Jonathan Collins

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things As

Postmodern Novel
In 1939, Irish novelist and journalist Flann O’Brien wrote what is considered
by many to be one of the first works of postmodern fiction. In his debut novel, At Swim-
Two-Birds O’Brien wrote:

“A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the
prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”
(O'Brien 2001: 9)

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is also a book with several beginnings. The
many beginnings are finely interwoven with the novels temporal fragmentation, that is,
its constant shifting in time and space. One of the story’s several beginnings takes place
in Ayemenem, Southern India, in the month of May and quickly jumps forward to the
next month to Rahel’s return and to her brother Estha’s ‘re-return’. After this, we see
another beginning and the narrative slides to twenty-three years in the past, to the fateful
two-weeks prior to the death of their English cousin, which for the narrator is “in a
purely practical sense […] correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to
Ayemenem” (Roy 2009: 28). These are just a few of the novel’s beginnings. Another
beginning is the story of Pappachi’s and his moth. His narrative exposes the family’s
anglophile tendencies and modern India’s juxtaposition of cultures, of postcolonial
modernity and traditional life and these time shifts, between the past and present, give
the reader this sense of imbalance; an imbalance from which modern India also suffers.

Critic Madhu Benoit states that time in the novel can be divided into
chronological (the timeline of the narrative) and a-chronological (the time relating to
history within the novel’s context, e.g. the History House, the caste system, religion,
the Love Laws etc.) (Benoit 1999: 99). Benoit argues that Roy uses this “fragmentation
of chronological time” to highlight the importance of a-chronological time (1999: 105).
Like At Swim-Two-Birds, its many openings eventually lead to its many endings.
However, The God of Small Things does not have a definite end, it leaves room for the
reader to interpret and end the novel as they so wish. Jon Simmons writes that the novel
finishes in the middle of the story, but that there is no ending just an end to the narration
of events. (as cited in Benoit 1999: 104)

Another prominent feature of postmodern literature is magic realism. Magic

realism is a style that has been most widely adopted by Latin American authors
including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. Roy’s fellow Indian writer,
Salman Rushdie also relies heavily on this style. Arundhati Roy, much to her annoyance
is among a group of writers often referred to as Midnight’s Grandchildren. This of
course is a reference to Rushdie and his seminal work of postmodern fiction, Midnight’s
Children. According to Pankaj Mishra this generation of writers, unlike Rushdie have

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begun moving away from the style of magic realism (as cited in Mzali 2003: 88). Magic
realism, while not a driving force in The God of Small Things does seem to be present.
It could be argued that the previously mentioned temporal fragmentation hints at magic
realism. However, the most obvious use of the style is in the twin’s telepathy and their
interconnectedness. One always knew when the other was near, they laughed at each
others funny dreams, Rahel knew what the Orangedrink Lemondrink man did to her
brother, and “she remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches –Estha’s sandwiches,
that Estha ate –on the Madras Mail to Madras” (Roy 2009: 7). Rahel also noticed that
her cousin, Sophie Mol was awake for her own funeral and performed a “secret
cartwheel in her coffin” (Roy 2009: 9). This could, however, be put down to a post-
traumatic stress induced hallucination due to the fact that they had recently witnessed
a man being beaten to death. Alex Tickell maintains that if we examine the description
of the funeral in more depth Rahel translates the fact that Sophie Mol died ‘because she
couldn’t breath’ into ‘a claustrophobic living burial’ (Tickell 2007: 57). However some
critics argue that putting Roy’s work in this genre can be misrepresentative of her style
and that the seemingly supernatural abilities of the twins can be put down to a child’s
overactive imagination. In fact Elleke Boehmer uses the phrase “extravagant realism”
which may suit Roy’s style more than the term magic realism (Boehmer 2000: 66).

In Roy’s work, like in most postmodern, postcolonial fiction intertextuality

plays an important role. There are numerous allusions to other literary works, religious
texts, history, folklore, fairy tales, cinema, pop culture, etc. Intertextuality in
postcolonial fiction is particularly important because it gives a sense of
interconnectedness and emphasises the clash between the culture of the coloniser and
the colonised. In The God of Small Things Roy uses many references to 1960s British
culture, which is juxtaposed with the more “backward”, behind the times, India that
seems to be stuck in the 50s. At the airport in Cochin, Sophie Mol arrives the
fashionable English cousin with her go-go bag and “she walked down the runway, the
smell of London in her hair” (Roy 2009: 106). Automatically we see this juxtaposition
of decades, of fashionable and old-fashioned; Sophie Mol’s 1960s go-go bag versus
Estha’s 1950s Elvis puff. Baby Kochamma trying to seem more up to date embarrasses
Estha: “Elvis Presley […] I’m afraid we’re a little behind the times here” (2009: 109).
With this reference to Estha’s hair another intertextual reference is brought to mind.
Like Estha, several references are made to Rahel’s hair and her Love-in-Tokyo hair clip.
Roy explains that a Love-in-Tokyo is a type of hair accessory that comprises two beads
on a rubber band. Like the Love-in-Tokyo beads, Rahel and Estha are physically
separate but with a single identity. Interestingly, Love in Tokyo is also the name of a
1960s Indian Bollywood film also with the theme of forbidden love.

