Arundhati Roy's Treatment on Indian Reality in the God of small things

Abstract

“The truth of art signifies its power to imaginatively inscribe hithero unknown dimensions of reality” (Surendra Narayan jha, Qtd in Indian Women Novelists in English 2001:145) Arundhati Roy’s the God of small Things unfolds a unique dimension of reality in general, and Indian reality in particular with ‘extraordinary linguistic inventiveness’ (the booker citation). Imbued with poetry, her narrative style dismisses the monopoly of ‘established reality’ to define what is real-in a way. Roy has attempted to de-define reality, like a few other promising Indians writing in English today. Centering on an engaging tale of a cross-caste doomed love between a paravan boy (untouchable) and Syrian Christian girl, the novel develops a number of themes to present Indian reality from different perspectives. Apart from the dominant language discourse, two other discourses prove to be central to the novel-1 socio-cultural discourse and 2 political discourses. This paper shows how the above-mentioned discourse have been infused into the fabric of the novel to offer a successful rending of Indian reality. The chapter “The Plight of the Untouchables” demonstrates how a rigid caste-structure plays havoc with innumerable innocent lives. The transgressors, who dare break the laws of love ( the laws that lay down who should be loved and how and how much), are treated cruelly. The next chapter ‘women’s place in a patriarchal society’ manifests how women are relegated to the status of mere ‘females’ as opposed to ‘male’ (Beauvoir, qtd in The Norton Anthology of the theory and criticism, 2001:2014. Inhuman treatment of women is inbuilt into the standards of behavior in a patriarchal society.