

connected with patriarchy, class, caste and feudal-capitalist economic structures. These

women also interrogate, through all their actions, the “Love laws”. But, interestingly

enough, these women do not advocate for the forces of global inequality masquerading as

globalization. Ammu refuses to prostitute herself to the white boss of her husband.

Mammachi feels threatened by whatever happens on the television. Baby Kochamma,

though affected by globalization, does not accept every change in the identity of Father

Mulligan. She accepts Roman Catholicism for his sake, but does not change over to

Hinduism, when Father Mulligan, becomes a Hindu Sadhu, echoing the effects of

movements like the ISKCON or Hare Krishna in the West. Rahel on her part awaits the

arrival of her twin brother Estha and tries to heal him of his dumbness and fractured

existence and consummates their childish but incestuous love transgressing along with

the “Love laws”. This act is a total denial of the restrictive permissive sexuality of the

West that ties sexuality with business, transaction and money. Thus, Rahel also seems to



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interrogate the global inequalities and hegemony masquerading as global connectivity or

globalization.

In dealing with local and global inequalities, Arundhati Roy deals with the actions of

Comrade Pillai and Chacko—two card carrying members of the Communist Party. They

are complicit in the marginalization of a subaltern like Velutha, who suffers because of

his caste and class backgrounds. Comrade Pillai and Chacko, people without scruples,

manipulate Velutha. However, when he gets emotionally and sexually involved with

Ammu, in an act of personal rebellion against the restrictions of caste, class and gender,

rather than one of personal “aggrandizement”, these two characters do not act according

to the declared principles of Communist ideology. Chacko is furious about the loss of

familial “honour” and Comrade Pillai refuses to stand by Velutha, a fellow comrade.

Chacko does not consider class and caste backgrounds while sexually abusing pickle-

factory female labourers. This is significant as those female labourers are subalterns

without position, helplessly available in the hands of a man with money. In terms of

resisting global inequalities also, these two Communist party cadres, do not have the

ability, sincerity or vision to challenge it through discerning the links between local and

global inequalities. Both take advantage of the capitalist systems in place in Kerala. They

do not empathise with any of the subalterns or women in the novel. Chacko attitude

towards Rahel and Estha is also negative. Comrade Pillai, representing other communists

in the state, does not advocate mounting a frontal attack against the hierarchical caste

system, which is even an anomaly in a capitalist society and is oblivious to the oppression

of women because of caste, class and gender. Ammu and the other women are victimized

because of these so called communists. Communism, as represented by Roy, seems to fail

as an adequate ideology in resisting inequalities. The author does not proffer any

ideology of her own or communism. But O. P. Dwivedi thinks that “Arundhati Roy has

(un)consciously also extended the views of this [Subaltern Studies Collective] group by

highlighting the pathetic condition of these subaltern in India.”(2010) This leads us to the

final section of our article dealing with the path of emancipation shown by Roy.



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Roy, in The God of Small Things and her numerous non-fictional writings as intimated in

the interviews in The Shape of the Beast(2009), deals with the fate of the subalterns, both

local and global, including women. Generally considered a kind of a feminist, the author

does not focus on the question of women severed from other subalterns. Roy‟s treatment

of the issues of women in her fiction, again, is different from her examination of the state

of women in her non-fictional writings. In her novel the women are represented as

subalterns at par with the untouchable Velutha and the children Rahel and Estha. In her

non-fictional writings, Roy deals with specific issues and comments sparsely in a

theoretical mode about their interrelationship. She seldom makes comments like these:

“Deep at the heart of the horror of what‟s going on lies the caste system: this layered,

horizontally divided society with no vertical bolts, no glue, no intermarriage, no social

mingling; no human-humane-interaction that holds the layers together.” (2009, p. 6) The

complexity of texture, allusiveness, Joycean stream of consciousness, and intertextuality

make the novel a much more articulate though ambiguous document about the subalterns

in post-colonial India, including its women than many of her non-fictional writings.

