Subalternity and Scale in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Author(s): JANE POYNER

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , September 2018, Vol. 51, No. 3, A
SPECIAL ISSUE: SCALE (September 2018), pp. 53-69
Published by: University of Manitoba

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Reading subaltern agency in The God of Small Things according to environmentalist notions of “scale” produces
more complex and potentially more empowering refractions of subalternity than straightforwardly Marxist or
postcolonial studies have afforded. I argue Velutha is both oppressed subaltern and prototypical eco-warrior of
a new planetary order.

Subalternity and Scale

in Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things
JANE POYNER

n the looming shadows cast across the globe by environmental degradation and

I climate change from the onset of the Anthropocene—the term coined by envi-
ronmental scientists for the new geological age we have entered in the wake of
industrialization and urbanization, particularly after the “Great Acceleration” from
1945 (Clark, Ecocriticism 1)—entanglements of forms of human and non-human
agency, such as the warming of the planet, preoccupy environmentalist debate. The
problem for environmentalists is that the needs and interests of human beings do not
as a matter of course correlate with the well-being of the planet; it is a particularly
thorny problem in the context of the “Third World,” where the objective of “making
poverty history” through equal (and thus increased) access to resources, both natural
and human-made, seems to fly in the face of the worldwide call to reduce our com-
bined global carbon footprint. In David Harvey’s words, “the right to be free of eco-
logical destruction is posed so strongly as a negative right that it appears to preclude
the positive right to transform the Earth in ways conducive to the well-being of the
poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed” (351).

Mosaic 51/3 0027-1276-07/053018$02.00©Mosaic

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54 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

Postcolonial and Marxist thinkers who have made it their task to address the
needs of such communities have wrestled with socio-political and epistemological
questions about these two seemingly conflicting forms of agency, human and non-
human: as subaltern studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “Any effort to con-
template the human condition today—after colonialism, globalization, and global
warming—on political and ethical registers encounters the necessity of thinking dis-
junctively about the human, through moves that in their simultaneity appear contra-
dictory” (“Postcolonial” 2). Taking stock of his own position as a postcolonial and
subaltern studies scholar at a time of environmental crisis, Chakrabarty writes, “As the
crisis gathered momentum in the last few years, I realized that all my readings in the-
ories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial
criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying global-
ization, had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture
within which humanity finds itself today” (“History” 199). Chakrabarty thus high-
lights the inadequacies in current critical thought of thinking across scales. How, for
instance, can postcolonial critics appropriately take account of environmental degra-
dation and climate change, which, after all, typically will have the most devastating
effects on the former sites of and peoples subjected to colonial conquest? He contends
that the challenge for postcolonial critics during “the current conjuncture of global-
ization and global warming” is “having to think of human agency over multiple and
incommensurable scales at once” (“Postcolonial” 1).
Probing the relationship between human and non-human agency, Chakrabarty
asks how we humans can possibly fathom the complex relationship between vastly
divergent scales of existence. At its heart lie questions such as how, to what extent, and
in what ways history and natural history coincide. Chakrabarty posits that we are able
only to comprehend natural history as “historical” at the present conjuncture because
of nature’s newly compressed time frame, during the Great Acceleration: nature
becomes history. For the first time in the long history of human evolution, Chakrabarty
argues, humans have become “geological agents” because for the first time in the longer
history of the planet, humans will contribute to the planet’s future well-being
(“History” 207). Thus forms of human and non-human agency in the context of envi-
ronmental crisis are not distinct categories but, in certain conditions, are collapsed.
This essay engages with these questions by considering how the Indian novelist
Arundhati Roy, through her depiction of subaltern agency in The God of Small Things,
helps us negotiate the apparently insurmountable task described by ecocritic Hannes
Bergthaller as “a failure of the imagination” (qtd. in Clark, Ecocriticism 18) of thinking
across scales. It is thus not insignificant that Roy’s recuperative gesture, which I read as

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 Jane Poyner 55

her endeavour to overcome this failure, is staged within a work of imaginative litera-
ture: fiction after all has the capacity to imagine the unimaginable. What is more, lit-
erature’s fictive world opens a space for the necessary intellectual work of making
scalar connections. The capacity to think across scales is important not only to these
disciplines but to their conjunctions and cross-currents, because it points the way to a
more holistic understanding of the embeddedness of environmental issues in the mar-
ginalization of oppressed peoples. This essay will argue that, through the depiction of
the Paravan1 Velutha and, specifically, the motif of Dalit footprints, Roy enables her
reader to situate subaltern agency within the context of environmental change and, in
so doing, grapples with what Timothy Clark calls “scale effects” (Ecocriticism 10).