One of the most obvious and most important intertextual references is that of
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the novel Roy makes several uses of the
metaphor ‘heart of darkness’. She says “in Ayemenem, in the heart of darkness, I talk
not about the white man, but about the darkness, about what the darkness is about” (as
cited in Liddle 2013: 1). What is not clear is if this refers to the darkness of the Indian

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caste system or to the subjugation of Indians by their colonisers, the British. Heart of
Darkness also appears in reference to Kari Saipu and the ‘History House’, the
Englishman that went native and committed suicide after a love affair with a boy ended
badly. He is referred to as “Ayemenem’s own Kurtz” which is an explicit reference to
a central character in Conrad’s novella, who also ‘went native’ and established himself
as a demi-god among a primitive tribe in the Congo (Conrad 2008). In the novel, Saipu
is the former occupant of the History House, the location where the novel’s most
important events take place. It is the site where Ammu and Velutha first make love and
subsequently the site where Velutha was murdered. In the novel, Saipu is a symbol of
sexual nonconformity and emphasises Ammu and Velutha’s transgression and their
forbidden cross-caste sexual relationship. According to critic Sooyoung Chon, Kari
Saipu’s and his suicide can be seen as a metaphor for “British imperialist desire which
destroyed itself when it lost India but is still haunting India” (Chon 2002: 4). It may be
interesting to note that Kari Saipu is in fact based on a real person: Alfred G. Baker,
the son of an English missionary who went to live in Kerala in the 19 th century. The
name Kari Saipu may be a distortion of Baker Sahib (Kerala Tourism 2013:)

Other interesting intertextual references include The Great Gatsby as a

reference to inherited wealth. Also Napoleon and his famous saying “you can't make
an omelette without breaking eggs” is alluded to in the chapter 1: “The old omelette
and eggs thing” (Roy 2009: 15). This of course is a reference to Colonel Pillai’s
involvement in the death of Velutha. One of the most interesting intertextual references
in the novel is Mammachi’s letter to the Regional Manager of the Bombay based pickle
factory, Padma Pickles for advice on pickling mangoes (2009: 125). Padma Pickles is
a reference to the pickle factory in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and it seems
that Roy is paying homage to India’s foremost postmodern author. It may also be a
reference to Rushdie’s concept of the Chutnification of history, which is the blending
and mixing of cultures, ideas, languages etc. (Rushdie 2006: 471).

As mentioned in a previous section, time in the novel can be divided into

chronological and a-chronological. The same can be done with Roy’s approach to
history in the novel. On one hand you have the “official” history and on the other the
“unofficial. Both histories intertwine and become, what is known in postmodern literary
criticism as, historiographical metafiction. History and politics are inextricably linked
to the narrative in the novel. 1969 in India was a turbulent period and protests against
the caste system were commonplace. In Kerala, the communist Naxalites were unhappy
with the treatment of the Paravans, otherwise known as ‘untouchables’. We get our
first glimpse of this social unrest in Chapter 2 when the family comes across a Naxalite
rally on their way to Cochin. In the midst of the protest the Rahel catches sight of
Velutha. Velutha and his father Vellya Paapen are converted Christian untouchables
and reflect the many former Hindus that converted to Syrian Christian, wrongly
believing that it would remove their caste status. Once they were converted they were
officially casteless, but the stigma of untouchability stayed with them (Patchay 2001:
149). Velutha, as far as history is concerned is one of the most important characters in

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the story. He embodies thousands of years of oppression by higher castes, by religion

(Christian and Hindu alike), the authorities etc. His and Ammu’s sexual transgression
represents a yearning for a casteless society and Velutha’s father represents the
resistance to this ideal, not just by the upper castes but also by “old world Paravans”
like himself who believe that these sort of transgressions disrupt the natural order of
things (Roy 2009: 58). This is emphasised in chapter 2, when Vellya Paapen discovers
his son’s transgression “He offered to kill his son with his own bare hands” (Roy 2009:
59). This also emphasises the level of brainwashing that thousands of years of
oppression can induce. Velutha’s father embodies a nation of people who have been
assured for so long that they are inferior and have thus come to believe it.

The language used by Roy is at times whimsical and her playfulness with
language is another literary device in postmodern fiction. There are several incidents in
the book where she writes expressions phonetically, uses Malayalam words in English,
uses nonstandard capitalisation, punctuation and spelling and invents new words and
expressions. The characters in The God of Small Things are multilingual. Their native
language is Malayalam and for them English will always stand second as the language
of their former masters. This is most evident when characters use Malayalam
expressions intercalated in English sentences. One of the first examples in the book is
in chapter 1 in the police station when Inspector Thomas Mathew informs Ammu “that
the Kottayam Police didn’t take statements from veshyas” (Roy 2009: 10) . It is not
until chapter 7 that we find out the meaning of veshya, however it is easy to work out
it’s meaning from the context in which it is used.

