2002 MMLA
Writing the Postcolonial
Purna Banerjee
and Sarah Liles
Texas Christian University
Empire Writes Back: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
Introduction
Who is to bear the burden of history? On who shall fall the onus of recording
it? Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things is vexed by some of
these questions. This novel situates itself in a global discourse community
and shows how colonization both occidental and national has changed and
complicated the idea of India as a monolithic nation. National history
is implied through the narration of the fate of a single family, that
of the Reverend E. John Ipe and his successors, who struggle to maintain
an essential identity. For Roy both the Ipe family and India provides
an epistemic space that reveals the multiple markers of simultaneous affirmation
and contestation. The characters in the novel inhabit a world where traditional
boundaries are challenged and violently ruptured. National, familial,
and sexual identities get blurred and hence, become socially suspect.
A spiraling sense is imparted with the constant mobility of the central
characters within the disparate states of India and between different
nations of the world—India, Britain, Canada, America and Australia. This
is juxtaposed against the stultifying town of Ayemenem, a backwater of
Kerela, a Southern Indian state. Ayemenem becomes the primary locale for
the novel. As history pushes for clarity, order and neat separation of
categories the novel reveals the ludicrousness of such an enterprise.
It abounds in the notions of hybridity and the bleeding of categories
into each other. It is no wonder then, that the communist, equal opportunity
state of Kerala is also a repository of traditional cast-ism. The mobility
of the characters and the relationship that they establish outside the
social normative structures then challenge the limits of a traditional
culture. This results in the unleashing of cultural fear, wrath and violence.
However, the question that haunts the pages of the novel relates to the
issue of recording history. If the natural impulse of history is to neatly
organize, classify and separate, then why does Roy herself participate
in such an enterprise? For what is a novel if not at some level a documenting
of history?
When we question the reason behind Roy's writing of the novel (which simultaneously
is a recording of social history), we are in fact questioning Arundhati
Roy's assumption of authorial space. In this paper then we inquire into
the space that Roy as a postcolonial female writer assumes. As a postcolonial
writer "floating in the amniotic fluid of the past" (Rushdie 120), Roy
at one level is responding to the historical British-Indian empire, while
at another level as a female writer she is also responding to the established
Rushdian tradition of Indo-Anglian fiction. With the publication of his
1981 novel Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie was said to have redrawn
"the literary map of India" by the New York Times (Kadzis 2). Roy's The
God of Small Things, published nearly two decades (1997) later, regenders
this much-celebrated literary history previously drawn by Rushdie. Roy's
is not an easy job. We might come to a better understanding of Roy's idea
(both as a female and as a Post-Rushdian Indo-Anglian writer) of space
when we mark that in the novel she constantly shows us failed attempts
at reversing history. Yet, she seems to be showing that history can never
be reversed; it can only be reworked. In this context, we propose that
Roy brings in the necessity of inhabiting a hybrid third space for a postcolonial
female writer. From this third space she negotiates her relationship between
both the personal and national—in her preference for small over large.
The God of Small Things then is a novel about space. Space, however, is
perpetually redefined with the acceptance of "other," the "external" into
the "self" or the "internal." This does not indicate the victory of one
principle over another but merely that a third, new and often quite powerful
space is being forged. The novel in the end shows us how impossible it
is to make the separation between the "other" and the "self." The characters
in the novel often inhabit a betwixt and between threshold that if anything
at all, brings to light the fluid nature of the markers that are traditionally
employed to compartmentalize.
Merely an identification and mention of Roy's forging of the third space
for a female postcolonial writer seems inadequate. Roy's intellectual
acuity demands that we closely appraise the third space. The delineated
third space is closely affiliated to the idea of a performative artist.
