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THE BOOK(ER) OF THE YEAR

by Ranga Rao

C-6 Staff Quarters

SSSIHL

Samadhi Road

PRASANTHI NILAYAM

AP 515134

["The Book of the Year’. The Hindu

(Madras) 16 and 23 Nov, 1997. Two-part Essay on

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things in two parts.]

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Post-Booker, past gaga.

Few novels have drawn such a range of opinion as

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Though some of

it could be reactionary response to the hype—and

panic knee-jerk to the three-crore advance, made

worse by the five-crore sales—our own Booker-

winning novel is, in the flurry of critical darts

flung at it, an advance on Seth’s A Suitable Boy.

Let’s look at a few of these puzzling statements,

in an attempt, tentative and cursory still because

we are looking at an extremely recent work,

towards achieving, with sahrudayata, oneness with

the text, a further critical debate.

STATEMENT 1: with extraordinary linguistic inventiveness Roy funnels

the history of South India through the eyes of seven-year-old twins.

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Coming from the Booker citation, this deserves some

respect. But there are two problems. First about

the South India bit; as it happens the text informs

us that the twins are born in Assam, in the North-

East of India, to a Bengalee father and a Malayalee

mother, and, more tantalisingly, ‘on a day of

national humiliation’: the national humiliation is the

defeat of the Indian forces at the hands of the

Chinese in 1962. The history, if there is one, is

of India as a whole, Rushdie or no Rushdie. And

straight we have another problem: ‘My book is not

about history....’ says Roy (Interview, The Week,

October 26, 97) But then if it is not about history

why make it a point, Ms Roy, to tell us about the

remarkable coincidence? Still we are told by

Professor Beer, the Booker chair-person: the novel

‘keeps all the promises it makes’.

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The other, more serious, problem with the statement

concerns point of view: that the story is told from

the point of view of the twins ( filtered through the eyes

of seven-year old twins). The twins and their point of

view occupy large spaces of the book, but how do we

place this passage about the Untouchable lover at

the rendezvous with Ammu, the mother of the twins

who of course are nowhere in the picture.

He watched her. He took his time.

Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress

was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Who can tell?

Whose point of view is this? Either of the twins?

And how is that possible, when they are not

ubiquitous? or, is it not the good old authorial

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voice which in the conventional novel is the

vehicle of authorial presence and authorial

omniscience both of which can be potentially

welcome, doubly welcome, to any reader? And there

are any number of such passages where the twins are

not present, are not likely to be: but the

omniscient author is. Roy’s ‘post-modernist’ novel

has a free-wheeling point of view.

Statement 2: ... ‘tells its tale quite clearly’

That is the Booker citation again. And what is

meant is that the book is readable; The Hindu, in

its handsome editorial tribute, represents such a

widespread impression: that Ms Roy could have appealed to

two diverse audiences—the serious and the non- serious, if you like—

is of course only one of the astonishing attributes of her novel.

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I have doubts about this. Take the metaphor-rich

opening paras of the novel; a votary of say, Harold

Robbins or whatever—the non-serious, ‘time-pass’

reader will find it as comfortable to wade through

these as a child through The Silent Valley. And

the vertigo of to-fros, reflecting perhaps the

twins’ high-strung state of mind. Or, take this

passage :

A friendship that, unfortunately, would be left dangling. Incomplete.

Flailing in the air with no foothold. A friendship that never circled

around to a story, which is why, far more quickly than ever should

have happened, Sophie Mol became a Memory, while the Loss of

Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every

season.

Apart from the figurative viscosity, what is one to

believe, that a non-serious reader—or even a

serious reader—will find it easy to transit, so to

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say, from one moss-covered stone to the next,

across this stream of thought and sentiment? Or,

consider: beyond the shadow, the light was flat and gentle: what

is the average reader to make of the yoking of flat

and gentle: which non-serious reader will get at the

gustatory sense of the first and the tactile appeal

of the second? and savour the combination of the

two? It is startling, teasing, evocative, but

halting, distracting, confusing to the ordinary

reader. Or: The seas black, the spume vomit green: how many

readers of English fiction can make out spume? or

stand the slam of the image? She had half-moons under her

eyes and a team of trolls on her horizon : trolls? And: History

walking the dog: makes sense only to an alert reader of

serious fiction. Now look at the Joycean: He had a

greenwavy, thick-watery, lumpy, seaweedy, floaty, bottomless-

bottomful feeling: which makes contextual sense, but is

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Joyce ‘readable’? ( Ms Roy’s step-daughter mentions

two writers as favourites of our author: Joyce and

Marquez) Again: Here they studied Silence (like the children of the

Fisher Peoples), and learned the bright language of dragonflies. Or:

And Ousa the Bar Nowl watched the pickle-smelling silence that lay

between the twins like a bruise. Or: consider the obscurity

of:

When they grew tired of waiting, the dinner smells climbed off the

curtains and drifted through the Sea Queen windows to dance the

night away on the dinner-smelling sea. Does it mean that

the dancers went back after a satisfying nocturnal

jaunt? Or in their absence, the hotel was rid of

them, the smells? Take another passage:

But anger wasn’t available to them and there was no face to put on

this Other Thing that they held in their sticky Other Hands, like an

imaginary orange. There was nowhere to lay it down. It wasn’t theirs

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to give away. It would have to be held. Carefully and for ever. What

does one make of this?

Conceptually, rhetorically, stylistically, Roy’s

novel is not accessible to the common reader.

Seth’s A Suitable Boy, as ambitious, is; and that in all

probability ruled out a Booker for him; a Jane

Austen, or a Dickens will not appeal to the Booker

Committee, either: their language, their ‘style’,

is not innovative enough.

And now for our next statement it is time to move

closer home.

Statement3: I don’t scrabble around and try, and I don’t sweat the

language.... No, not erasing much—language was never rewritten. I

don’t rewrite.

That makes Ms Roy, I am sure, unique; not for her,

it would appear, the intolerable wrestle with words. To be

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fair to her, she has sound writerly instincts;

still a little vetting, even at the editorial desk,

would have helped:

They only worried about the Naxalites, who had been known to force

men from Good Families to marry servant girls whom they had made

pregnant.

Who are the seducers? The Naxalites? or men from

Good Families? Of course Ms Roy’s sympathies

clearly lie with the former: but the ambiguity

impinges and impedes. Take another kind of problem

Ms Roy does not seem to have considered: Or husbands

who spent all their earnings in toddy bars. To a non-Indian

reader this will not have any problem; but to an

Indian, bars has affluent urban associations: a

translator from an Indian language will avoid the

term as culturally polluted; he will probably try

toddy shacks. Similarly: That Kuttappen’s a basket case.

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Coming from an illiterate untouchable, basket case is

too slangy, too un-Indian, and the wrong register.

At another level we have: A giant burning ghat was erected

on the highway. As it cannot be a permanent affair—

obstructing the traffic and hence objectionable,

and even unnecessary—what is meant perhaps is A giant

pyre. In a similar vein, and perhaps more serious to

an Indian sensibility we have: The man who had tried

publicly to undress the Pandavas’ wife, Draupadi.... Now we have

heard of people undressing to go to bed. What the

Kauravas attempt outrageously is a different

mischief: in the open court, in the presence of

nobles and elders, now that Draupadi is technically

no longer a princess but a dasi, they try to disrobe

her. Similarly both Bhima and his arch-enemy locked

in a duel may not be described as stoned: which is

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too distinctive with foreign associations alien to

the context and ethos.

Perhaps, Ms Roy, one should after all, scrabble and

try, sweat the language. Perhaps ‘re-breathing a

breath’ is not such a bad idea.

But then the Booker: doesn’t the book Booker?

Doesn’t it!

Does

n’t

it

!

Does

It still does. Without a shred of doubt. The power

of Roy’s book is such that it absorbs any omissions

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and commissions, any lacunae, artistic shocks; and

triumphs. The God of Small Things remains memorable.

Roy’s novel belongs to the metro stream of the

80’s made popular by Upamanyu Chatterjee and later

Firdaus Kanga. Consider Ms Roy’s antecedents:

include Ooty’s Breeks School and Lawrence School.

But Roy also marks an extension from the metro to

the cosmopolitan: consider the foreign,

international presence in The God of Small Things

( which begins with a quote from John Berger,

whoever that is): joeys, roos(Australian); slicked

buff and gofers(American and Canadian usage),

diddled, and of course, trolls (Scandinavian);

Elvis Presley-puff, and Love-In-Tokyo; New York:

Ireland and Holland; Kipling, Charlie Chaplin; and,

well, The Sound of Music.

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Neither Chatterjee nor Kanga has Roy’s rural

reach. Her desi roots show not only in liberal use

of Malayalam, but in her descriptions of Kerala;

Rushdie seems to err in commenting that Roy’s India

is any place. After Menon Marath, Kerala gets

spectacular representation in Indian fiction in

English.

Roy’s book is the only one I can think of among

Indian novels in English which can be

comprehensively described as a protest novel: it is

all about atrocities against minorities, Small

Things: children and youth, women, and

untouchables. And the narrative achieves, at the

same time, the appeal of a fairy tale, with

archetypal characters, such as two lovers

bedevilled by vamps and ogres.