ublished in 1997, The God of Small Things is Roy’s first novel (her second, The
P Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published in 2017). Since the novel’s publica-
tion, Roy has refashioned herself as a grassroots activist and political essayist (most
notably for our purposes writing “The Doctor and the Saint” and The Cost of Living,
which includes “The Greater Common Good” and in which Roy expresses concern for
the effects of dam-building and transnational capital on the poorest communities liv-
ing alongside the Narmada River in the Indian state of Gujarat). The God of Small
Things is set in the village of Ayemenem in Kerala (meaning “land of coconuts”), the
Indian state famed for its lush backwaters, for inaugurating the world’s first democrat-
ically elected Communist local government (of which the novel is notoriously critical),
and, during the Communist regime’s term of office, for boasting some of the world’s
highest literacy rates. The narrative’s two main time frames, primarily presented from
the perspective of the fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, are 1969, when the twins are
young children growing up in Ayemenem, and the early 1990s, when Estha, the boy
twin, has been “re-Returned” (God 9) from his father’s home in Calcutta and Rahel, his
sister, is visiting the Ayemenem family home following her divorce in the U.S. It is in
the late ’60s that the tragedy driving the plot unfolds: firstly the drowning in the
Meenachal River of Sophie Mol, the twins’ cousin, daughter of their self-proclaimed
Marxist Uncle Chacko and his English now ex-wife Margaret, who is visiting with her
daughter from England, and, secondly, the death of Velutha at the hands of the local
police following Estha’s inadvertent betrayal of him to them, in turn a consequence of
the revelation of Velutha’s affair with Ammu, the boy’s mother. Velutha has been mali-
ciously accused by Baby Kochamma, the twins’ great aunt, of attempting to kidnap the
twins when they had run away from their enraged mother, who blamed them for the
disclosure of her social transgression. It is the trauma brought about by Velutha’s mur-
der and Estha’s unwitting part in it that result in the young boy’s elective muteness.

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56 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

Caste is presented in the novel as highly deterministic. A combination of the nar-

rative’s double time frame and the revelation of the story’s tragic outcome before its
full explanation through analepsis and prolepsis—like the oral storytelling Salman
Rushdie describes, it goes in “loops” and “swoops” (7)—performs an important ethi-
cal function, leading the reader to focus on wider socio-political questions of why
Velutha was murdered rather than on how, where, or when this event took place. The
novel thereby partially absolves the police of responsibility for Velutha’s murder,
pointing to wider socio-political processes and a longer history of injustice. These
questions are framed in terms of the “polluted” Dalit body: “If [the police] hurt
Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship [. . .] between
them and him [. . .] had been severed long ago [. . .]. They were merely inoculating a
community against an outbreak” (292-93, emph. mine).
Caste, whilst linked primarily to Hinduism, pervades all India’s religious group-
ings: Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and, as in The God of Small Things, Syrian
Christians (the twins are described by their manipulative aunt, Baby Kochamma, as
“Half-Hindu Hybrids” [45] because their mother is Syrian Christian and their father
is Hindu). Indian society traditionally is divided into a hierarchy of four castes: brah-
mins (priests), ksatriyas (the military), vaisyas (traders and farmers), and sudras
(labourers and menial workers). “Untouchables” (now properly called “Dalits”) are
actually caste-less, existing outside this hierarchy: they were and often still are the
“outcasts” of society and perform spiritually polluting work like latrine- and street-
cleaning. As Roy writes in “The Doctor and the Saint,” caste has been profoundly
deterministic in Indian society: “Caste was implied in peoples’ names, in the way peo-
ple referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the mar-
riages that were arranged, in the language we spoke.”
Caste in Hindu mythology is closely linked to the cycle of reincarnation, to the
karma attached to one’s actions in previous lives, and to notions of impurity and pol-
lution. Alex Tickell sketches the complexity of the system as it pertains to untoucha-
bility: “The gradual progress towards moksha (a transcendent escape from the cycle of
reincarnation) is [. . .] a process of increasing spiritual purification, a progression that
is threatened by the unclean nature of the outside world and the innate impurities of
the body itself. Higher castes can alleviate the temporary pollution of bodily products
such as blood, sweat, semen, urine and faeces, with baths and ritual purifications.
Untouchables, on the other hand, are born polluted and cannot purify themselves
except through death and rebirth” (24-25). Here is a key passage from the novel
describing Velutha’s “untouchability”:

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 Jane Poyner 57

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 com-
pound. Pappachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They were not
allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. [. . .] Mammachi [. . .] could remem-
ber 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. They had to put their hands
over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom
they addressed. (73-74)

