Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things stands as a masterful exposition of postcolonial India in its manifold contradictions, legacies, and lived realities. Far from being a mere chronicle of rural Kerala, the novel renders a compelling portrait of how colonial history, caste hierarchies, language politics, globalisation and internal political betrayal interweave to produce the fragmented identities and unspoken traumas that mark postcolonial existence.
Central to the postcolonial framework in Roy’s text is the critique of colonial legacies embedded in language and cultural mimicry. The twins Estha and Rahel inhabit a world where English occupies both prestige and alienation. A punishment from their Aunt Baby Kochamma forces them to “write lines I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English (Roy 36).” This compulsion reveals how colonial linguistic norms remain internalised long after political independence. At the same time, Roy subverts the tyranny of standard English by incorporating Malayalam expressions and local idioms. When she describes the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” (Roy 3) or British tea brought by Pappachi’s company, she refuses the purity of colonial English. Instead, she invests it with Indian rhythms and a touch of irony. In scholarly terms, what Roy does here is enact the hybrid ‘third space’ Homi K. Bhabha describes in which postcolonial subjects negotiate and invent identities (Bhabha 118). Language becomes resistance rather than submission.
Another central postcolonial theme is caste, which the novel exposes as a structure reinforced not only by tradition but also by colonial intervention. Velutha, a Dalit and factory worker, becomes the focus of intersecting forms of oppression. His clandestine relationship with Ammu defies caste and gender boundaries and directly leads to his annihilation. The brutality that follows underscores how colonial regimes legitimised social stratification and how those structures endured beyond independence. As Pranav Jani argues, the novel represents “a narrative of subaltern struggle and survival in postcolonial India” (Jani 176). Roy gives Velutha a voice and presence even as the state and society erase him. The “Love Laws that lay down who should be loved and how much” (Roy 3) are enforced with cruelty. Their enforcement demonstrates how caste and gender control are deeply entwined with colonial modernity.
Roy also interrogates the failures of postcolonial institutions, which were meant to dismantle privilege. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is exposed as no better than casteist elites. When Velutha seeks help after the affair is exposed, he is told by Comrade Pillai that the party was not constituted to support workers’ indiscipline in their private life (Roy 197). In effect, the CPI(M) betrays class and caste politics. Roy thus asserts that revolutionary rhetoric cannot substitute for substantive social transformation. As Priyamvada Gopal observes, Roy’s critique pierces through which leftists in India claimed moral authority but often colluded with caste and patriarchy (Gopal 212). Roy’s representation dismantles any idealised impression of postcolonial political movements.
Globalisation and neo-colonial consumerism form another layer of postcolonial analysis. The novel projects consumer culture through the symbolic figure of Baby Kochamma, who abandons her garden to sit in front of satellite television, consuming American soap operas, world news, and sports. She no longer tends a living ecosystem but watches exotic tragedies and entertainment from afar. Roy’s narrative suggests that global capitalism replaces local culture with homogenous media spectacles. Berthold Schoene describes Roy’s fiction as “ethical world‑creation” that refuses the flattening of difference by globalisation and strives to preserve a cosmopolitan yet rooted imagination (Schoene 67). Roy’s refusal to romanticise local culture as idyllic is part of her postcolonial project. She sees global media as complicit in perpetuating neo‑colonial frames. The arrival of Western tourists at the Ayemenem resort in the novel is portrayed as a continuation not of hospitality but of colonial voyeurism. The tourists lie by the pool like they own the world (Roy 197). Roy critiques cosmopolitanism that fails to address inequality, instead embracing difference without justice.
Memory and history in The God of Small Things resist official narratives. The novel’s discontinuous structure demonstrates that history is personal, ambivalent, and incomplete. The narrative moves back and forth in time as fragmented experiences surface unpredictably. Cathy Caruth argues that trauma cannot be told in a linear sequence, and it is Roy’s very form that embodies this truth (Caruth 4). The narrated past—the drowning of Sophie Mol, the death of Ammu, Velutha’s murder—cannot be assimilated into grand national myth. They may seem insignificant, yet they have catastrophic reverberations. Dirk Wiemann underscores that Roy’s text “rejects the single story or exclusive perspective focusing on multiple consciousness that challenges totalising historical narratives” (Wiemann 52). Roy thus inserts subaltern memory into a literary archive that has often marginalised it.
