Teaching Notes: "The God of Small Things" General Overview and Context

Briefly Introducing Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy is one of the most successful in the ‘new wave’ of Indian writers in English that emerged in the late 1990s. (Writers like Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Rohinton Mistry all emerged on the scene in the 1970s and 80s). Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was a bestseller around the English-speaking world upon its release in 1997, and won Roy the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998. Surprising many of her fans, Roy took a long break from writing fiction after The God of Small Things, and became known as an activist and political essayist, who frequently wrote to criticize undemocratic policies of the Indian government as well as the American prosecution of the “War on Terror” after 9/11. She’s also well-known for her interventions on behalf of environmental justice (especially for Indian indigenous communities, known as “tribals” or “adivasis”) as well as her advocacy for Dalits and other low-caste communities. Many of these themes are visible in one way or another in The God of Small Things; the issue of caste is obvious, but the environmental justice might be more of a subtext, though there are hints of it from the very beginning (“Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils” [14]). The seemingly throwaway line about the World Bank points to a theme Roy later addressed at length in her nonfiction writing – the ecological destruction caused by large-scale development programs associated with the World Bank.

Roy finally published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017. It’s a fascinating book in many ways, with a transgender protagonist (pretty  unusual in Indian fiction) and a plot involving the Indian government’s response to the Kashmiri secessionist movement. It’s closely attentive to important events in recent Indian politics. If you like this book, you might enjoy that newer novel as well, though on the whole the newer book is a little messier and less well-structured than this one (some reviewers complained that Roy needed a stronger editor…).  

A Bit About Mary Roy: Finally, a book that might bear reading in close proximity to The God of Small Things might be Roy’s recent memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me (2025). Mother Mary tells a version of the story that makes it clear The God of Small Things is actually largely autobiographical – she really did have a family member in Ayemenem, Kerala who started a pickle factory. Like Rahel in the novel, Roy did leave her family behind to study architecture in Delhi, and decided to stay away. (However, unlike Rahel, she didn’t marry an American man or move to the U.S.) Her mother (real life: Mary Roy; “Ammu” [mother] in the novel) really was a kind of black sheep of the family, who ended up starting a school in part because she had been exiled from her own family and denied access to her father’s property. (Under the old law, a daughter’s inheritance was limited to one-quarter of a son’s share or 5000 rupees – whichever was less – or nothing at all if dowry had been given on marriage. When their father P.V. Isaac died without a will, the real Mary Roy sued her brother, George Isaac, for access to their father’s property. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court; she won the case in 1986, though the results were tied up in court. Mary Roy finally received access to her share of the property in 2010; it was worth 2 Crores (20 million rupees).  (One place this all comes up early in the novel is with reference to who owns the pickle factory that was started by their Mammachi (their mother). Chacko claims complete ownership, which Ammu protests (“Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society.”) Chacko’s facetious response has an ominous undertone: “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine” [57]). 

Despite this rather heroic story of feminist perseverance, Roy’s portrait of her mother is at times pretty unsparing in the memoir – it depicts a woman who could be abusive to her own children even as she was subject to all manner of social marginalization because of her life choices. And Roy really does have a brother (not her twin) with whom she has had a complicated relationship. 

Teaching Notes: "Religion and Literature" (Fall 2016)

This fall I taught a course for advanced undergraduates on "Religion and Literature." In it, I assigned Milton's Paradise Lost (the first five books), a substantial selection from William Blake, Iris Murdoch's The Bell, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Overall, a pretty successful class on a topic I have been thinking about for much of my career. The following is a lightly edited version of the opening day lecture I wrote up for my students. 

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Let's start with the following poem by William Blake:

“The Garden of Love” (from Songs of Experience)

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys desires.

English and American literature has been deeply connected to debates over religion, going back to the medieval period. Even as Christianity seemed to recede in public life in the modern era, prominent writers continued to write about it, sometimes expressing their passionate dissent from various religious orthodoxies -- as we see in Blake's poem "The Garden of Love" above. For Blake, the formal institution of the Church (represented by the Chapel that's been built in what used to be a garden) is first and foremost an institution of interdiction and denial ("Thou shalt not"). Its principles of self-denial and its championing of suffering are a species of death for Blake. And yet he resists them not in the name of atheism or secular humanism -- but in the name of a much more personal, text-centered interpretation of Christianity. Blake's Christianity was not centered around the idea of Christ's particular suffering on the cross, but on the idea of a divine gift in the form of human prophetic genius in dialectical relationship with the restraints that are placed on it.

For many of Blake's peers, his radical beliefs and personal practices (he refused to enter Churches for much of his adult life!) would actually have placed him outside of Christianity. It’s worth remembering that in England at least, the Church of England was the “Establishment” Church throughout this period: the Monarchy and Parliament were directly connected to the Church. Non-Anglican Christian sects -- Roman Catholics, and Protestant “Dissenters” (Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Methodists…) were banned from holding public office, and there was widespread discrimination against them in many walks of life. It wouldn’t be until 1835, for instance, that Catholics would be allowed to vote or serve as members of Parliament in England. English Jews wouldn't get the same privileges until 1858.

With Milton in the 17th century, through Bunyan, Blake, Defoe, and Swift in the 18th century, and going further through the 19th and 20th centuries there is no shortage of canonical writers who have seriously engaged issues of religion in their works. Books like Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) are thickly saturated with religious references. People often overlook these when they talk about Robinson Crusoe – whose eponymous hero starts off rebelling against religion. His life as a castaway can be interpreted in the novel as punishment for his sins. Later, he has a “conversion” experience; his subsequent rescue might be seen as a reward for that good behavior.

There’s a shift in the approach to religion in the 19th century. During this period, many of the great canonical novelists (especially George Eliot and Thomas Hardy) are preoccupied with the decline in influence of the Church on everyday life. A writer like Eliot agrees with many of the moral ideas of Christianity, but from an early age she rejects organized religion and makes the case to friends and family that the teachings of Christianity should be seen as mythology rather than literal truth. If we had more time together in this course, we could look at novels like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1894), and Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859) – which both show ordinary people turning against the values of the Church in favor of a more common-sense idea of personal morality. The sense of a Church in decline is also very much present in mid-20th century novelists like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. Here we will look at Murdoch’s fascinating novel The Bell (1958), in which the novel’s heroine finds herself on a kind of spiritual quest. Can the Church reassert itself, and can religion/Christianity once again play the defining role in the lives of modern people (and especially: modern women) that we believe it played in the Medieval period?