Here, caste is framed, as it is in Hindu lore, in terms of pollution, emphasized else-

where in the novel by Roy’s neologisms “untouchability” (74) and “touchables” (73).
The swept footprints transmute from signs of pollution to the divestment of agency.
Dalits’ use of public space is circumscribed: Vellya and Velutha must use the back
entrance to the house and are barred from public roads; their capacity for speech,
both literal and symbolic (in the sense of political agency), is impeded by blocking
their own mouths.
The association between footprints and subaltern agency in the novel can be
readily traced—I have counted nine instances. For example, Vellya’s realization about
the unwitting part he plays in his son’s death is expressed in terms of swept footprints,
connoting his interpellation as untouchable: “By the time he understood his part in
History’s Plans, it was too late to retrace his steps. He had swept his footprints away
himself. Crawling backwards with a broom” (200). We learn of the Paravan Christian
converts’ smashed dreams after independence, when “they found they were not enti-
tled to any government benefits [. . .] because officially, on paper, they were
Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your foot-
prints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all” (74).
Hovering in the space between untouchable and Christian, the converts become fur-
ther entrenched as one of those “unimagined communities” whom Rebecca Solnit
suggestively terms “uninhabitants” or “ghosted causalities” (qtd. in Nixon, Slow 152):
communities excluded, made invisible, and “evacuated from public awareness” (153).
The meaning of footprints in The God of Small Things broadens out to socio-political
agency more generally when Chacko explains to the twins that the Ipe family “were a
family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own
history and unable to retrace their steps—because their footprints had been swept
away” (52).

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58 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

Accounts of Velutha’s subalternity have identified his albeit limited agency, com-
menting, for instance, on his work as a carpenter and on his political activism—he is
a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (and, on his mysterious, temporary
disappearance from Ayemenem, is rumoured to have joined the Naxalites)—but is
ultimately betrayed by the Party’s leader, Comrade Pillai, who is himself subject to a
highly determinist society: in the act of betrayal, Pillai “merely slipped his fingers into
History’s waiting glove” (281). Above all, such accounts have identified Velutha’s
agency in his relationship with Ammu, by which the two defy the “Love Laws”—the
socio-cultural conventions of caste. Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad notoriously argues
that the novel “stake[s] its transgressive and radical claim” on the manner and mode
by which it “depicts and resolves” (113) issues of caste and sexuality, concluding that,
on the consummation of their affair, there is a “remarkable lack of intelligent speech
between them [. . .] [which is] absolutely essential to building the erotic utopia across
class lines” (114). Pranav Jani in “Beyond ‘Anticommunism’” endorses Roy’s leftist
credentials on the grounds of what he perceives to be her critique of radical politics
from within. Nevertheless, Jani identifies an absence of subaltern agency, for the novel
“sets as its [. . .] task the retracing of Dalits’ footsteps by exposing how they were
wiped away” (54). “Were” here is operative: the oppression of Dalits in Jani’s view is a
done deal. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham explores the connections Roy draws
between smallness and subalternity through Subaltern Studies scholar Ranajit Guha’s
essay “The Small Voice of History”: “The conjuncture that Roy’s novel and Guha’s
essay exemplify and help illuminate locates the motors of social, disciplinary, and
epistemological transformation in the inherently or potentially resistant properties of
the oppressed subaltern subject—‘small voice’ and ‘small things’” (370). Yet all these
divergent class- and caste-based accounts elide the crucial ways in which Velutha
relates to and inhabits the natural environment upon which the forces of global capi-
talism in the form of the tourist trade are enacting a form of “slow violence”: the
“obscuring [of] the free-market double standards that allowed Western companies to
operate with violent, fatal impunity in the global South” (Nixon, “Neoliberalism” 446).

he novel reveals the pristine if romanticized landscape to be threatened by global

T capitalism in the form of the tourist industry and of Kerala’s Marxists, whom the
novel presents as selling out to the market. The sites of environmental degradation
exposed by the novel are the river, the “ebb and flow” of which, Divya Anand notices,
“mirrors the destinies of the characters both materially as well as symbolically” (101),
and, on its banks, what the children call “the History House”—a kind of Gothic
repository of Indian history spanning colonial times when it was presided over by

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 Jane Poyner 59

rubber plantation-owner Kari Saipu, “Ayemenem’s own Kurtz” (52)—to the present
of late global capitalism and the transformation of the house into the five-star
Heritage Hotel. The following passage describing the degradation of the river result-
ing from the onset of global tourism exemplifies Roy’s environmentalist critique:

Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile
[. . .].
Both things had happened.
It had shrunk. And she had grown.
Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential
paddy-farmer lobby. The barrage had regulated the inflow of saltwater from the backwaters
that opened into the Arabian Sea. So now they had two harvests a year instead of one. More
rice, for the price of a river.
[. . .]
On warm days the smell of shit lifted off the river and hovered over Ayemenem like a hat.
Further inland, and still across, a five-star hotel chain had bought the Heart of Darkness.
[. . .] The hotel guests were ferried across the backwaters, straight from Cochin. They
arrived by speedboat, opening up a V of foam on the water, leaving behind a rainbow film
of gasoline.
The view from the hotel was beautiful, but here too the water was thick and toxic. No
Swimming signs had been put up in stylish calligraphy. They had built a tall wall to screen
off the slum and prevent it from encroaching on Kari Saipu’s estate. There wasn’t much
they could do about the smell. (124-25)

If, as Anand contends, “the pollution of the river from toxic wastes coincides with the
onset of social learning in its proteges—Rahel and Estha,” then its pollution also
marks the punishment of the social transgressors, Velutha and Ammu, who not only
traverse the river but also all that it comes to signify within the text. As Anand puts it,
“The river serves as a borderline of water, segregating two different social worlds as
well as connecting both the touchable and untouchable worlds. The waters touch
both the terrains serving as an intermediary space devoid of repressive forces.”
Notably, a literal boundary in the form of the wall has been erected around the hotel
to shut down local access to a site representative of “global” trade, at the same time
screening “global” tourists from the less savoury aspects of a landscape that would
feed an exoticizing, “globalizing” imaginary. Whilst Anand describes the inhabitants
of the other side of the river as social “others” “ensconced in the lap of nature” (102)—
in other words, part of nature—for Anand, within the workings of this novel, nature
serves as an expression of culture. Akin to this interpretation is Peter Mortensen’s
description of Velutha as “a boundary-figure, a gatekeeper, who mediates between

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60 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

culture and nature” (192). A scalar reading like the one proposed here needs to work
beyond such boundaries between culture and nature (suggesting as they do a failure
of the imagination) so that human and non-human agency are incorporated within
each other: each produces inscriptions, material and discursive, upon the other.
What we see at work in the Keralan tourist industry is environmental racism: the
“treat[ment of] certain communities as more expendable than others” (Nixon,
“Neoliberalism” 455). Environmental racism goes some way to explain why the
world’s poorest will be worst affected by the immediate and long-term effects of
global warming and environmental degradation: why, for instance, the developing
world has become the dumping ground for the developed world’s toxic waste and why
chemical disasters like Union Carbide in Bhopal are more likely to afflict the “Third
World.” Kerala, as Aarthi Vadde comments, represents a key site in “environmentalism
versus development debates” within India:

It is globally renowned for its beautiful backwaters [. . .] advertised by Kerala’s Department

of Tourism as “God’s own country” [. . .]. Tourist development in the state has been pri-
marily the result of a particular interest group, the hotel industry, benefiting from subsi-
dies, tax exemptions, and credit facilities at low interest rates (Sreekumar and Parayil 530).
Using such incentives, the state government has created several models of public-private
partnerships with [. . .] star hotel conglomerates [. . .], while successfully lobbying against
the central government’s Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules. In 1998, a CRZ report
found tourism to be a top contributor to the destruction of Kerala’s coastal ecosystems.
(523-24)

Yet the paradisiac playground of the rich Roy depicts in The God of Small Things can-
not be fully sanitized, for “there wasn’t much they could do about the smell.” Here,
notions of human and non-human agency are presented as interdependent and
folded into forms of environmental racism.
Recent accounts of subalternity in The God of Small Things incorporate an envi-
ronmentalist critique by identifying a “matrix” (Anand 95) of forms of human and
non-human agency. In his reading of the river, Mortensen charts the failed promises of
postmodern discourse in attending to environmental questions: “the vital connection
to nature that makes humans human” (179). Yet Mortensen not only reinscribes the
boundaries between culture and nature suggestive of Bergthaller’s “failure of the imag-
ination” when he describes Velutha as “gatekeeper,” he also fails to identify the connec-
tions the novel makes between nature and a human agency inscribed by colonial
legacies like globalization when arguing that The God of Small Things “envisions—and
is itself part of—a globalised, deterritorialised world, where national boundaries have

