Chapter Six

Ayemenem: Interrogating Big Voices

The final novel this study intends to discuss is Arundhati

Roy’s The God of Small Things. She is the first resident Indian
writer to win the Booker-McConnell Prize in 1997 for her debut
novel and it remains her only fictional endeavour to date. A trained
architect, she has since shifted to political activism. She vocalises
her dissent in her non-fictional works like The Algebra of Infinite
Justice (2001), An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2005) and
Listening to the Grasshoppers: Field Notes in Democracy (2009)
which are a collection of her influential essays and The Shape of
the Beast (2008) includes a set of her semi-informal conversations
with N. Ram, David Barsamian, Anthony Arnove and a few others.
Roy has written two screen plays In which Annie Give It Those
Ones (1988) and Electric Moon, and a pair of controversial essays
“The Great Indian Rape Trick” (Parts 1 and II) which charges
Shekhar Kapoor for misrepresenting and undermining the
legendary dacoit Phoolan Devi’s life-history through his film, Bandit
Queen (1994). Projecting her as the conscience of the nation,
writer Meena Kandaswamy observes: “She stands at the forefront
of every struggle where the Indian state acts against the interest of
its citizens. She was against the Narmada Dam, India’s Nuclear
Weapon’s Test at Pokhran, the police-paramilitary oppression of
the Adivasis, she is upset by the civilian killings in Kashmir”(qtd in
Gunasekaran 1). Though Roy has not been the first to raise these
issues, Kandaswamy claims that she wields her global celebrity
status to bring international attention to these issues in India. Roy
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feels that the injustice around her gives her writing a mission: “To
be a writer in a country where something akin to an undeclared
civil war is being waged on its citizens in the name of
‘development’ is an onerous responsibility” (“Ladies have
Feelings”190). Speaking of this responsibility she continues: “The
trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve
seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act
as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you are
accountable”(192-93). The central preoccupation of both her
fiction and non-fictional writings, she reiterates “is the relationship
between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular
conflict they’re engaged in” (“Come September”13). However, she
has often been accused of not offering any alternative to the
present order. Natasha Walter, in her review in the Guardian
Weekly maintains that “even if Roy has no interest in putting
forward ideas for a better world, at least she has the desire to
make us notice what is happening to this one”(“A Passionate
Writer”). The God of Small Things (cited hereafter as Small Things)
has been inundated with accolades and at the same time courted
controversy. The novel has been extolled for its innovative style
and criticised for its politics and sexual transgressions. Scholars
have made theoretical readings of the novel on varied levels such
as the feminist, postcolonial, psycho-analytical, Marxist,
postmodernist and the stylistic. This chapter purports to examine
how the concept of regionalism is assimilated in the novel. Just as
Anita Nair and Kavery Nambisan have explored their respective
regions in their novels, Ayemenem becomes Roy‘s chosen locale
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for her narrative. To her mother’s query on having chosen

Ayemenem as the village and the Meenachal as the river, Roy
elucidates: “’Because I want people to know that we have stories.’
It’s not that India has no stories. Of course we have stories–
beautiful and brilliant ones. But those stories, because of the
languages in which they’re written, are not privileged. So nobody
knows them” (“Development Nationalism”77).

Roy’s definitive views on the concept of what a region should

be, is evident in her essay “The End of Imagination”, where she
questions the very notion of an ‘Indian’ identity and of the
existence of an ’Indian’ civilisation. She affirms:

There’s no such thing as an Authentic India or a Real

Indian. There is no Divine Committee that has the right
to sanction one single, authorised version of what India
is or should be. There is no one religion or language or
caste or region or person or story or book that can
claim to be its sole representative. (37)