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‘I was an unprotected child in some ways’, says Roy

(Interview, The Week, 26 Oct). She continues: ‘Two

things happen. You grow up quickly. And when you become an adult

there is a part of you that remains a child, so the communication

between you and your childhood remains open.’ The only

writer I can think of endowed with comparable

empathy with the child is R.K.Narayan. Compare the

sunshine and sparkle of the ‘30s story of little

Swami supported by the matrix of a loving family,

concluding on the merest suggestion of mortality,

with the sombre atmosphere surrounding the

disturbed twins in Roy’s novel who are products of

a debilitated, debilitating ethos (‘a hopelessly

practical world’), ending up, in each other’s

arms, like babes in the wood. The incest, as the

masturbation scene earlier, fits in disturbingly:

the twins go through a savaged childhood, through

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a mine-field of demoralised parents, and callous

or cunning adults, even a paedophile or two; for

them the adult spectacle is but a Play,

hypocritical, scheming, brutal. Their tender dreams

are perpetually in danger of being hi-jacked and

redreamed for them. Nature is offered in the novel,

among other things as a matrix to the human child:

the natural is contraposed to the adult Play.

Their high-voltage imagination results in

linguistic, stylistic exuberance, in the profusion

of capitals, inspired mis-spellings, punctuational

liberties, single word sentences, repetitions,

single sentence paras etc., in a comic strip-

cartoon style. After R.K.Narayan no novelist has

realized a child’s vision of the adult world as

much as Arundhati Roy; and Rahel and Estha, the

names sound almost Biblical, but they experience

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the joy and purity of childhood in just one scene:

when they visit Velutha’s cottage, and can see

Jesus in a mini. It’s Estha’s spontaneity, his

singing which, ironically, brings him into the

company of Terror, the OrangeDrinkLemondrink Man;

the singer is silenced; and as if this were not

enough Estha offers the final betrayal to their

only friend, Velutha, and he ‘would keep the

receipt’, carry the guilt to the end: ‘memory of a

young man with an old man’s mouth’. The twins,

traumatized initially by parental strife--remember

the wrenching scene where their Ammu and Baba

squabble over sharing the burden of the twins--and

brutalized by the society--the twins, the off-

spring of Malayalee-Bengalee union, ‘with their

sometimes strangeness’, represent modern urbanized

Indian environment of crumbling family values,

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‘old roses on a breeze’; and Sophie Mol, the

shortlived fruit of an Indo-British encounter, with

‘first world panache’, and in comparison with the

unfortunate twins, reported ‘Hatted, bell-bottomed

and loved from the beginning’ only underscores

and confirms their experience. In an unforgettable

scene Sophie coolly watches her cousin make a

mayhem of ants , and advises: ‘Let’s leave one

alive so that he can be lonely’. The only other

novelist in English who seems to have experienced

Loneliness is, once again, R.K.Narayan in The English

Teacher, after the death of his wife. In Roy’s

novel, the major themes all seem to tie up,

unlovedness, loneliness (‘You can’t trust anybody’,

Ammu tells her children), madness (the ‘hum’ in

Rahel’s or Estha’s head, for example), betrayal.

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The children in the novel are all social victims,

as much as the adults. The tragic death of Sophie

Mol (an inspired name) is caused by the adventure

of ‘unloved’ children running away to reclaim

countermanded love, and Sophie joins the fatal

cruise in the canoe in a bid to get close to her

cousins; her death gives the final push to a family

that had been rotting for three generations, the

rot begun by the beastly patriarch, Pappachi. The

comparison with Narayan offers a further

contrast; no doubt Narayan himself charts the

disintegration of the institution of the family in

his post- ‘47 novels, but he does it, in comparison

with Roy, but indirectly. Now at one bound our

novel in English has ushered India into the

modernity of advanced civilizations, the comity of

neurosis.

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Roy achieves superb success in realizing the

child’s world; in the writing styles (Wisdom

Exercise Notebooks) and some of the ‘overwriting’

goes with the child sensibility; in their

playfulness, recalling Alice in Wonderland; in the

child’s total commitment to life, in the child’s

pristine approach to excreta etc.; in the

child’s dread of punishments meted out by the adult

world; and above all in its terror of being

unloved. In the treatment of the twins Roy makes do

with a dash of magic realism, (though she calls

herself a realist in contrast with Rushdie); in

this autobiographical recall of childhood, Roy

recreates a real-life brother and his sister

separated by eighteen months into twins born within

eighteen minutes of each other; what is emphasized

perhaps is likemindedness, identity, ‘As though they

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were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint

identities.’