In The God of Small Things, this space gets created as where the body
serves as a libratory text, providing its own form of syntax through gestural
and performative codes. A good example of this is Roy's admiration for
the Kathakali man (219). The Kathakali man is presented as the model for
subjective space that a marginalized artist/author (Roy being perhaps
dually marginal as both a female and a postcolonial writer) may successfully
access. At this stage we would like to defer a detailed discussion on
the Kathakali man until later, but suffice it to say that Roy's construction
of the Kathakali man shows her privileging somatic values over written
text. The God of Small Things as a postcolonial female novel is then Roy's
own gender performance where "the body is always an embodying of possibilities
both conditioned and circumscribed by historical conventions" (Butler
272).
We realize that it is impossible to fully address this topic, without
unraveling the multiple layers of this text but such an investigation
is beyond the scope of this paper. In this collaborative project, then,
we shall concentrate on the characters' and the novels' relationship to
language and history, both of which are directly related to the idea of
gendered space.
The Rule of Law
This novel symbolizes the notion that no one is independent from history
and that cultures that have intertwined cannot be easily separated. All
of the personal events have been historiographized. For example, the twins
Rahel and Estha were born during the India-China war of 1962, and the
mother Ammu divorces her husband and returns home from Assam to Ayamenem
during the India-Pakistan war. This signifies that the individual events
are tied to historical and national events. Individual actions affect
social and national reactions.
It is prudent as this stage to give a brief summary of the novel, for
those of you who have not read it before. This will at the same time allow
us to examine social customs as well as gender politics. The primary characters
are the mother Ammu and her twins Rahel and Estha who attempt to defy
multiple social boundaries and who are punished in their attempts by members
of their community who feel the need to prevent the chaos that these transgressions
would lead to. Ammu and her twins repeatedly break "the love laws" which
control whom one should love and how much.
The first transgression against the love laws occurs with Ammu's marriage
to Baba. They belong to different castes--Baba is Bengali and Ammu is
Malayali. Also, they belong to different religions--Baba is Hindu and
Ammu is Syrian Christian. Because of this, their marriage is considered
to be an intercommunity love marriage, also known as an inter-caste marriage,
something to be despised and discouraged, and thus their children Rahel
and Estha are considered illegitimate. Ammu transgresses further by obtaining
a divorce, and her social position in the community is adversely affected
when she and the twins return to Ayamenem. Even Baby Kochamma dislikes
both the twins and Ammu because the twins "were Half-Hindu Hybrids whom
no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry" (44). Baby Kochama
also subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married
daughter had no position in her parents' home. As for a divorced daughter—according
to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. [. . .] As for
a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma
chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject. (45) Baby Kochama's
silence represents the unspeakable nature of Ammu's transgression.
The second transgression against the love laws occurs when Ammu has a
sexual affair with Velutha, a member of the Paravan caste, also known
as the Untouchables, thereby defying the traditional Indian separation
of the castes. Even before this affair, Velutha has managed to transgress
his position in Indian society by acquiring technical training and a better
education. While society can overlook his attempt to better himself through
education, it cannot allow him to ally sexually with a member of another
class/caste, and thus begin attempts to contain him.
Velutha is contained at multiple levels: (1) for his sexual union with
Ammu, and (2) for his relationship with the children that cannot be sanctioned.
For these supposed crimes, he is beaten to death. In order to justify
their actions and maintain a pretense of law and order, the police need
to find him guilty. Estha is forced, through the use of emotional blackmail,
to make an accusation of kidnapping cousin Sophie Mol against Velutha
in front of Velutha's broken body. This betrayal of their friend haunts
Ammu, Rahel and Estha for the rest of their lives. Estha stops speaking
after he is returned to his father; Ammu is banished from her home, and
dies alone at age 31; Rahel is expelled from school, drifts, marries an
American, whom she later divorces. All the characters float around as
if rootless. The narrative begins and ends as Rahel returns to her family
home in India and to Estha, wherein ensues their union, the third transgression
against the love laws. An union that is incestuous and hence, socially
transgressive. However, Estha and Rahel perceive this relationship differently.