Thus she makes it explicit that there is not a single vision of India
but “there are, and can only be, visions of India” and various
perspectives of seeing it. This idea is echoed in the epigraph to
Small Things which Roy quotes from John Berger, “Never again will
a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” The novel
narrates not one story but a number of them encompassing four
generations and she connects her region with others of the state,
the country, and even with those of other continents. The
narrative makes use of several “texts” to narrate itself which
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include encyclopedias, atlases, novels, dramas, fairytales, films,

music and theatre. The very first chapter of the novel introduces
most of the characters and almost all the events that are related to
the Ipe family of Ayemenem. Hence the varied stories that are
presented in the novel “have no secrets” as in the kathakali stories
but “are the ones you have heard and want to hear again” (229).
The local spectators who watch a kathakali performance are
familiar with its stories drawn from the Ramayana and the
Mahabharatha. Roy constructs her narrative through the
appropriation of this technique. Julie Mullaney claims that this
sense of being mesmerized by the performances of stories already
known becomes the basis for the construction of the novel (56).
Despite its conventional plot, what makes the novel unique is the
manner of its narration, the language used and the treatment of
the intricacies of the locale.

Set in Ayemenem in the Kottayam district of south Kerala,

the plot of Small Things pivots around the feudal Syrian Christian
family of the Ipes. The plot develops around the ill-fated forbidden
relationship of the high caste Ammu, the twins’ mother and the
untouchable, Velutha. The death of the English Sophie Mol
(Ammu’s brother, Chacko’s daughter) by drowning in the
Meenachal river sparks off the events in the story. To save
themselves and their mother the twins are forced by their grand
aunt, Baby Kochamma to testify Velutha as the murderer. The
realisation that they had unknowingly been responsible for the
brutal death of their beloved Velutha in the police station shatters
their childhood leading to their estrangement.
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Roy’s close acquaintance with the Syrian Christian

community of Kottayam, to which she belongs, features
predominantly in her novel. The Syrian Christians popularly known
as ‘Suriyani Christians’ claim to have the most ancient Christian
tradition in India (Kulirani 1349). The legend of St Thomas, disciple
of Jesus Christ who landed at Cranganore on the Kerala coast in 52
AD and converted high caste Hindu families remains an integral
part of their identity. The family in Roy’s novel considers
themselves to be the privileged descendants of Reverend E. John
Ipe (known as Punnyan Kunju–the Little Blessed One), a priest of
the Mar Thoma church who had been blessed by Patriarch of
Antioch of the sovereign head of the Syrian Christian Church (22-
23). The Syrian Christians who trace their origins to Apostle
Thomas have been encapsulated within the caste society for
centuries and share a recognised place in it. James Massey claims
that around 1020 AD the Syrian Christians were accorded the
status of caste Hindus. They were given a list of seventy-two
privileges including the right to ride an elephant, to be preceded
by drums and trumpets and have criers announcing their approach
so that people from lower castes would withdraw into the streets
(17). Since then they claim to be of high caste Hindu descent as
well as function as a caste community in Kerala and their churches
observe this rigid caste discrimination as well. Though they
practise untouchability like the local Hindus and also share many
customs in common with them, the community harbours prejudice
towards high caste Hindus and even with other sects in the
Christian community.
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The Syrian Christians who populate Kottayam and its

neighbouring areas in large numbers cultivated an ally in the
Empire and with the English language to propagate its growth in
the region. The community tried to master the language by
educating their children in elite colleges and thus turned out to be
a “living proof of the success of Macaulay's civilising mission” (John
26). The community’s fascination for the colonialist ideology is
evident in Pappachi whom Roy projects to be a stereotypical victim
of the colonial project. In the stifling heat of Ayemenem, the
Imperial Entomologist wore his “well pressed three-piece suit and
his gold pocket watch” (49) and went around in his sky blue
Plymouth, bought from an old Englishman in Munnar. His daughter,
Ammu refers to the Oxford educated, Pappachi as “an incurable
British CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi
meant shit-wiper” (51). Pappachi “was charming and urbane with
visitors, and stopped short of fawning on them if they happened to
be white” (18). When Ammu cites the reason of her divorce being
the attempted rape of
Mr. Hollick, her husband‘s English boss, Pappachi refuses to believe
her “not because he thought well of her husband, but simply
because he didn‘t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman,
would covet another man‘s wife” (42). Roy explains through
Chacko, that such people were called Anglophiles (people whose
mind was brought to a state which made them behave like the
English)–Pappachi was one and so were all the members of the Ipe
family: “Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own
history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints
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had been swept away” (52). Though Chacko’s wife, Margaret was a
“shopkeeper’s daughter” (167), Mammachi and Baby Kochamma
respect her for being English. The grand preparations for Sophie
Mol’s arrival and the training lessons in English given to the twins
to meet Sophie Mol are also on this account. Even Ammu’s mindset
wishes for “a smooth performance” from her children (145). The
love for the English texts and movies ingrained in the twins at a
very early age are “extended exercise[s] in Anglophilia” (55). The
Imperial Entomologist, the Rhodes scholar, the Plymouth car, Elvis
records, the playing of Handel's Water Music on the violin – are all
caricatured in the novel to impart the inability of the community to
shake off its colonial hangover.

