The God of Small Things

The author of The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy's themes and multi-layered writing style are worth studying as an entry point into thinking about India's social constructs, politics, and cultural diversity, as well as any potential relevance that these may have across time and place.

Fig. 1 - The novel's cover features a lotus design

The God Of Small Things: summary

The novel follows the story of one originally prosperous family in modern-day Kerala, India. The protagonists are fraternal twins, Estha and Rahel. The plot spans continents and three generations. It details the lives of each family member, other related characters, and how their current social and political realities impact their stories.

The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with events from different periods of time intermingling with each other. The narrative also jumps between different perspectives, including those of the twins, their mother Ammu, their uncle Chacko, and their cousin Sophie Mol.

The novel begins with the adult Rahel returning to Ayemenem after being away for many years. She reflects on her childhood and the tragic events that occurred when she was seven years old. The narrative then shifts to the past, when Estha and Rahel are still children.

The arrival of their young cousin, Sophie Mol, from England starts the series of events in the novel. She comes to visit her mother, Ammu, and her grandmother, Mammachi. Sophie and the twins, Rahel and Estha, quickly become friends. They spend their days exploring the town and the river, playing games and sharing secrets.

Ammu, who is a divorced single mother, falls in love with Velutha, a lower-caste Paravan man who works for Chacko. Their relationship is forbidden by society, and when they are caught by Velutha's father, Vellya, Ammu is locked in her room by Mammachi and Baby Kochamma. Estha and Rahel try to run away to the History House, their hideout, with Sophie. However, their boat tips and Sophie drowns.

Baby Kochamma goes to the police to claim that Velutha kidnapped the children and tried to rape Ammu. Velutha is brutally beaten and arrested by the police, dying in jail. Ammu is thrown out of the house, and Estha is made to live with their abusive, alcoholic father Baba.

The twins are separated for 23 years, reuniting in 1993 when Baba 're-returns' him to Ayemenem. Ammu died when the twins were 11, and Rahel has divorced an American.

In the present day, Rahel returns to Kerala to see her family and reconnect with her childhood memories. She and Estha, who has become a reclusive and damaged adult, try to piece together the events that led to Sophie's death and the subsequent tragedies that befell their family. The History House has become a five-star hotel.

The God of Small Things: main characters

The novel focuses on one extended family, the Ipe's, and the characters who surround and engage with them.

Estha

Rahel's female fraternal twin. Much of the narration is told from her perspective as a child in India and an adult woman living in America. After her divorce, she goes back to India when she hears that her twin has returned to their hometown, Ayemenem.

Rahel

Estha's male fraternal twin. After the death of their cousin, Sophie Mol, Rahel is sent to live with his father. He stopped talking as a child and has not spoken since. As children, he and Estha communicated telepathically.

Sophie Mol

The twins' cousin, whose death by drowning is a catalyst for many of the events that engulf the other characters in the novel.

Ammu

Rahel and Estha's mother is considered a secondary protagonist after her twins. She married and then left an abusive alcoholic, Babu. She has an affair with a man of a lower caste, Velutha, and is banished from her own home.

Baby Kochamma

Rahel and Estha's grandaunt. The novel's antagonist. She has a cruel, controlling personality and engineers the accusations against Velutha using Rahel as a pawn.

The God of Small Things: book analysis

Arundhati Roy's debut novel is highly original and multi-layered, making it an ideal text to begin to understand more complex ideas and concepts.

Genre

The God of Small Things features elements of a variety of genres. Often considered a family saga, the novel has political and cultural themes. These themes can be viewed as both specific to one place, Kerala, and potentially relevant to other places and times.

For instance, the creation of 'others' by social convention is a phenomenon that is widely spread beyond the scope of this setting. 'Othering' is a social construct whereby a group defines other groups or individuals as not fitting in with the accepted cultural or political norms.

Generally, the novel is broadly accepted as semi-autobiographical and fictional. The God of Small Things subverts the unspoken societal, religious and political norms referred to as 'love laws', which are 'the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much' (Chapter 8). These 'love laws' are laws dictated by society and vary between cultures. In The God of Small Things, the 'love laws' that are broken include those between different castes, religions, and families.

Movement

Arundhati Roy is considered a postmodern and postcolonial author due to her use of non-linear plots, intertextuality, irony, and focus on political themes.

