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Amanda Ayers

Dr. Cameron Crawford

Women Writers in World Literature

12 December 2018

Happiness as Post-Colonial Rebellion in ​The God of Small Things

The language politics of postcolonial India provide a complex system of controlling who

speaks, how they speak, and what words they use. Historically, postcolonial literature has been

“written in the colonies in the colonizer’s language, English,” which is inherently associated with

power and was once reserved for the educated Indian elite (Trivedi 212). Today an

Indian-English hybrid language aptly named “Inglish” is common throughout India’s middle

class. Many Indian scholars refuse to validate this pseudo-language, demanding instead a purity

of language and a faithfulness to a true Indian dialect. Renowned postcolonial Indian writers like

Kamala Das, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie incorporate Inglish into their works and assert

the validity of the hybrid language of their childhoods. In her 2012 poem entitled “An

Introduction,” Kamala Das embodies the experience of many Inglish speakers:

... The language I speak,

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

All mine, mine alone.

It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human, don't

You see? It voices my joys, my longings… (Das 10-15)

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Inglish gives the colonized access to the colonizer’s language while preserving their own dialects

and linguistic traditions. The resulting language has rich meaning and a dynamic history.

Scholarship has situated Arundhati Roy’s novel ​The God of Small Things​ in the complex

language politics of postcolonial theory. Scholarship analyzing her bold and unconventional

linguistic style abounds. Like a master hypnotist, her vivid imagery and careful repetition draw

the reader into the world and family of young Esthappen and Rahel, the language-conscious

twins at the center of the novel. The children’s propensity to read backwards, to assign

whimsical names to objects and people, and to incorporate Malayalam, their native dialect, has

positioned Roy as one of the many Indian writers forging a path for Indian English in a country

historically divided between languages. Yet, Roy’s illustrious language transcends the fight to

validate Inglish alone and expands into a calculated rebellion against the patriarchal systems that

silence the masses. Obviously, the words she chooses are a vital aspect of this rebellion. The

characters who speak those words and the careful methodology of her storytelling are equally

important. When these three interrelated concepts – the narrative structure, the character’s

voices, and the use of language – are analyzed together, the rebellious intention in Arundhati

Roy’s elevation of disempowered voices is revealed.

In this nonlinear narrative, the reader jumps along the generational timeline of a wealthy

Indian family. The narrative centers around Rahel and her male twin, Esthappen, their mother,

Ammu, and the family they grew up with: Mammachi, their grandmother, Baby Kochamma,

their great aunt, and Chacko, their uncle. Though narrated in the third person, much of the story

is told from Rahel’s point of view as she recounts the complexities and traumas of her childhood

in Ayemenem. The omniscient narrator seamlessly glides between major plot points, circling
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them like a gyre and revealing the impact of the trauma before the audience witnesses the actual

event. Her style is particularly feminine, focusing more on the embodied experiences of her

characters by describing in detail the tastes, colors, sounds, and emotions that expand and

intensify their narratives. Typically relegated to the role of audience, readers are challenged to

develop their sensitivities as empaths, following the characters’ feelings instead of their story

lines. Roy’s embodied narrative structure invites her readers into a bodily experience. Traditional

linear narratives, notably more masculine and western in nature, place emphasis on the order of a

plot. Readers are positioned firmly outside the story as observers. In these linear narratives, the

order of events controls the narrator. Moments of foreshadowing can occur in these narratives,

but the consistent circling and the sporadic revelation of key plot points is unique to the feminist

nonlinear narrative that Roy employs. Rather than being controlled by the story line, Roy returns

ownership of the story to traditionally marginalized characters like Rahel while simultaneously

returning the narrative authority to herself as the author. They decide when and how you, as the

reader, experience their story. With this restored agency, the author and narrator, both Indian

women, rewrite their stories.

Ammu’s story in particular is a powerful example of this intentional rewriting. Her life is

stalked by remarkable pain. In a home of strict gender expectations, this young divorcee and

single mother becomes the family pariah. After her short-lived and disastrous marriage, she

returned to her family’s home in Ayemenem with her two twins and “the cold knowledge that,

for her, life had been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong

man” (38). When life strips her of agency and ownership, Ammu takes back her body and her

story in her affair with Velutha, an untouchable connected with her family as a servant. The
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affair ends in his tragic death, the separation of the twins and, ultimately, with

thirty-one-year-old Ammu dying alone in a grimmy hotel room. But Roy’s circular narrative

ends with Ammu and Velutha’s first night together. In their intimacy, Ammu finds herself again

and, as “she danced for him,… she lived” (Roy 319). The union of their bodies – her female

sexual desire and his racial marginalization – in carnal bliss is the height of patriarchal rebellion

in this novel. In reclaiming ownership of the narrative structure, Ammu’s story and Roy’s novel

end in this blissful rebellion against the social systems and familial patriarchy that have kept

them from living.