But their childhood experiences cruelly isolate

them and transform their lives hopelessly.

Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because

separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever

thought They’d

be.

Humanity duplicated: human misery replicated.

The God of Small Things is also a powerful feminist

presentation. I cannot think of a more moving

image of a feminist in our fiction than Ammu, who

of course is partly built on the novelist’s mother

Mary Roy. Says Lalit Roy, the novelist’s brother:

‘My mother is a powerful personality and she

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brought us up to be very independent’. (But his

uncle, the real-life model for Chacko dissents.) Ms

Mary Roy fought single-handedly and brought

property rights to Syrian Christian women; she also

went quietly and bravely through the trauma of a

broken marriage: “I tried to hide the pain from my

children.’(India Today, October 27, 97): when

Arundhati grew up she always stood by her mother.

In Ammu, the novelist has presented, with

compassion, a woman, a feminist locked in a

struggle with her family, its ‘hidden morality’,

with society, and tragically, with herself. All

the more moving, because she is a Malayalee woman,

and the Malayalees are traditionally the only

major matriarchal society among the peoples of

India; Mammachi’s hypocrisy in catering to her son

Chacko’s ‘Man’s Needs’ and condemning her

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daughter’s affair is blatant. And Ammu’s tragedy

too is presented in a context of broken or failed

marriages; what is being dramatized is ‘The whole

Question of a woman’s Locusts Stand I’. And the

struggle between the mother and the woman in Ammu.

In the event, the Syrian Christian community

suffers, inevitably, but incidentally; so does the

East Indian community in Naipaul’s novel, A House for

Mr. Biswas, autobiography turned into art.

Like Naipaul’s masterpiece (and Seth’s A Suitable Boy),

Roy’s novel too is a filial tribute; it brings to

Mary Roy her daughter’s ‘interest and anger’, a

phrase from Naipaul’s novel. Roy does to her mother

what Naipaul has done to his father. The book is a

vindication.

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The God of Small Things breathes the spirit of youth. It

is one of our protest novels, an outstanding one;

in its taboo-breaking it goes further than either

Upamanyu Chatterjee or Firdaus Kanga. It is

radical, subversive; it attacks several holy cows:

the family (the novel presents three generations of

a family), religion, Communist Establishment, even

public administration: the linguistic excesses are

just one dimension of the rebellion. Roy brings in

even environmentalism, the concern of many young

people today. In its ability, its keenness to view

things as they are, a passion for things, all

things, any thing, from human beauty, floral beauty

to sexual candour, a Renaissance interest in this

world, in the beautiful and the ugly, to the

extraordinary explicitness, and explicitness with a

vengeance, the scatology carried to, for example,

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the colour and consistency of shit, the book

represents the spirit of modern youth. What we have

uniquely in A God of Small Things is a suffusion of

protest. The story is about an Indian village,

authentic India; but the sensibility is urban,

westernized, modern.

Both minorities, the minors and the minority woman

are drawn to Velutha, the dalit, the ultimate

Indian minority. The ebony-skinned Untouchable is

called Velutha, which means White in Malayalam--because he

is so black. And he certainly is the fairest of all

and is apotheosised by the author, he is

eminently qualified to be the titular hero. A

carpenter with wonderfully creative hands, he is a

Christ-like figure to the novelist; and his

merciless torture at the hands of the police is a

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re-enactment of Passion; he is also the cheerful

man with one arm whom Ammu sees in her dream; the

handicap is a concretization of his outcaste

status. In the idealization of the dalit, the only

parallel I can think of is in classic Telugu

fiction; in the hero of the novel Malapalli by Unnava

Lakshminarayana. And in a fabulous short story by

Veluri Sivarama Sastry, ‘Maladasari’ which I have

translated for my Classic Telugu Short Stories(Penguin

Books India).

The role of the local Marxist leader in the

Velutha tragedy has been interpreted as anti-

communist slander; the Chief Minister of Kerala,

torn between pride for the daughter of the soil

making it big and his own party loyalties has

dubbed the episode as pandering to the western

prejudices. This is gross misreading of the novel,

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though mentioning Mr. Namboodripad by name marks a

failure of invention; and maybe Rushdiesque. But

the fact remains: Roy’s hero is a card-carrying

communist, and is suspected by the local Marxist

leader to be a Naxalite; being a dalit, Velutha is

also a nuisance, a ‘wrinkle’ in the local Marxist

leader’s political domain which has to be quietly

ironed out--an illustration of caste prejudices

swamping secular ideology. If the Booker committee

is to be accused of any political prejudice it is

partiality for Naxalism; that is what Roy reveals

in her novel. In the blatant murder of Velutha she

offers an allegory of the alleged complicity of

the Marxist Communist establishment in the

suppression of Naxalism, yet another betrayal in

the novel. Roy is not being ideological, she is

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being post-ideological, and perhaps, pre-

ideological. It is the NGO spirit.