Postmodernism

Often described as a postmodern novel due to its fragmented plot, multiple viewpoints, and intertextuality, The God of Small Things also makes use of black humour, metafiction, and irony.

These narrative structures and devices are considered part of the Postmodernist movement's reaction against Modernism. The novel's epigraph by John Berger introduces the premise for multiple perspectives as he writes:

Postcolonialism

As it was written in the 1990s by an Indian author making extensive use of neologisms, The God of Small Things has also been classified as a postcolonial novel.¹ Arundhati Roy challenges traditional novel structures such as linear plots, more minimalist styles, standard vocabulary and grammar, and more traditional political themes, which are characteristics associated with postmodernism.

The God of Small Things: themes and narrative structure

The main themes of The God of Small Things are love, caste, family, politics, and social norms in Indian society.

Narrative structure determines how the plot, characters, and themes are presented to the reader. The author breaks many formal conventions in her use of narration and narrator.

Narrative

The God of Small Things does not have a linear narrative and adopts a non-sequential approach. The plot starts at the chronological end and jumps backwards and forwards in time from there. The novel references events as far back as the birth of Baby Kochamma's father in 1869 before documenting the twin's birth in 1962 and running up to early 1969. The main narrative is told in two parts and covers set periods in the present and the past.

Present narrative: 1992

• References characters in India, America, and Canada.

• Themes of divorce, death, relocation, and the separation of the family.

Past narrative: December 1969

• References characters in England and India.

• Themes of relocation, death, politics, caste, facets of love, and family bonds.

Narration

The style of narration used is the third person omniscient.

Although it is easy to assume that Rahel is the narrator as she takes up much of the narrative's focus, the narrator incorporates thoughts and language used by both Estha and Rahel to highlight their bond and childlike viewpoint.

In addition, the narrator makes use of free indirect discourse to get the reader to experience multiple transhistorical viewpoints from the perspective of different characters. This serves to highlight the psychological, situational, and familial links between characters.

Information unknown to other characters is shared with the reader, further indicating the use of a fluid narrator voice.

The God of Small Things: literary devices and quotes

At a narrative level, The God of Small Things uses devices like irony, black humour, parody, and intertextuality to deal with serious subjects in an almost playful way.²

Irony

In Arundhati Roy's text, Navomi Ipe is renamed Baby Kochamma once she is old enough to become an aunt. This nickname endures, even as she becomes more and more elderly. The double meaning in the use of the word 'baby' for an older woman has distinct elements of irony, especially considering her spiteful and controlling nature.

Another instance of irony being used to deal with heavy subjects is the incident related to the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. Ester is deeply affected by his molestation, but Roy ironically describes the event as a small thing:

Intertextuality

The God of Small Things references many other texts and cultural icons. These include The Jungle Book (1894), The Sound of Music (1965), WWF's Hulk Hogan, Julius Caesar (1599), and Ulysses (1922).

As another example of intertextuality, the following quote links the journey in Hansel and Gretel with the journey taken by the twins to the History House:

The God of Small Things: linguistic devices

In a review of The God of Small Things, the novelist John Updike comments:

Similar to James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake (1939) and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange (1962), Arundhati Roy creates her own style and language by using a variety of unconventional formal language elements.

At a sentence level, her prose breaks the traditional rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Capitalisations are added where none should exist, and neologisms are created to precisely convey a specific meaning, inference, or rhythm. The novel is also full of anagrams, puns, and palindromes.

Neologisms

Many of the words used in the text are made up, which makes them neologisms. This device is multipurpose and subverts the English language to create meaning that is specific to a particular time, place, and people. The resulting neologisms in the novel that create connotations and implications not available in existing words include the following:

Repetition

Repetition is a sound-based linguistic device used to create rhythm, intensity, and tone, and it is often used in The God of Small Things.³

Can you see and hear how the repetition of the word 'past' in the quote below creates a certain rhythm and reinforces the idea of a progressive journey?

¹ Vinay Dharwadker. Great World Texts Program of the Center for the Humanities. University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2012–13.

² A. Hariharasudan & P. Thavabalan. Narrativity in Postmodern Text: A Study of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education. 2018

³ G. Anburaj, Hrishikesh Bharadwaj C & Anshu Laur. Linguistic Experiment in Arundhati Roy's: The God of Small Things. VIT University. 1999.