Roy’s narrative also reveals the cultural hybridism constructed through glocal intersections of class, gender and colonial memory. Ayemenem is depicted not as a rural backwater, but as emblematic of post-Independence India’s contradictory encounters with modernity, communism, tourism, and caste resurgence. As Schoene observes, Roy’s novel enacts “glocality,” excavating the relations between small, private spaces and the global structures that shape them (Schoene 67). This portrayal refuses both idealisation of tradition and a wholesale embrace of global modernity. Instead, Roy maps the tensions that arise from the jostling of caste pride, communist politics, foreign capital, and multinational media within a small town. Roy’s fiction turns Ayemenem into a locus for world‑creation, not in the sense of exoticism but in its capacity to evoke ethical complexities.
Roy’s critique of sensationalist commodification reflects another postcolonial concern. She constantly questions the literary marketplace and the commercialisation of exoticism, as Schoene notes the novel functions as a “potentially subaltern moment of resistance” to commodified literature that operates on exotic tropes (Schoene 74). The sumptuous descriptions of mangroves, the river, and the old fridge, which always splutters six times before dying, are not tourism marketing copy. Instead, they hold out a local sensibility that resists easy packaging. When Roy donates her Booker Prize money to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, she signals that literature should serve a political purpose, not just appeal to consumers (Schoene 80). The text thus participates in a political debate about what postcolonial writing can or should be.
Roy’s engagement with women’s subalternity in a postcolonial setting is also critical. Ammu’s alienation as a divorced mother, Baby Kochamma’s residual Anglophilia refracted through bitterness, Mammachi’s physical and psychic scars inflicted by Pappachi, each woman represents a node in intersecting oppressions of caste, patriarchy, colonial legacy and class. Roy’s narrative traces how women remain vulnerable even when the colonial master has departed. Gender intersecting with caste, wealth, and the incision of colonial education produces multiple forms of subjugation. As Brinda Bose argues, Roy’s feminist critique is inseparable from her postcolonial critique of structural injustice (Bose 110). By situating female suffering within a historical context, Roy shows that patriarchal harm is often enacted by respected communal institutions cloaked in modernity.
Even the novel’s imagery performs postcolonial critique. Recurring symbols, such as the river carrying Sophie Mol’s body, Pappachi’s moth on the wall evoking the colonial obsession with classification, and the decaying pickle factory aligning with India’s postcolonial decline, operate as metonyms for broader power dynamics. The concept of “small things” becomes theological. The novel insists that grand histories are produced not only by wars and treaties but by whispered romances, broken toys, and silences in train compartments. By centring the “small things,” the narrative reconfigures who gets to be remembered and how. This is Roy’s ethical intervention: memory is political, even minute.
In the novel’s conclusion, Roy resists closure. The siblings’ reunion is tentative, Ammu’s death unresolved in familial grief, Velutha erased from collective memory. The narrative ends in a kind of hovering silence, much like lived postcolonial reality, where historical wrongs remain unrectified and future redemption remains elusive. Estha’s final gaze sees Rahel in the treehouse many years later, but remains uncertain whether they recognise each other (Roy 381). That unresolved gaze epitomises the postcolonial condition: a longing for connection, history and meaning in a world fractured by structural violence and erased narratives.
In summary, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is dense with postcolonial elements intricately interwoven: linguistic hybridity as resistance, caste hierarchies re-imposed through colonial structures, betrayal by postcolonial institutions, globalisation as neo-colonial consumer culture, memory as a contested archive, women’s subalternity, and the refusal of commodification. Roy’s aesthetic strategies, including narrative fragmentation, language play and symbolic attention to everyday artefacts, are not ornamental but politically charged. They enable her to dismantle monolithic historical narratives and recast subaltern experience in its full psychic and socio‑political complexity. The novel emerges not as nostalgia for a pre-colonial past or a celebration of modernity, but as a profound meditation on the small forces that continue to shape lives after empire.
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Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Bose, Brinda. In Desire and Defiance: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Indian Writing. Manohar, 1996.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience, Trauma Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Gopal, Priyamvada. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Jani, Pranav. “Beyond the Big Things: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as Postcolonial Critique of History.” Globalizing Dissent Essays on Arundhati Roy, edited by Ranjan Ghosh, Routledge, 2009, pp. 175–190.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. HarperCollins Flamingo, 1998.
Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. [Publisher], [Year].
Wiemann, Dirk. Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English. Editions Rodopi, 2008.