Arundhati Roy--Biography
• “My mother says that
some of the incidents in
the book are based on
things that happened
when I was two years
old. I have no
recollection of them.
But obviously, they
were trapped in some
part of my brain.”
Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
Pinchia Feng
NCTU
Arundhati Roy-- childhood
• born as Suzanna Arundhati Roy on
11/24/1961
• mother--Mary Roy (Christian)--a wellknown social activist, ran an informal
school (Corpus Chrisiti )
• father (a Bengali Hindu tea planter)
• uncle--George Issac (owned the Palat
Pickles--the slogan: “Emperor in the
realm of taste”)
Arundhati Roy--childhood
• feeling of insecurity because of the
broken marriage--“on the edge of the
community” (GSM p.60)
• “When I think back on all the things I
have done I think from a very early age,
I was determined to negotiate with the
world on my own. There were no
parents, no uncles, no aunts; I was
completely responsible for myself."
Adult Life and Career
• left home at 16 and lived in a squatter’s
colony in Delhi
• The Delhi School of Architecture
• marriage (Gerard Da Cunha)--divorced after
4 years
• a role in Massey Saab
• The Banyan Tree--TV series
• screenplay--In Which Annie Gives It Those
Ones /Electric Moon
• a critique of Bandit Queen
Kerala and the Meenachil river
Influence of Kerala
• “A lot of the atmosphere of A God of Small
Things is based on my experience of what it
was like to grow up in Kerala. Most
interestingly, it was the only place in the
world where religions coincide, there is
Christianity, Hinduism, Marxism and Islam
and they all live together and rub each other
down. When I grew up it was the Marxism
that was very strong, it was like the
revolution was coming the next week…. To
me, I couldn’t think of a better location for a
book about human beings.”
The Rural Environment
• “I think the kind of landscape that you grew
up in, it lives in you. I don’t think it’s true
of people who’ve grown up in cities so
much, you may love building but I don’t
think you can love it in the way that you
love a tree or a river or the colour of the
earth, it’s a different kind of love. I’m not a
very well read person but I don’t imagine
that that kind of gut love for the earth can
be replaced by the open landscape.”
The God of Small Things
• Completed in May 1996
• published in 4/4/1997 by
Random House
• the Booker Price--Oct. 1997
(India’s 50th anniversary of
independence)--the first
non-expatriate Indian author
and the first Indian woman
to win the price
Arundhati on Writing the Novel
• inspiration--“the image of this sky blue
Plymouth stuck at the railroad crossing with
the twins inside and this Marxist procession
raging around it”
• “so much of fiction is a way of seeing, of
making sense of the world…and you need a
key of how to begin to do that. This was
just a key. For me (the novel) was five
years of almost unchanging and mutating,
and growing a new skin. It’s almost like a
part of me.”
Biology and Transgression
• “I have to say that my book is not
about history but biology and
transgression. And, in fact is that YOU
CAN NEVER UNDERSTAND THE
NATURE OF BRUTALITY UNTIL
YOU SEE WHAT HAS BEEN
LOVED BEING SMASHED. And the
book deals with both things--it deals
with our ability to be brutal as well as
our ability to be so deeply intimate and
so deeply loving.”
The Title
• “To me the god of small things is the
inversion of God. God’s a big thing and
God’s in control. The god of small
things…whether it’s the way the children
see things or whether it’s the insect life in
the book, or the fish or the stars--there is a
not accepting of what we think of as adult
boundaries. This small activity that goes on
is the under life of the book, All sorts of
boundaries are transgressed upon….”
• It’s a story that examines things very
closely but also from a very, very
distant point, almost from geological
time and you look at it and see a
pattern there. A pattern…of how in
these small events and in these small
lives the world intrudes. And because
of this, because of people being
unprotected…the world and the social
machine intrudes into the smallest,
deepest core of their being and changes
their life.”--a last minute title
Characters
• The Ipe family
Papachi (Benaan John)--Mammachi (Shoshamma)
Margaret--Checko
Ammu (1942-73)--Baba
Sophie Mol
Esthappen Yako (Estha) Rachel
Baby Kochamma (Navomi Ipe)
• the Untouchables: Vellya Paapen Velutha Paapen
• Comrade K. N. M. Pillai
Language and Structure
• “Repetition I love, and used because it made me
feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have
rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take
away the shock of the plot.”