As evidenced in Ammu’s stigmatization, familial power structures often threaten the

voices of those operating within them. In her research on the reinforcement of patriarchy in

Indian family systems, Elizabeth Jackson explains, “older women are often the sternest enforcers

of patriarchal norms” because they have found themselves at the top of their small sphere of

control over “the division of household labor… marriage alliances, sons, and the behavior of

other women” (160). In Roy’s narrative, Baby Kochamma embodies this stereotype. When she

returns home as a young woman after romantic rejection and a failed attempt at life as a nun,

“her father [gives her] charge of the front garden… where she raised a fierce, bitter garden” (Roy

26). What an apt metaphor for Baby Kochamma who uses her limited power to wreak havoc and

sow bitterness in the family at every turn. Despite Baby Kochamma’s villainy and apparent

power, she, like other accomplices to patriarchy, is still a victim of the power structure that

sometimes serves them. After all, her power is strictly limited by her father’s permission.

Familial patriarchy often manifests “as a system of male privilege in the family” that victimizes

both young men and women “by rigid gender roles and expectations that do not always respect
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their individuality” (Jackson 169). As twins, Esthappen’s and Rahel’s stories align to

demonstrate the dangers of patriarchy for both girls and boys. While Rahel is certainly subject to

gendered expectations about her appearance and behavior, Estha receives the brunt of the abuse

in the patriarchal system. The trauma of his sexual assault and his banishment to his father’s

house after Ammu’s affair contribute to Estha’s literal silencing. Even the sons of the patriarchy

are victims of the system as their voices are stripped alongside their mothers and sisters.

In her landmark research on the voicelessness of the subaltern, or disenfranchised people,

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak analyzes the power dynamics in colonized or imperialized caste

systems, like India, where language and the privileging of certain language become a powerful

tool of subjugation. The assumption of the native language as a lower form of communication

privileges the colonizers language, elevates a eurocentric culture, and silences the subaltern.

Women, even those belonging to the middle-class or bourgeoisie, are disempowered despite their

assumed economic privilege. In this imperialist system, “one never encounters the testimony of

the women’s voice consciousness” (Spivak 43). Through this silencing at the hands of

imperialism and patriarchy, “the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness,

but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught

between tradition and modernization, culturalism and development” (Spivak 51). Roy challenges

Spivak’s ultimate conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak by her authorship as an Indian

woman and by returning narrative ownership to her marginalized characters. Yet, the women of

her novel, especially Ammu, reflect this struggle against voicelessness at the hands of patriarchy.

Of course, that voicelessness physically manifests in Esthappen’s years of silence, but it also

presents in Ammu’s inability to express her desires, passions, and needs. By resurrecting these
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suppressed voices, Roy joins a new wave of feminist historiography dedicated to reclaiming the

lost voices of the postcolonial societies.

Roy leverages the complex history of language in India as a tool in her rebellion against

the postcolonial patriarchy. As discussed earlier in this paper, Roy’s refusal to privilege either

language validates Inglish, the emerging pseudo-language, and challenges the power dynamics

of postcolonial patriarchy. This rebellion begins in her own corporeal identity as an Indian

woman and seeps into the bodies of her characters. Her use of English, the colonizer’s language,

transcends mere understanding to demonstrate an utter mastery of the nuance and complexities

of the language. She then hands this innovative and creative English to her characters, regardless

of their socioeconomic, racial, or gender identities. Whether they are reading backwards or trying

to “dissect a word,” the twins regularly distort language for their own education and amusement

(Reyes Torres 199). Because Indian society limits different social castes to specific dialects to

prevent fraternization, Roy’s use of English to enable communication between these typically

separate groups transcends convenience. As Christine Vogt-William asserts, Roy makes a

political statement about the value of Velutha when his words, typically restricted to an

untouchable dialect, are written in English, the most privileged language shaping his identity as

“a person with rights” (396). By allowing the lowest of society to communicate in the colonizer’s

language, Roy subverts the patriarchal power structure.