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 Jane Poyner 61

collapsed, where older cultural traditions no longer apply” (187). Mirja Lobnik argues
that the novel grapples with the problem of the “rhetorical treatment of the natural
environment as reservoir of usable elements, as mere resource and commodity, in the
late twentieth century [which] tends to occlude its complex ecologies, its liveliness,
and, above all, its conjunction with subaltern and marginalized human beings” (116,
emph. mine). Lobnik proceeds with a reading of the aural in Roy’s novel, which she
identifies as “the missing link between matter and human perception—that which
expands our connection with the environment” (116). Anand shows how environ-
mental disasters like Bhopal in the developing world highlight “the need to reconfig-
ure the ecological, political, social, and cultural matrix of the present world system”
(95), whilst Vadde reads the novel as one of Roy’s “narratives of connection. [. . .] the
novel strives not only to address several spheres of existence—the biotic, the public,
and the private—but also to develop formal strategies that enable readers to see these
spheres as overlapping” (522-23). Vadde pursues this mode of reading at “the inter-
section of ecocriticism and cosmopolitanism” (523). Contributing to these debates,
I argue that the novel refracts human agency through the non-human agency of
which it is always already an integral part (humans as part of nature) and that it does
so by focusing on two forms of “pollution”: on the mythologies of pollution pertain-
ing to caste and on the environmental impact of pollution brought about by “global”
tourism. Our access to this refraction is by interpreting the scale effects the novel
produces.
That scale is central to The God of Small Things is signalled in the text’s central
tropes of “smallness” and “bigness”; Velutha is “the God of Small Things” (220): not
only is he portrayed as representative of Dalits’ “small voices,” but as a child he is also
described as a “little magician,” carving for Ammu the most “intricate toys” from
“dried palm reeds,” “tapioca stems,” and “cashew nuts” (74) (toys as an adult he will
carve for her children). He is also the figurative steward of Kerala’s natural environ-
ment. On the lovers’ fateful encounter on the banks of the River Meenachal, Ammu
dreamily reflects, “the world they stood in was his [. . .] he belonged to it [. . .] it
belonged to him. The water. The mud. The trees. The fish. The stars” (333). The adult
Velutha and Ammu, facing the dire consequences transgression of caste and class
boundaries obtain as they embark on their affair, “instinctively [. . .] stuck to the Small
Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside” (338). They focus on the life of a beetle,
Chappu Thamburan, “fret[ting] over his frailty. His smallness. The adequacy of his
camouflage” (339) to deflect from impending and apparently inevitable disaster. Big
things in the novel are not only those associated with caste (one meaning of the “Love
Laws”), but with other grand narratives like History, Religion, and Politics (as Roy sees

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62 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

it, the corrupting influences of Communism and global capitalism), and universal bio-
social norms like the incest taboo (a second meaning of “Love Laws”). Like “bigness,”
“smallness” is thus not a stable signifier within the text, encompassing notions of sub-
altern agency, the workings of memory (an alternative, resistant narrative form to his-
tory), represented, for example, in the girl twin Rahel’s toy wristwatch, the face of
which, figuratively frozen in time, permanently announces “ten to two” (127), and the
lush but threatened Keralan backwaters the novel describes. In an interview, Roy cap-
tures The God of Small Things’ scale effects when she says that it “is a book which con-
nects the very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it’s the dent that a baby spider
makes on the surface of water in a pond or the quality of moonlight on a river or how
history and politics intrude into your life, your house, your bedroom, your bed, into the
most intimate relationships between people” (Roy and Barsamian 11).
The association made between nature and subalternity in these descriptions of
Velutha can be construed as highly dubious: discourses of the Noble Savage and exoti-
cism obtain, as critics have noted.2 Graham Huggan goes so far as to claim that the
novel unashamedly cashes in on Roy’s own very marketable “exotic” (77) looks, with
Roy projecting herself as “the god of small things.” The novel bears a part-“self-
referential title: it intimates a magical discovery also hinted at in its cover, where the
tiny but brilliant lotus-flower appears miraculously among the choking weeds” (76-
77). Velutha’s taut stomach, sculpted by manual labour, is likened in the novel to “the
divisions on a slab of chocolate” (175). Yet we might hypothesize that, by depicting his
body as metaphorically edible, Roy anticipates the marketability of the text/Velutha.
An alternative interpretation of this romanticized, symbolically resonant imagery is
that it bridges our failure of imagination, ascribing to Velutha a kind of “cosmic role”
(Clark, Ecocriticism 4) only plausible in imaginative literature.
Velutha’s agency is crystallized between two kinds of footprint: firstly, footprints
signifying perceived human pollution (associated with human agency), especially that
of Dalits, who are described as “sweeping away their footprints”; and, secondly, foot-
prints signifying environmental pollution (associated with non-human agency): the
“carbon footprint,” in common parlance, and humans’ impact on the natural envi-
ronment. Within this schema, the line repeatedly invoked in varying forms during the
narrative—“he left no footprints in sand” (216, 218, 265, 290)—and anticipated in
Ammu’s “afternoon-mare” (216-17)—“He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in
water, no image in mirrors” (265)—can be read across centrifugal scales, from indi-
vidual to national to “global.”
To make this analysis, I turn to Clark’s ecocritical work on “scale.” Clark deploys
“scale” in the sense of both time and space: “global” refers to the planet but also to nat-

