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.
Religion. Roy comes from a Syrian Christian background in the southern Indian state of Kerala, in southern India. Syrian Christians converted to a form of Christianity (resembling Eastern/Greek Orthodoxy) many centuries ago, possibly in ancient times. Unlike many other Indian Christians, they were not converted by British missionaries during the era of British colonialism. This region of India is also an area where English is widely spoken – much more so than in northern India (it is still class-marked, with better English skills associated with higher class status). Roy studied architecture in college, and starred in some independent art films before settling down to write this novel.
Caste and Power Relations: One of the central themes in the novel is caste. Even though most of the main characters in the book are Christians, their caste identities have been carried over from their Hindu origins, and are still legible to the broader community. India has an elaborate affirmative action system in place to address caste discrimination, though instead of reducing discrimination it seems to have reified it and made it permanent.
The English word “pariah” actually comes from the Indian caste system : “Paraiyar” is a Dalit (formerly ‘untouchable’) caste group in southern India.
We see references to caste in the passages dealing with the love laws, and in a somewhat subtle and understated way in passages like this:
“It’s a little too late for all this, don’t you think?” he [the police officer] said. He spoke the coarse Kottayam dialect of Malayalam. He stared at Ammu’s breasts as he spoke. He said the police knew all they needed to know and that the Kottayam Police didn’t take statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children. Ammu said she’d see about that. Inspector Thomas Mathew came around his desk and approached Ammu with his baton. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d go home quietly.” Then he tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out the ones that he wanted packed and delivered. Inspector Thomas Mathew seemed to know whom he could pick on and whom he couldn’t. Policemen have that instinct. (9-10)
The discrimination in many contexts in India is essentially completely open and flagrant. Veshya most probably means sex-worker here; Ammu is not that, though she is being treated as one because of her romantic connection to Velutha, a Dalit. The other assumptions being made here are also worth noting – Ammu’s children are not illegitimate. The police officer is calling her these names because he can; she has no one with whom to file a complaint.
Caste is also recognized by people who are ostensibly committed to leftist politics, including the character K.N.M. Pillai, a local Communist Party official. (Kerala has a long tradition of an active Communist party movement.)
Roy sometimes talks about caste obliquely, through the rather poetic phrase, the “Love Laws”:
Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
Love Laws: caste is, at its most fundamental level, a system for regulating who can marry whom. Ideas about endogamous (in-group) marriage are extremely persistent, even amongst today’s urban Indians who might otherwise shrug their shoulders at official caste distinctions or otherwise not adhere to caste roles.
We’re going to see a serious transgression of caste laws with Ammu (hinted at near the beginning of the novel, though the story is not unpacked fully until much later), but even her marriage described in chapter 2 – to a Bengali (speaking a different language / from a different region of India) is described as an “intercommunity love marriage.” Her parents did not attend her marriage and her community is not terribly sympathetic when she returns home after separating from her alcoholic husband after living for some years in India’s northeast.
More on caste / untouchability from chapter 2:
Velutha wasn’t supposed to be a carpenter. He was called Velutha—which means White in Malayalam—because he was so black. His father, Vellya Paapen, was a Paravan [Paravan is a Dalit caste]. A toddy tapper. He had a glass eye. He had been shaping a block of granite with a hammer when a chip flew into his left eye and sliced right through it. As a young boy, Velutha would come with Vellya Paapen to the back entrance of the Ayemenem House to deliver the coconuts they had plucked from the trees in the compound. Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They were not allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. Caste Hindus and Caste Christians. Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint. In Mammachi’s time, Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas. (70-71)
The part about covering the upper body actually comes up in the novel. Estha and Rahel know Velutha well – and they’re surprised to see him wearing a shirt at the communist party rally.
Globalization and Decolonization: This novel starts in the late 1960s, before the beginning of the contemporary globalization moment. However, there are definitely ways in which Roy deals with Western influences on Indian culture. We already mentioned language issues. Another might be her awareness of the impact of Western cultural reference points – The Sound of Music, the music of Elvis Presley… These aren’t necessarily seen as impositions; they’re aspects of culture that the characters in the story enjoy without feeling put upon. That said, some familiar dynamics involving race and racism do appear with Estha and Rahel’s cousin, Sophie Mol. Sophie Mol’s father is their uncle, but their mother is a white English woman. The fact that their cousin is half-white is a factor in how she’s treated (vs. how they’re treated), and again adds to the sense of horror after Sophie Mol’s death.
We also see many instances in the novel exploring some of the quirks of her characters’ approach to English, and there is a fair amount of self-consciousness about the “Anglophilia” of a certain class and generation of upper-class Indians. The twins’ uncle Chacko has studied at Oxford in England, and is clearly an Anglophile – though he is also self-conscious about it and at times calls out others in the family for ostensible Anglophilia (he associated their interest in The Sound of Music with Anglophilia). Chacko also has a theory of decolonization that he expresses in somewhat pretentious, over-the-top terms (pp. 51-52); he is the one who talks about History as a house that can’t be entered (which the children immediately associate with a mysterious house across the river where a white man once lived – they call it History House).
