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Text and contexts
The text
Memory and identity
Set in the southern Indian state of Kerala and divided, chronologically, between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the plot of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things pivots around a fated, forbidden relationship between a Syrian-Christian divorcee, Ammu, and a low-caste ‘untouchable’ carpenter, Velutha. Much of the narrative of The God of Small Things (cited hereafter as TGST) is presented from the perspective of Roy’s twinned child-protagonists, Ammu’s children Estha and Rahel, and the decisive events of the novel – the cross-caste affair, the subsequent beating and murder of Velutha by the police, and the death by drowning of the children’s cousin, Sophie Mol – are revealed gradually as the adult twins meet more than twenty years later. Roy’s complex doubled time scheme allows for a meditative, almost obsessive remembrance of these family tragedies, and it is through the close juxtaposition of past and present that Roy is able to develop the novel’s other central concern, the delayed effect of these damaging events on Estha and Rahel, their traumatized return to the family home in the town of Ayemenem and their (incestuous) reconciliation in adulthood.
Like Ammu’s deferred choice of a proper surname for her children, Roy’s novel resists categorization and draws together elements of the fairy tale, psychological drama, pastoral lyric, tragedy and political fable. Roy’s interest in the continuities between childhood and adulthood does, however, point to an important generic template in the Bildungsroman – a type of novel, usually narrated in the first person, in which the central character’s growth from childhood to maturity and their developing self-awareness provide the main framework of the narrative. The enduring resonance of the past in Estha and Rahel’s adult lives and their troubled return to Ayemenem suspends and almost reverses the genre’s conventional progressive pattern, leading some reviewers to describe Roy’s third-person narrative as an ‘anti-Bildungsroman’ in which the main protagonists ‘never properly grow up’.1
In fact, the twins’ ‘arrested development’ means that their story stretches both backwards and forwards: not only into the remembered/repressed past in a pattern of ‘analepsis’ (retrospection or flashback) but also towards its horrifying conclusion, which is anticipated, repeatedly, in a process of ‘prolepsis’ (a ‘flash-forward’ in which future events are anticipated in the narrative ‘present’). Roy succinctly describes the effect of these narrative devices when she states, ‘the structure of the book ambushes the story – by that I mean the novel ends more or less in the middle of the story and it ends with Ammu and Velutha making love and it ends on the word tomorrow’.2 As in the standard Bildungsroman, memory is central to both character development and plot in TGST, but the process of reminiscence is rarely ordered like a conventional narrative, tending instead to be repetitious, digressive and continually triggered by ‘little events, ordinary things’.3 Indeed, this sifting,4 beachcombing return over the ground of memory shapes the structure of TGST as a whole, and the process through which ‘remembered’ small things become ‘the bleached bones of a story’,5 is one of the triumphs of the novel.
Because of its close formal connection to biography and memoir, the Bildungsroman has often been used by postcolonial writers as a means of connecting the political with the individual and allegorizing the struggle for independence and the growth of the newly independent nation in the personal progress of a central protagonist.6 In the 1920s and 1930s the highly popular memoirs of India’s nationalist leaders, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, fulfilled a similar function and seemed, in Nehru’s words, to show how during the struggle against the British ‘our prosaic existence […] developed something of epic greatness in it’.7 For many postcolonial writers and artists, however, the ‘epic’ experience of national independence was followed by a growing disillusionment with the tarnished ideals and unfulfilled promises of the independent nation-state. Thus, in contemporary Indian literature we are more likely to encounter ironic or satirical reworkings of the established convention of the national allegory. This is certainly the case in TGST where the tension between ‘big and small things’, and the obvious failure of political groups such as the communists to represent their constituents, serves to undermine the positive association of self and nation so evident in earlier nationalist fictions.
Postcolonial authors have also used the Bildungsroman to explore the problems of retaining roots and preserving a sense of cultural belonging in the aftermath of colonial rule. In TGST, these issues are registered in the uncanny linked consciousness of the twins, Estha and Rahel, who are ‘physically separate, but with joint identities’ (Ch. 1, p. 2) and who seem to embody, in their compound subjectivity, the dislocated or split cultural identity of the colonized.8 In addition, the desire to recapture childhood or to reconcile oneself with a lost homeland has been a rich theme for ‘diasporic’ South-Asian writers, who have been forced to negotiate their sense of identity and ‘translate’ themselves after experiencing personal or familial migration. This is something that we will return to in comparisons between TGST and Salman Rushdie’s writing (see Text and contexts, pp. 46–8), and while Roy is not part of India’s literary diaspora herself, TGST relates numerous journeys and points towards the dislocating effects of migrancy and dispossession in the multiple returns of the story: Ammu’s shameful return after her divorce, Rahel’s return from America, Estha’s ‘re-return’ and the unhappy homecomings of South Indian migrant workers from the gulf states. Haunted, as adults, by a past that cannot be physically returned to, or changed, Estha and Rahel also experience the quintessentially ‘migrant’ predicament of an enduring sense of exile and loss, even as they are reunited in the familiar surroundings of their family home.