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 Jane Poyner 63

ural history; “national” could constitute national or global in its common usage—a
world peopled by interconnected communities (the so-called “global village”) across
a more condensed human history. Clark’s ecocriticism is situated at the conjunction
of the humanities, a reading practice, and environmental science to reconsider the
Anthropocene through literary readings. In The God of Small Things, Velutha is both
the oppressed subaltern and the prototypical eco-warrior of a new planetary order; in
fact, these two apparently distinct subject positions are indelibly intertwined. (Roy’s
romanticized belief in such popularized “warriors” is suggested in her writings on the
Sardar Sarovar Dam project, which has produced a “war” that is not “an exclusively
Indian war. It’s a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All
sorts of warriors from all over the world [. . .] will be honoured and welcomed” [Cost
51-52].) In this sense, we cannot afford to prioritize the “global” or planetary scale of
reading as critics have taken Clark to mean, but must conjoin it with the national scale
too. Each contributes to producing the other, and vice versa.
In conversation with two such critics, Michael Tavel Clarke and Faye Halpern,
Clark addresses his supposed “rejection of human agency” or “abdication of human
agency” on the global scale (14) by introducing the concept of the “carbon footprint.”
He describes how

This useful concept relates to the issue of an individual’s environmental impact on the
atmosphere or, crudely speaking, the atmospheric pollution for which he or she could
notionally be held responsible. However—and this is where scale effects come in—the size
of anyone’s carbon footprint could be of no interest or significance in itself. [. . .] Scale
effects are something beyond my individual horizon, perception, or even calculation. The
effect of my individual action in relation to my carbon footprint is caught up in this series
in which each impact is of significance only through its opaque relation to the others, now
and in the future. (14-15, emph. Clark’s)

So individual carbon footprints are only significant when considered en masse: we all
have our part to play in reducing pollution, but doing so individually will make no
impact worth mentioning on the environment. Yet Clark does not sufficiently account
for the interconnectedness of the national and the global scales: the former plays a
part in producing the latter (humans as geological agents), but the resulting effects of
this dynamic are realized in their uneven distribution. In other words, they constitute
forms of environmental racism because whilst the poorest communities in the world,
typically postcolonial subjects, are typically worst hit by the impact of environmental
change and disaster, they are also likely to produce smaller “footprints” than their
richer, typically Western, counterparts.

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64 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

Roy’s political essays reveal what Nixon calls her “obsession with the politics of
scale” and “the politics of visibility,” by which he means a politics of agency and self-
determinism (Slow 161). In “Greater Common Good,” for instance, Roy champions
grassroots politics (a politics of “smallness”) when she writes that, “For the people of
the [Narmada] valley, the fact that the stakes were raised to this degree has meant that
their most effective weapon—specific facts about specific issues in this specific valley—
has been blunted by the debate on the big issues [like] [. . .] the Government’s [. . .]
treatment of displaced peoples” (Cost 10, emph. Roy’s). Nixon documents Roy’s advo-
cacy of “unimagined communities” excluded from the national imaginary carved by
newly postcolonial nationalist governments such as India’s. Gamal Abdel Nasser,
Jawaharlal Nehru, and Kwame Nkrumah, all postcolonial nationalist leaders, were
“seduced by the symbolism” of the megadam (Nixon, Slow 166). In the episode in The
God of Small Things depicting the polluting hotel business, like the “untouchables”
who are perceived to pollute those with whom they come into contact, the poorest
communities are quarantined from the rich (tourists) so as to avoid contaminating
them, both metaphorically and literally (with shit).
Besides her participation in the Save the Narmada Movement of which she writes
in “Greater Common Good,” Roy has frequently targeted the nuclear arms race in India
and Pakistan. In “The End of Imagination” (Cost) and interviews in The Chequebook she
documents the near-calamitous events of May 1998, when India and Pakistan were on
the brink of nuclear war following India’s nuclear testing. The common ground of her
interest in these two distinct causes is, in Nixon’s words, “the tyranny of scale and the
politics of violent invisibility” (Slow 160). As Nixon puts it, “Roy’s radical, controver-
sial move was to view the Indian government’s nuclear and hydrological hubris as two
versions of a single mindset rather than divide them into a purely malign [i.e., nuclear
arms] and a purely benign [i.e., dam building] spectacle of modernity.” Nixon goes on
to argue in his space-time-centred study that the “conjoining of her antinuclear and
antimegadam polemics suggests this explicit pairing can help shift our perspective on
what qualifies as modernity” (159). As William Finnegan puts it, “It is simplistic, even
misleading, to talk about whole nations as winners or losers under the current glob-
alization regime, since there are, in every country, significant groups of both winners
and losers” (qtd. in Slow 159).
Clark argues that scale “enables a calibrated and useful extrapolation between
dimensions of space or time” that typically “implies a calculable [. . .] smooth zoom-
ing out or in” (“Scale” 148). Such “smoothness,” he argues, cannot readily be imposed
for within such a map “its scale includes the whole earth but when it comes to relat-
ing the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history,