As the narrator points out, Estha and Rahel are two-egg twins with a Siamese
soul (4-5). They have always referred to themselves as we or us, never
as I. Although they are physically different, they are one spiritually.
Sex allows them to become one physically as well as spiritually.
In some respects, Rahel and Estha's relationship reflects the relationship
between India and England. Each nation has its own cultures, its own history,
but England's colonialization of India allowed a negotiation between cultures
and histories, and after colonization is over, the negotiation continues.
In Estha and Rahel's cases, each is an individual tied together by a shared
period of history, and even after they are forcefully and physically separated
for many years and by many miles, their souls still transact and/or connect,
so much so that they cannot form lasting, meaningful relationships with
other people. Like postcolonial India, Rahel and Estha refuse to be categorized.
They fit everywhere and nowhere.
We Speak of Language
Rahel and Estha's relationship to language mirrors the postcolonial tendency
to rebel against all things English, yet their identity is intrinsically
constructed by their sensitivity to the discourse of the Empire. As their
uncle Chacko encourages them to look up the term Anglophile, Estha and
Rahel learn that this term means "Person well disposed to the English"
(51). After looking up the term "dispose," the twins discover three definitions:
"(1) Place suitably in particular order. (2) Bring mind into certain state.
(3) Do what one will with, get off one's hands, stow away, demolish, finish,
settle, consume (food), kill, sell." (51). Chacko says that in their grandfather
Pappachi's case, Anglophile means that his mind "had been brought into
a state which made him like the English" (51). However, there is a subtle
hint that being an Anglophile is more complex than this. The English have
placed the Indians in a particular order and have consumed and demolished
Indian culture in an attempt to replace it with British culture (the common
presumption being that there is one Indian culture). The English have
the ability to do whatever they will to the Indians, and subtly they have
made most Indians accept these changes. As Chacko claims, "They were a
family of Anglophiles" (51). This situation is further complicated because
the Indians have actively participated in their own cultural demise.
Rahel and Estha, even as children, rebel against the colonizing forces
of English. Although their aunt Baby Kochamma relentlessly enforces a
rule that the twins must always speak English, the twins rebel and speak
their native language Malayalam in private. If their aunt catches them,
she makes them write, "I will always speak in English" one hundred times
each to penalize them for their transgression (36). Thwarted by their
aunt, Rahel and Estha find another way to revolt. They begin reading English
lines backward, as if in an attempt to reverse time. They are punished
for this too, and their teacher Miss Mitten tells their aunt Baby Kochamma
that she had "seen Satan in their eyes. NataS ni rieht seye" (58). They
have to write one hundred times each "In future we will not read backwards"
(58). When their teacher Miss Mitten is killed by a milk van several months
later, the twins believe that "there was hidden justice in the fact that
the milk van had been reversing (58).
Although Rahel and Estha's new language, that of reading English backward,
is funny at the best of times and absurd at the worst, it does make an
important postcolonial argument. They refuse to accept formalized English
as their language because it has been forced upon them, both by the colonizing
forces and by the colonized—their family members. The twins and their
unique use of English language represent the postcolonial space. This
redefining of their relationship to the language of empire can be better
understood in conjunction with Baktin's theory of heteroglossia. As Bakhtin
argues,
at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot
from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence of socio-ideological
contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs
of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present,
between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily
form. These "languages" of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety
of ways, forming new socially typifying "languages." (347).
Bakhtin's theory finds its place within Roy's novel if we focus on the
socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past existing
within the twins. Although they are of the middle class, they befriend
Velutha, a member of the Untouchable class. In this sense they rebel against
"Indian" culture(s). Yet they rebel against the use of English in the
attempt to self- identify as Indian. There is a sense in this novel that
time and change cannot be completely reversed. Rahel and Estha, despite
their rebellion, embrace a redefined notion of empire. They have a versatile
relationship with English language and customs. While they cannot entirely
dispense with speaking English, and they enjoy American/English films
such as The Sound of Music, Rahel and Estha are able to use the master's
tools to dismantle the master's house. They take the authority previously
denied to a colonized subject to create a new language out of the old,
and to some extent, they merge "Indian" culture with English. They seem
to be creating a third space, not traditionally English and not traditionally
Indian. The novel is extremely complex in its relation to language, an
issue that is most exigent in modern India, an India that still struggles
with its essential national identity. Attention to "language" provides
an ontological space for the numerous issues of postcoloniality to confront
each other in the novel.