But, being ambiguous, the novel does not provide or show any blueprint for the women

to be emancipated from the three kinds of oppression of caste, class and gender. All

women are also not equally affected by these three kinds of repressive regimes. While we

do agree that there are definite similarities between the insights of the Subaltern Studies

Project and the views of Arundhati Roy, we have to keep in mind that while the members

of the Subaltern Studies Collective were/are theoretically informed historians,

sociologists, and people of similar academic backgrounds; Roy is primarily a writer,

writing for an inchoate readership, as well as a committed activist. Needham‟s words

about Ranajit Guha in her article, (linking Guha and Roy) towards the end talks of the

utopian desires in Guha‟s Small Voice of History and Roy‟s The God of Small Things,

and comments: “Guha‟s „utopian aspiration‟, in other words , is not only to „achieve‟

what Scwarz characterizes as „the impossible ideal of allowing an unmediated subaltern

voice to speak‟ through and in the „textual space‟ (O‟Hanlon‟s words) his work wishes to



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make available; his „utopian aspiration‟ is also, as O‟Hanlon observes with considerable

unease, to see this(wished for) work as „coterminous with the struggles of the

dispossessed, feeding directly unto them by making sense of them‟ (O‟Hanlon

2001[1988]:174).”(2005) What Guha aspires for theoretically, Roy does not necessarily

desire empirically all through her novel. Being speculative, one can envision similar

kinds of desires in Roy and Guha and his group, but to say that Roy endorses the insights

of the Subaltern Studies Project as a kind of ideology of emancipation for women in a

postmodern India, is perhaps going too far.

Roy‟s The God of Small Things, presents women as subalterns, some of whom try to

bring about change through resistance. But as subalterns they do not have the articulate

voice that members of other groups in Indian society have. These women mount

resistance against both local and global inequalities, though the first kind of resistance is

perhaps stronger. Through their trajectories of personal involvement in different issues

they interrogate the structures of caste, class and gender, implicitly and explicitly,

unconsciously and consciously, partially or tangentially and wholeheartedly. These

women are different and similar, complicit in oppressions as well as mounting frontal

attacks against iniquitous social structures, customs and laws. All of the women discussed

do not fit into the way things are in post-colonial India, plagued by indigenous kinds of

injustice and neo-colonialism masquerading as global connectivity or globalization. The

insights of the Subaltern Studies Project are useful in understanding the complexity of

their conditions, but not fully. We do not see a one to one correspondence between those

insights and the non-discursive intuitions of the novelist, Roy. A thorough consideration

of Roy‟s presentation of women in all her works, both fictional and non-fictional, in

tandem with the works of multiple authors from the Subaltern Studies Project and its

admirers and detractors can fully or adequately throw light on the four women characters

we have dealt with and the question of what Roy considers the proper way for the

emancipation of post-colonial Indian women.



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Biographies

Golam Gaus Al-Quaderi is an associate professor at the Department of English,

University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Muhammad Saiful Islam is a lecturer in the Department of English, King Khalid

University, Abha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz (2006). Reading Arundhati Roy politically. In Murari Prasad (edited).

Arundhati Roy: Critical perspectives. New Delhi, India: Pencraft International.

Alam, Khurshid (2001). “Untouchables” in The God of Small Things.5.6.2007. Retrieved

from http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/india/roy/alum1.html.

Bose, Brinda (2006). In desire and in death: Eroticism as politics in Arundhati Roy’s The

God of Small Things. In Murari Prasad (edited). Arundhati Roy: Critical perspectives.

New Delhi, India: Pencraft International.

Dwivedi, O.P (2010). The Subaltern and the text: Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small

Things. Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 1(2), 387-394.

Navarro-Tejero, Antonia (2006). Power Relationships in The God of Small Things. In

Murari Prasad (edited). Arundhati Roy: Critical perspectives. New Delhi, India: Pencraft

International.

Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney (2005). „The Small Voice of History‟ in Arundhati

Roy‟s The God of Small Things. Interventions:International Journal of Postcolonial

Studies, 7(3), 369-391.doi: 10.1080/13698010500268072.

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/india/roy/alum1.html



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Prasad, Murari (2006). Introduction. In Murari Prasad (edited). Arundhati Roy: Critical

perspectives. New Delhi, India: Pencraft International.

Rabinow, Paul (Edited)(1991). The Foucault Reader. London, Penguin Group.

Roy, Amitabh (2005).The God of Small Things : A novel of social commitment. New

Delhi, India: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.

Roy, Arundhati (1997). The God of Small Things. New Delhi, India: IndiaInk.

Roy, Arundhati(2009). The Shape of the Beast: conversations with Arundhati Roy.New

Delhi, India: Penguin .

Roy, Binayak (2009). The Title of The God of Small Things: A subversive salvo. ANQ,

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Surendran, K.V (2000). The God of Small Things: A saga of lost dreams. New Delhi,

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Endnotes.

i “ ‘I feel’, says Guha, ‘that women’s voice once it is heard , will activate and make available other small

voices as well’(1994:11)”(Anuradha Dingwaney Needham 376)

Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

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