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 Jane Poyner 65

culture, literature, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless” (148-49). So whilst
in one part of the world campaigners may be pressing for environmental reform, the
failure to act on the same measures elsewhere might undermine the campaign’s pos-
itive effects. An obvious example would be the West’s dumping of toxic waste in
poorer “Third World” countries whilst agitating for a cleaner environment through
institutions like the G8. Clark warns of “fantasies of agency” (151), by which he means
a “derangement of scale” whereby, for instance, the individual is called upon to “save
the planet” (158) by “buying a slightly less destructive make of car” (151) or by recy-
cling plastic carrier bags. The “carbon footprint,” he points out, “alters the distinctions
of public and private built into the foundations of the modern liberal state.” On the
literary-cultural level, one is left with the sense that “most given thought about liter-
ature and culture has been taking place on the wrong scale” (152).
Where Nixon’s path-breaking study focuses on Roy’s political essays—the book
briefly mentions the interlude in The God of Small Things when Estha “strolls ‘along
the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank
loans’” (qtd. in Slow 160)—Clark’s invective on “scale” offers a mode of literary read-
ing, including a close reading of Raymond Carver’s short story “Elephant” (1988),
which he describes as a “comic monologue consisting of the complaints and then
gradual acceptance of a male blue-collar worker who is continually being pestered for
money by hard-pressed relatives in other parts of the country” (“Scale” 156). A pre-
liminary environmentalist reading of the story might identify an “environmental alle-
gory” about “unpaid debt and unearned support” that ultimately is confirmed in the
image of the “unpaid for car” (157). But an alternative reading taking account of the
broader sweep of scale would move beyond the first and second normative scales of
reading—namely, the “personal” (familial) scale, which in turn maps onto the
“national” scale and which gives readings such as “‘Carver’s figures dramatize and
indirectly comment upon the problems besetting American culture, particularly
lower-class culture, today’” (Kirk Nesset qtd. in “Scale” 158). The third scale, instead
of reflecting issues like class, gender, materialism, and so on, would take account of
“the whole earth and its inhabitants,” “placing ‘Elephant’ in the middle of a, let us say,
six hundred year time frame” (158). This “global” reading addresses the environmen-
tally monumental consequences of the “industrial exploitation of fossil fuels” (159),
which in Carver is figured in motifs of cars and driving. This scrambles normative
reading practices so that “Plots, characters, setting and trivia that seemed normal and
harmless on the personal or national scale reappear as destructive doubles of them-
selves on the third scale” (161). Clark recognizes that, on the third, global scale, the
notion that persons become physical things “is evidently problematic” (163) (a form

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66 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

of “green moralism” [162]). Yet, he concludes, one scale should not, effectively, cancel
out another but should enrich and derange our reading of a text through multiple,
seemingly conflicting levels simultaneously. So according to the three readings of
“Elephant,” the story can be interpreted as “(1) a wry anecdote of personal heroism,
(2) a protest against social exclusion, and (3) a confrontation with the entrapment of
human actions and decisions with a disastrous impersonal dynamic they do not com-
prehend, as well as the various containments of inherited modes of thinking” (163).