The Haunted House of Her/His-tory
At a point in the novel Mammachi, the grandmother to Rahel and Estha,
informs them that she recalled a time when Paravans were expected to walk
backwards, sweeping and erasing all marks of their presence so as not
to defile the Brahmins and the Syrian Christians (70). This same sense
of being denied viable existence in the social, historical and national
narrative is replicated when Chacko nationalistically bemoans that as
Anglophiles they were "trapped outside their own history and unable to
retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away" (51).
He explained to the children "that history was like an old house at night.
With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. Chacko asserted
that to understand history, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're
saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell
the smells'" (51). Chacko's notion of History here is quite fixed. He
talks of history as spatially fixed and encompassed—within a room. Chacko
fails where the twins succeed, that is, in perceiving history as what
Dipesh Chakrabarty calls "affective histories" (18). As Chakrabarty asserts,
it is "affective histories" that provide "a loving grasp of detail in
search of an understanding of the diversity of the human life-worlds"
(18).
A reader first encounters the perception of history as the meta-narrative
(same as Chacko's perception) that disregards all other small, personal
narratives in the beginning of the novel. The narrator informs the reader
of Rahel's husband's exasperation when he was unable to decipher the empty
look in her eyes. But as s/he (the narrator) goes on to clarify,
He [Rahel's husband] didn't know that in some places, like the country
that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And
that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something
happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the
vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public
turmoil of a nation. The Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded
obeisance. The small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came
away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation
of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing
mattered much…It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had
happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the
terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. (20)
The big/small God distinction in the novel allegorizes the distinctions
between the national and personal. In the beginning of the novel it appears
that Roy seems to endorse this concept of history as a meta-narrative.
Rahel's emptiness and Estha's silence might indicate a sense of indifference
that although transgressive is not powerful enough to disrupt it. Fortunately
there are no easy answers in the novel. Even while meta-history continues
its classifications, cracks appear and the all-governing love laws are
tampered with, forbidden territories are crossed and "the unthinkable"
becomes "thinkable and the impossible really" possible (31). The union
of Velutha and Ammu is one such instance when the meta-history is ruptured
as "Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed,
caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars,
its wounds from old wars and the walking-backwards days all fell away.
In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was plain to
see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky" (168). It is in such
moments that the principles of history are revamped to include narratives
about gods of small things. Such moments draw their power through their
aberrant or "mad" status (204). They do not form the part of the social
lexicon as they defy the act of classification. They can only be lived
and performed.
Yet meta-history collects its dues when it uses Estha, the official "Keeper
of [small] Records," (156) against the god of small things, Velutha. Estha
is forced to falsely implicate Velutha in charges of abduction, hence,
he stops speaking—a refusal to participate in history. The brutalization
of Velutha by the police is another example of meta-history systematically
settling the score: "There was nothing accidental about what happened
that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal
settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived
in it. History in live performance" (293). Yet, Roy uses the device of
history brilliantly. It is in the house of history (an abandoned ruin)
where violence is wrecked on Velutha; it is the house of history that
was later bought by a five star hotel chain and converted into a space
for "Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in," it is the same house
of history which Roy makes the site for one of the novel's most powerful
unions, that of Ammu and Velutha's. It is not a mere coincidence that
the novel ends with depiction of Ammu and Velutha's union and narration
of their nocturnal ritual of finding each other in the house of history.