Some of the lyrical moments and poetic ‘coinages’ in the novel are plays with English from the point of view of Indian children, who are learning it as a second language.
One of the notable features of The God of Small Things is its emphatic use of foreshadowing, through which Roy ‘gives away’ major chunks of the plot in lyrical capsules that almost sound like poetry. Rather than spoil the plot, they help to introduce a sense of mystery:
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age. (5)
There are many passages in the novel that deal with language in one way or another. Some deal directly with the English question. Others deal with language – and its opposite, silence – itself. Here is a passage that relates to one of the twins, Estha, who has grown up effectively mute, for reasons that are not explained at the beginning of the novel:
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. (13)
And here is a passage that resembles the political debates about English that have been important in a good deal of postcolonial literary studies:
That whole week Baby Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversations, and whenever she caught them speaking in Malayalam, she levied a small fine which was deducted at source. From their pocket money. She made them write lines– “impositions” she called them–I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English. A hundred times each. When they were done, she scored them out with her red pen to make sure that old lines were not recycled for new punishments.
She had made them practice an English car song for the way back. They had to form the words properly, and be particularly careful about their pronunciation. Prer NUN sea ayshun.
ReJ-Oice in the Lo-Ord Or-Orhvays
And again I say rej-Oice,
RejOice,
RejOice,
And again I say rej-Oice. (36)
Both the elderly Baby Kochamma (the twins’ grandmother) and Chacko (the twins’ uncle) exemplify versions of ‘Anglophilia’ in one way or another. Chacko’s Anglophilia has to do with his having gone to Oxford, where he met his wife Margaret. The two later divorced, and Margaret remarried (though as the action of the novel begins, with the twins as children, her second husband has died – and she’s come to India for Christmas). Here is some background about Chacko:
For instance, that morning, as they drove out through the gate, shouting their good-byes to Mammachi in the verandah, Chacko suddenly said: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
Everyone was so used to it that they didn’t bother to nudge each other or exchange glances. Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. (38)
Characters. Wikipedia is helpful on the many characters in the novel (I have modified some of the following withrelevant information):
Ammu - Rahel and Estha's mother, sister of Chacko, daughter of Pappachi and Mammachi. Note: “Ammu” is not her name, it means “mother.”
Baba - Rahel and Estha's father, tried to beat Ammu and prostitute her, later re-married, of a lower caste than Ammu.
Baby Kochamma (Navomi Ipe) - Pappachi's sister, aunt to Chacko and Ammu, and grandaunt to Sophie Mol, Estha, and Rahel.
Chacko - Brother to Ammu, son of Pappachi and Mammachi, father to Sophie Mol and divorced from Margaret Kochamma.
Comrade Pillai - Leader of the local communist party.
Estha (Esthappen Yako) - Rahel's twin brother, son of Ammu and Baba.
Father Mulligan - Baby Kochamma's love interest. A Roman Catholic.
Joe - Second husband of Margaret.
Kari Saipu – Englishman who lived in the “History House”
Kochu Maria - Housekeeper to Rahel, Grandmother.
Larry McCaslin - ex-husband of Rahel, travels to India to teach and falls in love with Rahel, bringing her back to the USA with him.
Mammachi (Shoshamma Ipe) - Blind. Wife of Pappachi, mother of Chacko and Ammu, grandmother of Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol. Also founder of the family pickle factory.
Margaret Kochamma - Chacko's ex-wife, mother of Sophie Mol. An Englishwoman.
Murlidharan - Homeless, insane person who crouches naked on the welcome sign for Cochin. Carries keys to his last residence around his waist expectantly.
Orangedrink Lemondrink Man - Paedophile from Estha's past.
Pappachi (Shri Benaan John Ipe) - Father to Chacko and Ammu, grandfather to Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol. He was an imperial entomologist, who later worked as an official entomologist for the Indian government after independence. Bitter about discovering a new species of moth (it fell into his drink), but not getting credit.
Rahel - Estha's twin sister, daughter of Ammu and Baba, divorced from Larry McCaslin.
Sophie Mol - Cousin of the twins, daughter of their uncle Chacko and Margaret Kochamma.
Pollution and the environment:
Keep an eye on the ecological reference points in the novel, particularly in the gap between the first moment in the book (1969 – when Sophie Mol comes to visit and dies) and 1992, when Estha and Rahel both return to Ayemenem. At the latter moment, there’s been a pronounced deterioration of the ecosystem around the river near Ayemenem:
Now that he’d been re-Returned, Estha walked all over Ayemenem. 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.