et us return to the question of Velutha’s agency, constellated in the line “He left no
L footprints”: what happens to questions of agency when Clark’s three interpretative
scales are applied? A reading of Scale 2 (the national) via Scale 1 (the personal) char-
acterizes standard analyses of subaltern agency within the novel; indeed, Scale 1 maps
onto Scale 2 so that, for instance, Velutha’s private predicament within the Ipe house-
hold maps onto the predicament of Dalits or subalterns more generally. On the
national scale (Scale 2), Velutha’s lack of footprints, of his not disturbing the water or
casting an image in a mirror (figuratively identity-bearing), connote Dalits’ lack of
political agency. According to such a reading, though profoundly disturbing the fam-
ily’s equilibrium, resisting being interpellated as Paravan and expressing himself
through his political activism, Velutha is rendered symbolically voiceless, as Ahmad
claims. Swept footprints signify a loss of agency.
But to take account of the third, “global” scale manifests a very different notion
of agency: Velutha leaves no mark on the natural environment in which he resides, liv-
ing symbiotically alongside it without contributing to the environmental degradation
of which the Keralan tourist industry is guilty. “Footprint” translates within this
“global” scale to the “carbon footprint” of environmental rhetoric. Although Clark
warns of environmentalist “fantasies of agency,” giving the carbon footprint as one
such example, since here we are dealing with a work of imaginative literature in which
symbolism necessarily produces an excess of meaning, we should understand that
Velutha stands for environmental justice. What is more, this excess bridges the failure
of imagination characterizing the postcolonial environmentalist debate. Similarly,
within the global scale, Velutha’s lack of reflection in the mirror suggests an absence
of narcissism and, consequently, of an anthropocentric worldview. The novel clearly
signals this longer, wider scale of reading in its references to the Earth Goddess, whom
Chacko describes to the twins when he is trying to explain the question of historical
perspective: “he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the
earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—was a forty-six-year-old
woman [. . .]. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become

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 Jane Poyner 67

what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was
eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. [. . .]
‘The whole of civilization as we know it [. . .] began only two hours ago in the Earth
Woman’s life’” (52-53, emph. Roy’s). The environmentalism the novel projects is
embedded within a pedagogical exercise—Chacko gives the children an important
lesson about the relationship between human history (Chacko’s pseudo-Marxist his-
tory of oppressor and oppressed) and natural history—suggesting the novel itself is a
lesson in reading scale effects.
Such scalar readings of The God of Small Things facilitate increasingly expansive
interpretations of “footprints,” in turn testing the limits of our imaginative capacity
as readers. For instance, Estha’s “beloved” dog Khubchand leaves urine-soaked foot-
prints across the floor when he “decided to stage a miserable, long drawn-out death,
[and] Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as though his own life somehow
depended on it”: “he would look up at Estha with opaque green eyes that stood in his
grizzled skull like scummy pools and weave his way back to his damp cushion, leav-
ing wet footprints on the floor.” Whilst at first glance a reading of agency here might
seem improbable in the context of a world-weary, decrepit dog, the passage then shifts
metaphorical tenor to give: “As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see
the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And
once a bird that flew across. To Estha—steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on
memories of a broken man—the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender
had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an
old dog’s balls” (12). In a moment of transspecies reciprocity, caught in Khubchand’s
glance, Estha can see the sky reflected in the animal’s eyes. The moment is profoundly
poignant for a traumatized child “steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on
memories of a broken man [Velutha],” and therapeutically connects the “history” of
Velutha’s (human) tragedy to the vaster scales of natural history and the universe
(“the sky beyond”), producing a deeply utopic moment in the text, captured by the
word “miracle.” Khubchand exists within nature: his footprints are soiled but are not
environmentally polluting.
Clark argues that, whilst the three scales should be read simultaneously, they are
largely conflictual. Yet the “national” concerns of subaltern agency, including the ways
in which it is circumscribed by global capitalism, suggest the three scales are more
integral than Clark acknowledges. One problem with producing three distinct rather
than enmeshed scales is that human agency risks being unyoked from environmental
disaster, thus weakening important questions of responsibility. Rather than produc-
ing a set of concurrent if conflictual readings, Roy’s novel initiates embedded ones.

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68 Mosaic 51/3 (September 2018)

Whilst as subaltern Velutha is victim of caste and environmental racism, his “per-
sonal” expressions of agency through political activism and stewardship of the river
speak to the stories, for instance, of the Dalit and Adivasi protesters against the Sardar
Sarovar dam, which became the focal point of Indian environmentalist social justice
movements (Roy describes the dam as “the big one”; the “one in which the battle-lines
were clearly drawn” [Cost 8]). In a utopic gesture in “Greater Common Good,” Roy
emphasizes such a connection between human marginality and environmental
agency: “Who knows [. . .] what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dis-
mantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big
countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the
Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying
herself for us” (Cost 12). Velutha’s lack of footprints situate him symbolically within
and between these three scales, producing complex and cross-referential notions of
agency that reflect Roy’s belief in the efficacy of marginalized voices against the “big”
voices of corporate and state power that hasten environmental damage.

NOTES
1/ Paravans are a subdivision of Dalits.
2/ See Padmini Mongia (104-07) and Noy Thrupkaew.

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JANE POYNER is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Exeter. She researches Apartheid and
post-Apartheid South African and world and postcolonial literatures and also teaches in these areas.
She has published three books on J.M. Coetzee and is currently working on a book on transitional
post-Apartheid fiction.

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