The house of history is reappropriated by the enactment of small events,
like Ammu and Velutha's struggle to protect a spider that lived in cracks
of the walls in the House. The novel then can be thought of as a story
about this act of reappropriation. This act is also a form establishing
a claim over the creation and narration of one's own story. As Edward
Said informs us "stories, are at the heart of what explorers and novelists
say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized
people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own
history" (xii). The house of history provided Velutha and Ammu a space
in which the socially separated categories of "love," "madness," "hope,"
and "infinite joy" could be powerfully brought together (320). Roy, at
the end of the novel, seems to be endorsing this notion of history in
negation to Chacko's notion of history as meta-narrative. While Chacko
believed that their mundane lives would never form the material of historical
narratives ( "'Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail
unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows
will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never
big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.'" 52), Roy's
presentation of Velutha and Ammu's personal story does form the material
of which history is made.
The liminal space that Ammu and Velutha create is also a space that Roy,
the author, impressively forges. It is a space that dismantles the separation
of the national from the personal, the sacred from the secular. This notion
of there being a space, which can simultaneously encompass apparently
disparate ideological economies, is the third space that Roy establishes.
Roy's creation of this third space is a new contribution in the traditionally
binary critical structures of the postcolonial discourse community. Roy
replaces with this binary with the idea of simultaneity, or a continuum.
Roy's third space is the space that an artist or an author assumes when
performing or storytelling. This space is one in which the stipulations
of meta- history can be subverted. An artist is one who realizes that
great stories are made of simple tales that shimmer in a space between
the sacred and the profane. Roy's eulogy to the androgynous body of the
Kathakali Man (the dancer of the traditional Indian Kathakali) delineates
this notion of the power of the artist or the performer. Of the Kathakali
Man she writes:
So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own.
He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles
it to the ground and lets it go again…He can turn effortlessly from the
carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain
stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into
a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of
a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's
smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The
hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory. He tells stories of the gods,
but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart. The Kathakali Man
is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument.
From the age of three it has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed
wholly to the task of storytelling. (219)
The socially low and economically impoverished Kathakali man embodies
the power of assuming liminal undefined performative spaces. The Kathakali
man's physical performance challenges the linguistic and cultural order
as it allows the body to participate in the construction of meaning. His
performance encompasses almost an androgynous element (i.e. "From the
sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast"). To invoke Irigaray's
phrase, the Kathakali man uses all the "gestural code of women's bodies,"
that enables a limited escape from the restrictions of masculine languages
and histories (Irigaray 136). Further, as Hélène Cixous argues, theatricality
represents a contestation of linguistic order, allowing new meanings to
emerge (Shiach 109). Through his performative dance, then, the Kathakali
man successfully transcends the restrictions of meta-history and meta-language.
The Kathakali man provides the ontological plane on which the personal
can be placed alongside the national. In his person, we find the fracturing
of the whole hierarchical structure that privileges the large (and all
that is associated with this term, such as: man, meta-history, national,
colonial, formal structured language, etc) over the small. This physically
ambiguous figure of the Kathakali dancer presents Roy with an alternate
positionality that allows restrictive conventions to work against themselves
by opening up meanings that masculinist discourse seeks to foreclose.
The space of the Kathakali man symbolizes the space that Roy assumes as
a postcolonial storyteller. The history that she writes is not of kings
and national wars. Hers is the realm of small; she writes of the god of
small things—the Paravan Velutha.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "From The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays." Theory
of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2000. 321- 53.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical
Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Irigaray, Luce. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell,
1991.
Kadzis, Peter. "Salman Speaks: Rushdie's New Novel, The Ground Beneath
Her Feet, is a Work of Epic Ambition that Fuses Myth with Rock-and-Roll
Reality." The Boston Phoenix 6-13 May 1999. 8 Sept. 2002
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. New York: Penguin, 1980.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Shiach, Mirag. Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing. London: Routledge,
1991.