One of the fascinating aspects of Roy’s treatment

of Velutha’s story is the way she associates him

with Nature.

Naked now, he walked down the thirteen stone steps into the water

and further, until the river was chest high. Then he began to swim

with easy, powerful strokes, striking out towards where the current

was swift and certain, where the Really Deep began. The moonlit

river fell from his swimming arms like sleeves of silver. It took him

only a few minutes to make the crossing. When he reached the other

side he emerged gleaming and pulled himself ashore, black as the

night that surrounded him, black as the water he had crossed.

Black is beautiful: argent, elemental.

The birthmark on his back is repeated like an epic

epithet; it is believed to bring the monsoon on

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time. In the entire world the twins have only one

adult who can put them entirely at ease, Velutha,

as in the enchanting episode ‘The River in the

Boat’, one of the most riveting in the novel,

where, on a visit to Velutha’s cottage in the

woods, the twins experience joy as they never do

anywhere else, the only time they seem to regain a

little of their lost childhood. Incidentally, Roy

moves in this scene with incredible ease between

joy of life (represented by the twins and their

friend Velutha) and the terror of death (Velutha’s

brother Kuttappen paralysed with a spinal injury,

bedridden, aware all the time of the Presence

stealing on him.).

When the policemen penetrate the woods on their

sinister mission to the unsuspecting Velutha’s

‘hideout’, Roy presents their headway lyrically,

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and as transgression, a violation, a rape of

Paradise:

Quick piss.

Hotfoam on warmstone. Police-piss.

Drowned ants in yellow bubbly.

Deep breaths.

Roy describes in cold fury the police battering of

the defencelss dalit,Velutha; and, with brilliant

narrative skill, Roy makes the twins witness to

this outrage; and the trauma endures. Here is yet

another Roy, with a clinical description of a

victim of police brutality ( this under a communist

government):

His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his

cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The

blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth,

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three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his

beautiful smile. [That is a deadly touch--the twins are

watching.] Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his

left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The

blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine

was ruptured and haemorrhaged, the blood collected in his

abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the

concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted in a loss of

control over his bladder and rectum. Both his knee caps were

shattered.

No pathologist could have done better: the Roman

soldiers’ handling of Jesus, in comparison, was

decency itself. A shattering experience to the

reader.

In an interview (The Week, Oct 26, 97) Roy talks at

length about the structure of her book and seems to

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take particular satisfaction in the way the novel

ends. But I am afraid her structure does not

always work the way she imagines it does.

Velutha’s death, caused, like the destruction of

the epic hero Karna in The Mahabharatha by multiple

betrayals, (abandoned by God and History, by Marx, by Woman,

and ...by Children), marks the aesthetic climax, the

emotional high-eminence of the drama; the whole

novel has been moving towards the tragic

denouement. A coda follows, the incest scene. If

Roy had stopped here, the book would have gained

immensely; but in her anxiety to end on a stubborn

amor vincit omnia note ( as in Emile Bronte’s

Wuthering Heights), Roy seems to have, at the very

end, distracted her own narrative rhetoric ,

undercut the affects of her own story. Naipaul’s

novel and Seth’s are, in comparison, works of

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immaculate craftsmanship. By projecting the last

scene, though it is authentically erotic, Roy has

committed an act of dislocated sensibility, an

egregious error in craftsmanship; the ending is

optimistic, not artistic. The sultry love-making

scene at the end of the novel hangs out, an

appendage, loose, wobbly. Like a camel’s lip. On

a Yakshi.

The best thing about Roy reposes outside the book:

her humility. She went to the final function

without an acceptance speech and in an interview

remarked: ‘My book is not the best book.... It is

the luckier book’. And she also said ‘ I don’t know

if I will ever write another book’. That

possibility is real; Roy has put so much into her

first book.

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Ms Roy should prove herself wrong, believes at

least one reader.

THE END

Ranga Rao is the author of two novels, Fowl-Filcher

and The Drunk Tantra (Penguin), and An Indian Idyll and

Other Stories (Ravi Dayal); he has translated a

selection of Telugu short stories for Penguin Classic

Telugu Short Stories.

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