The significance of this political statement is not only in the accessibility of English, but

in the elevation of Malayalam, the Indian dialect spoken by Estha and Rahel’s family.

Malayalam is most often introduced and explored by the young twins, despite Baby

Kochamma’s chastisement. The use of Malayalam also effectively “others” English readers
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forcing them “to relearn the way a story might be told, and… accept what seem like interruptions

to the narrative with words in their proper places” (Reyes Torres 197). Phrases from this Indian

dialect are scattered throughout the novel, yet no glossary or definitions are provided. English

readers find themselves struggling to find meaning in context, effectively placing them outside

the narrative in a way few English speakers ever truly experience. Roy has given the

untouchables and the disenfranchised the power of language and “othered” the colonizers with

her hybrid Inglish.

Arundhati Roy’s ​The God of Small Things p​ rovides language and voice to the

disempowered. Through the study of her nonlinear narrative, her careful restoration of voice, and

her innovative use of language, Roy’s intent to weave rebellion into the very foundations of her

novel cannot be denied. Perhaps nowhere does this rebellion manifest more than in Ammu and

Velutha. Roy not only provides them with language; she also gives them happiness. In the final

words of the novel, Ammu and Velutha embody hope:

She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. Like

flat chalk on a blackboard. Like breeze in a paddyfield. Like jet-streaks in a blue church

sky. He took her face in his hands and drew it towards his. He closed his eyes and

smelled her skin. Ammu laughed... She kissed his closed eyes and stood up. Velutha with

his back against the mangosteen tree watched her walk away. She had a dry rose in her

hair. She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.’ Tomorrow. (Roy 321)

In a 2017 interview with ​British Vogue​ magazine, interviewer Charlotte Sinclair explored Roy’s

optimism amidst incredible adversity. They discuss Roy’s semi-autobiographical first novel, ​The

God of Small Things​ and the significant time that elapsed between the release of her next novel
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nearly 40 years later. During her hiatus from novel publishing, Roy became an outspoken

political and social activist in India and throughout the world. The theme of her second novel,

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,​ inspired much of the interview as the two discussed Roy’s

emphasis on the intermingling of hope and tragedy, light and darkness. The same themes swim

throughout her debut novel, dynamically connecting the marginalized voices she resurrects. In

the interview, Sinclair asks if optimism could be “a rebel stance,” and Roy emphatically

responded, “Yes!... And laughter. Because if you lose that, then what are you fighting for?

Sometimes… that’s the only real thing. These fragile victories that you snatch and fully live”

(Sinclair). Truly, this sentiment of happiness as rebellion is at the heart of ​The God of Small

Things​ as Arundhati Roy masterfully restores the voices of the voiceless so that they may fully

live.
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Works Cited

Das, Kamala. “An Introduction.” Classic Poetry Series: Kamala Das Poems, pg. 7-8. Poem

Hunter, The World Poetry Archive. 2012.

Jackson, Elizabeth. Responding to Patriarchy in India: Resistance and Complicity in Samina

Ali's ​Madras on Rainy Days​ and Anita Desai's ​Fasting, Feasting.​ ​Tulsa Studies in

Women's Literature​, vol. 37 no. 1, 2018, pp. 157-171. ​Project MUSE,​

doi:10.1353/tsw.2018.0007​.

Reyes Torres, Agustín. “Roy’s Inglish in ​The God of Small Things​: A Language for Subversion,

Reconciliation and Reassertion.” Lingüística, vol. 57, 2011.

http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/34844​.

Roy, Arundhati. ​The God of Small Things.​ Harper Perennial, 2017.

Sinclair, Charlotte. “Arundhati Roy: Why Happiness is a Radical Act,” British Vogue, 27 July,

2017, vogue.co.uk/article/arundhati-roy-interview.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ​Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea​.

Columbia University Press, 2010. ​EBSCOhost​,

libproxy.ung.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nleb

k&AN=584675&site=eds-live&scope=site

Trivedi, Harish. “Postcolonialism.” ​Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies​, edited by Gita

Dharampal-Frick et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 211–213. ​JSTOR,​

www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15zc7zj.85​.

Vogt-William, Christine. “Language is the skin of my thought: Language Relations in ​Ancient

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Promises​ and ​The God of Small Things.​ ” ​The Politics of English As a World Language :

New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies.​ Brill Academic Publishers, 2003.

EBSCOhost​,

libproxy.ung.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nleb

k&AN=119829&site=eds-live&scope=site​.