ARUNDHATI ROY's The God of Small Things and the Arrested Development of Childhood

This episode will focus on Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and how it depicts the arrested development of childhood. The novel tells the story of the Ipe family in the town of Ayemenem in Kerala, India. The story is related predominantly from the perspective of Rahel and her fraternal twin brother Estha and interlaces two time frames. The first unfolds during the course of two fateful weeks in 1969 when the twins are seven-year-olds and their family is visited for Christmas by Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma, their cousin and her mother from London. Sophie Mol drowns in a storm whilst accompanying the twins to the History House across the swollen Meenachal river close to their house. The second timeframe takes place over a few hours some twenty-three years later, when Rahel returns from a failed marriage in America to be reunited with her twin brother, who she hears has been re-Returned after being sent away to live with his estranged father following the tragic events of the earlier timeframe. The series of incidents that lead to Sophie Mol’s death coincide in the earlier time frame with the police beating to death Velutha, the untouchable lover of Ammu, the twins’ mother. Because the children had also grown to love Velutha his death affects them badly. In the chaotic aftermath of their cousin’s death, Estha is tricked by his grand aunt Baby Kochamma into answering yes to a seemingly innocuous question posed to him by a policeman at the Kottayam station where the badly beaten Velutha is being detained. It turns out Estha has answered yes to the question of whether they had been abducted by Velutha. It is Baby Kochamma’s accusation that Velutha raped Ammu that had been used earlier by the touchable policemen as an excuse to beat Velutha mercilessly at the History House, where the twins themselves had been hiding after their boat capsized and they lost Sophie Mol. As a consequence of all these unhappy events, Estha suffers unspeakable pangs of guilt for the rest of his days, while Rahel, in complete emotional identification with her dizygotic twin brother, is voided of all motivation and is instead filled with a numbing sense of chaos. We will see how the twins remain trapped in childhood even as adults, and how the novel enacts their sense of abiding innocence through the play with language, which applies both to the represented world of the twins themselves as well as in the discourse of the third-person narrator.
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Suggested Reading
- Lissa Paul’s “Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows about Children’s Literature,” Signal 54 (September 1987).
- Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, (London: Continuum, 2004).
- Catherine Lanone, “Seeing the Wolrd Through Red-Coloured Glasses: Desire and Death in The God of Small Things,” in Jean-Pierre Durix and Caroline Durix, eds. Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, (Paris: Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002), 125-144.
- Alex Tickell, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Routledge Study Guide (London: Routledge, 2007).
- Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas, The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy, (Delhi: MLBD, 2000).

[@anuragkumar1015]

Loved your review. What's more interesting is the story of Arundhati Roy's life itself after she won the Booker prize. She wrote her next fiction after 20 years.
From being arrested for protesting against the destruction of the forests in India to fighting for the oppressed and downtrodden, her life has come a full circle.

[@happygucci5094]

I fell in love with her use of language. It was so rich, lush suffused in thick meaning.
It had the immediate effect that Toni Morrison's prose has.

[@gladysagyeiwaadenkyi-manie3691]

Thanks Prof.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

You are most welcome, Agyeiwaa!

[@marybodomo2453]

Lucky me to be watching this just 14mins after it's posted. I read this book years ago, and only remember the part where the policeman taps Ammu's breasts " as though he was choosing mangoes from a basket', alluding to the theme of objectification of women in the book. Wow, l never thought of all these layers. Will definitely listen to it again. Good job my own Prof.🥰

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Thanks, Mary. It is a very complex novel. I have a chapter on it in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, my book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2021. Hopefully, you will get a chance to read the full range of my ideas from there.