In common with other postcolonial novelists, Roy’s sense of her own identity demands an awareness of the continuing, damaging effects of colonial rule. As she explains: ‘Fifty years after independence, India is still struggling with the legacy of colonialism, still flinching from the cultural insult [and …] we’re still caught up in the business of “disproving” the white world’s definition of us.’9 This issue is most evident in her sensitivity to language use and the force of ‘History’ in TGST, and we will see in the following pages that Roy recycles and challenges the linguistic inheritance of British colonialism in various ways. The dense patterns of quotation and literary reference that she weaves through TGST not only reveal the intermixtures and cross-fertilizations of contemporary South-Asian culture but also throw hidden or disturbing aspects of this history into relief. In keeping with her two-way time scheme, Roy does not confine herself to redressing the ‘insults’ of a colonial past, but is also keenly aware of the shadow of an older pre-colonial history. In this sense, ‘the postcolonial’ (as a belated ‘disproving’ critical response to colonialism) is just one aspect of TGST, and the novel also considers the enduring effects of India’s ancient Vedic and Hindu history and traditions, as well as looking forward to its fully industrialized, globally integrated present.10
Melodrama and romance
In some of its European language translations, TGST has appeared with a subtitle defining it as ‘a romance’, and while this is clearly a marketing decision by Roy’s publishers it also highlights another generic feature of her fiction. Much older than the novel, the romance, and popular subgenre variants such as the fairy tale, tend to be non-realist and deal in archetypes or emblematic figures, and, as a story of thwarted love, TGST inherits Indian folk-tale and romance traditions from devotional bhakti literature as well as repeating some conventions of the European ‘tragic’ romance.11 The recent success of another (historical, non-fiction) Indian romance, William Dalrymple’s White Mughals (2002), which deals with a ‘forbidden’ love affair between a colonial official and an Indian princess, suggests that TGST’s popularity may owe something to enduring Western fantasies of India as a setting for interracial or – in this case – intercaste romance. As Saadia Toor points out, transgressive sexuality haunts the novel in the same way as it overshadows some famous English fictions about colonial India such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).12 Forbidden love that breaks religious or social boundaries (albeit between partners who often, ultimately, gain social acceptance) is also a staple of the Indian film industry and, whilst Roy herself is scathing about mainstream cinema in India, TGST can be read as a clever reworking and reinterpretation of this established popular-cultural theme.
Roy’s debt to popular romance is also evident in the more melodramatic aspects of her novel. Indeed, Roy’s moral vision is so uncompromising that complex characters are often presented in terms of their own overshadowing fates, or ‘emblematic’ character traits such as greed or jealousy, something that also echoes the dramatic conventions of kathakali (discussed in more detail on pp. 40–2). These techniques result in a novel that sets up melodramatic situations and relationships but then structures and nuances them in increasingly subtle ways.13 In a process of internal mirroring, TGST includes a number of unhappy sub-romances that counterpoint Ammu and Velutha’s affair. The twins’ great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, is disappointed in her unrequited love for an Irish priest, which is sublimated in the ‘fierce, bitter garden’ she raises, and their uncle Chacko’s undergraduate marriage to an Englishwoman ends in divorce. Ammu herself is haunted by an exploitative marriage to the alcoholic manager of an Assam tea estate, and Rahel too inherits this pattern of doomed cross-cultural love in her marriage to an American architect. Significantly, all these ‘romances’ cross the boundaries of the Syrian-Christian community and threaten its ‘caste’ identity, but none is proscribed as severely as Ammu’s ‘unthinkable’ affair with Velutha.
Romance and sexuality are both overshadowed by death in TGST, either figuratively, as a marital death-in-life (which Mammachi and Ammu, for a time, share), or as the brutal, often symbolic consequence of actual liaisons. In the latter category, Ammu, Velutha and Sophie Mol’s deaths all occur as a darkly ironic, interminable working-out of the biblical warning about the wages of sin.14 The use of heightened melodramatic effect and the thematic proximity of love/desire and death also point towards Gothic ro...