Even though the narrator in the book is omniscient, we often see the world as if
witnessed by a child. This is especially true as far as language is concerned. Expressions
like Orangedrink Lemondrink man and Locusts Stand I stand to emphasise this point.
The latter, Locusts Stand I, is a Latin expression distorted by the memory of a small
child and refers to the legal term locus standi, which translates literally as “place of
standing”. This of course refers to Ammu and the fact that she had no legal standing as
a woman (and more importantly a divorced women) and had no legal claim to any
property including the pickle factory “Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist
society” (Roy 2009: 45). The language employed by Roy is also representative of a
colonised society suffering from postcolonial cultural hybridity. In any postcolonial
country the language will become a hybridisation of native and non-native languages
and in The God of Small Things “the reader is shown what it is like to have English
imposed” (Reyes Torres 2011: 196).

In this final section I will examine briefly a couple of instances of irony and
black humour, both features of the postmodern novel, as employed by Roy. In many
ways the character of Pappachi is quite comical and clownish. His life is full of dark
humour and bitter irony. The single greatest tragedy in his life was not having a moth
he discovered bear his name. According to Anna Clarke “the enormity of ‘tragedy’
juxtaposed with the seeming insignificance of a small insect creates an ironic effect”

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(as cited in Tickell 2007: 113). Pappachi always strove to be seen as an English
gentleman due to his position as Imperial Entomologist, however, according to his son,
Chacko, he was “an incurable British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in
Hindi meant shit wiper. Chacko said the correct word for people like Pappachi was
Anglophile” (Roy 2009: 41). For Roy, Pappachi represents a misogynistic society and
she is clearly using his character to undermine and depreciate this male dominated
chauvinistic world.

Whereas I have not covered everything that makes the novel a work of
postmodern fiction I do believe I have illustrated the most obvious markers of a
postmodern book: fractured temporality, intertextual references, magic realism,
linguistic whimsicality and playfulness, black comedy and irony.

To sum up, Roy’s novel The God of Small Things as a postmodern, postcolonial
novel works on many levels and can be read in so many different ways. It
simultaneously catapulted Roy into fame and infamy and has caused much controversy
in the Indian sub-continent and beyond and has earned its author death threats and,
indirectly, time in prison. It’s unpredictable, fractured temporality, nonconformity and
playful idioms are just a few of the subversive devices it uses to undermine both Indian
and British colonial society making it one of the most important works of postcolonial
Indian fiction since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It is to date Arundhati
Roy’s only work of fiction. She does, however, continue writing as an activist for Indian
civil rights and as an advocate for the treatment of women in Indian society. Reading
The God of Small Things it is easy to see where she comes from and many of the
happenings in the book are mirror images of modern Indian society with both negative
and positive aspects. While the story is on the whole a tragedy, it does end on a feeling
of hope and tries to break down the walls formed by the caste system and ends with the
word ‘tomorrow’ in both English and Malayalam.

Works Cited:

Primary Sources:
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London: The Floating Press, 2008

O'Brien, Flann, At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Penguin Classics, 2001)

Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things (London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.,
2009)

Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children, 25th Anniversary edition, (Random House

Trade Paperbacks, 2006)

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Secondary Sources:
Benoit, Madhu, 'Circular Time: A Study of Narrative Techniques in Arundhati Roy's
the God of Small Things', World Literature Written in English, 38 (1999), 98-106

Boehmer, Elleke, 'East is East and South is South: The Cases of Sarojini Naidu and
Arundhati Roy', Women: A Cultural Review, 11 (2000), 61-70

Chon, Sooyoung, 'Arundhati Roy’s Dialogic Engagement with Contemporary Literary

Theories', Journal of English and American Studies, 1 (2002)

Kerala Tourism, Kumarakom, http://www.keralatourism.org/kumarakom/alfred-

george-baker.php, 26/03/2014 (Kerala, India: Kerala Department of Tourism, 2013)

Liddle, Vandita, 'Hybridity, Marginalization and the Politics of Transgression in

Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things', The Criterion: An International Journal in
English, 12 (2013), 1-13

Mzali, Ines, 'Approaching the Real through Magic Realism: Magic Realism in
Contemporary Indian Literature in English' (Master of Arts, Concordia University,
2003)

Patchay, Sheena, 'Pickled Histories, Bottled Stories: Recuperative Narratives in the

God of Small Things', Journal of Literary Studies, 17 (2001), 145-160

Reyes Torres, Agustín, 'Roy's Inglish in the God of Small Things: A Language for
Subversion, Reconciliation and Reassertion', Odisea, 12 (2011), 195-204

Tickell, Alex, Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things: A Routledge Study Guide
(Oxon: Routledge, 2007)