• “...for me the book is not about what happened
but about how what happened affected people.”
• “in some way the structure of the book
ambushes the story…. In the first chapter I more
or less tell you the story, but the novel ends in
the middle of the story….”--p.32 “Suddenly they
become the bleached bones of a story.”
Syrian Christian Community
• less than 5% of Indian’s population
• more than 20%-1/3 in Kerala are
Christians
• the Syrian Church is one of the
oldest branches of Christianity-came to India with St. Thomas in
52 CE.
Controversy
• England--“derivative”--about India
• India--communist critique from E M S
Namboodiripad--“Anybody who attacks
Communists anywhere in the world will be
welcomed by the captains of the industry of
bourgeois literature in the world.” + “sexual
anarchy
• + obscenity case--Sabu Thomas-- affront Indian
tradition, culture, and morality; “excites sexual
desires and lascivious thoughts”; hurts the
Syrian Christian community
Women in Kerala
• Relative freedom for women in Kerala
• assertive, energetic, courageous
women
• instances of patriarchal oppression
• How are the women being
characterized in the novel?
(Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Ammu,
Rahel)
Timeline
• 1969--communist march (p.62-69);
Sophie Mol’s visit, death, and funeral;
Ammu and Velutha; Velutha’s death
• 1973--Ammu’s death (31), p.5 “a
viable die-able age”
• 1992--the narrative present--Estha
(“the quietness,” “re-Returned”); Rahel
(divorced, back for the States); Baby
Kochamma (satellite TV and diary)
Children--Two-Egg Twins
• P.4-5 “In those early amorphous years when
memory had only just begun, when life was full
of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was
Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of
themselves together as Me, and separately, as
We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of
Siamese twins, physically separate, but with
joint identities.”--“…now she thinks of Estha
and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two
of them are no longer what They were or
thought They’d be.”--p.81-82
The Love Laws/ Caste System
• p.33 “That it really began in the days when
the Love Laws were made. The laws that
lay down who should be loved, and how.
And How much.”
• caste is “the defining consideration in all
Indian politics, (and) in all Indian marriages,
(but) the lines are blurring. India exists in
several centuries simultaneously.” (GMS
p.71 on the Untouchables)
Chapter 2 (1)
• time: 12/1969 (the day before Sophie
Mol’s arrival)
• place: Ayemenem-----Cochin
• pop culture: The Sound of Music (1965);
Elvis puff, Love-in-Tokyo p.37
• language: p.37 Malayalam vs English
(“Pre NUN sea ayshun”--example of
small transgression)/ “cuff-link” p.50
• p.38 “the Terror”--p.74
Chapter 2 (2)
• Ammu--“life had been lived” p.38-44 “Unsafe
Edge” (p.44)
• “The fate of the wretched man-less woman.” (p.
44-5)
• Paradise Pickles & Preserves
• Mammachi’s pickles (and violin) vs
Pappachi’s moth (p.48)--colonized/ power and
knowledge
• other (post)colonial issues: CCP and
Anglophile p.50-51
History
• “The History House” (p.51-54)
Chacko’s--“an old house at night.” (p.51)
children’s--Kari-Saipu’s house
--in 1990s: “Toy Histories for rich tourists to play
in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph’s dream, like
a press of eager natives petitioning an English
magistrate, the old houses had been arranged
around the History House in attitudes of deference.
‘Heritage,’ the hotel was called.” (p.120)
• geological time: ‘the Earth woman” (p.52)
• Kurtz and the Heart of Darkness
Symbolic Language--questions
•
•
•
•
•
Rahel’s watch (p.37)
frogs (p.42)
Chacko--airplanes and pickle baron (p.55-56)
reading backwards--”Satan in their eyes” (p.58)
ambulance (Sacred Heart Hospital) and wedding
party (p.58)
• Murlidharan’s keys and “cupboards, cluttered
with secret pleasure” (p.61)
Marxism in Kerala
• “The first Communist government in the
world was elected in Kerala in 1957, and
from then on it became a big power to
contend with. I think in '67 the
government returned to power after
having been dismissed by Nehru, and so
in '69 it was at its peak. And it was as if
revolution was really just around the
corner.” + (GMS p.64-65)