The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

THE WRITER

Arundhati Roy ( 1961) is an activist and novelist from Southern India. Roy was born in Shillong to a Syrian Christian mother and a Bengalii Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, leaving for Delhi at the age of 16, where she embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut and making a living selling empty bottles. She later studied at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.

The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy and won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since that time, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include protesting against the Narmada Damn project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalisation movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism. .

In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.

Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it.

THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

The partly autobiographical novel The God of Small Things is imbued with the conflicts that Roy grew up witnessing as a child – Syrian Christian ideals, the caste system, communism, the unequal treatment of sons and daughters, and the clash of Western and Eastern values and norms. At the heart of the novel, however, is an examination of ´the love laws´- who is allowed to love whom and how much.

Rahel and Estha are twins born to Ammu, who as a single mother is both mother and father to them. Restless and disgraced, Ammu is described as filled with “the infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.” After first marrying out of her caste, she compounds her error in the eyes of her family by divorcing her alcoholic husband. She returns to live on sufferance in her childhood home.

The novel opens in the present when Rahel returns to the family home (after her own failed marriage) and reencounters her twin Estha, from whom she has been separated since their childhood. The novel revolves around the terrible circumstances of their long separation and ultimately resolves it and reunites them with a final transgression of the love laws.

Most of the novel is set in the past, leading up to their cousin Sophie Moll´s accidental death, the events it exposed and the individual tragedies that resulted from it: Velutha´s murder, their mother´s decline and early death and their brutal separation.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

Roy chooses to tell the story in layers of past and present. Why does she structure the book in this way? Why does she end the book before disaster strikes, even though the reader already knows how the story in the past ends?

Is Ammu´s ability to mother, love and protect her children compromised by the lack of mothering she herself received?

Velutha is defined as ´untouchable´ by the society that Roy describes. How much of the physical contact in the book is consensual and motivated by love, and how much is about inequality and the abuse of power?