Roy projects the class antagonism and class exploitation in

terms of caste. Caste segregation is prevalent in all the regions of
the country but in Kerala this pollution is more deeply ingrained
and assigned a greater importance. Roy refers to Kerala as a
complex society being simultaneously progressive and parochial
(“The Colonization” 31). In Kerala, although Christianity, Hinduism
and Islam coexist in harmony and the state has the highest literacy
rate, the region still continues to be caste-ridden and male-
dominated. Issues related to caste and the treatment of the
untouchables has been earlier addressed by Raja Rao and Mulk Raj
Anand. Rao’s attempt was to bring a village steeped in orthodoxy
under the sway of the Gandhian movement and the upliftment of
the untouchables formed only a part of it. In Anand’s Untouchable,
Bakha is the uneducated untouchable longing to break free of the
oppressive caste system. Despite the inhuman treatment meted
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out, he refrains from converting to Christianity. The treatment of

the Dalits is one of the major concerns of Small Things. After the
British occupied Malabar, a number of lower caste Hindus (like the
Paravans, Pulayas and Pelayas) converted to Christianity and
joined the Anglican Church in the hope of being freed from the
curse of untouchability. Mammachi offers historical information
regarding the pathetic conditions endured by the Paravans in the
olden times when they had to crawl backwards with a broom,
sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian
Christians would not defile themselves. They were not allowed to
walk on public roads, cover their upper bodies and had “to put
their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their
polluted breath away from those whom they addressed” (74).
Ayemenem and nearby areas of Kottayam had a sizable population
of converted Christians who were promised equality status on
embracing Christianity. The converts, known as the Rice-Christians
soon realised that “they had jumped from the frying pan into the
fire” (74) as they continued being treated as the lowest layer
within the Christian community:

They [Paravans] were made to have separate

churches, with separate services, and separate priests.
As a special favour they were even given their own
separate Pariah Bishop. After independence they found
they were not entitled to any Government benefits like
job reservations or bank loans at low interest rates,
because officially, on paper, they were Christians, and
therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep
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away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not

being allowed to leave footprints at all. (74)

In his fictional work, The House of Blue Mangoes (2002), David

Davidar crystallises the issues of ostracism practised against the
untouchables and the women in his fictitious village of Chevathar
in Tamil Nadu. Davidar’s description of the treatment meted out to
the new converts (26) bears a close resemblance to that of the
Paravans mentioned earlier in Roy’s novel.

In Small Things, the Dalit family of Vellya Pappen and his two
sons, Kuttappen and Velutha have endured this scourge for ages.
Generations of servitude and his personal gratitude for the
mortgaged glass eye makes Vellya Pappen, the “Old World
Paravan” (76), disclose the “unthinkable” affair between Velutha
and Ammu to his landlords. Kuttappen unlike his brother was “a
good, safe Paravan” who “could neither read nor write” (207).
Velutha who belongs to the new generation of Paravans is a skilled
carpenter and a member of the Communist Party. As a child he
would bring tiny hand-made toys and would hold them out to
Ammu so that she could take them without touching him. He had
attended the Untouchables’ School founded by Punnyan Kunju and
had learnt carpentry from Johann Klein, a carpenter from the
carpenter’s guild in Baveria when he had conducted a workshop in
Kottayam. Mammachi says if “he hadn’t been a Paravan, he might
have become an engineer” (75).
Deeply rooted in the geo-cultural reality of Ayemenem are
the issues of patriarchy and the subalternity of women. Pappachi,
the male chauvinist, finds it difficult to tolerate his exceptionally
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talented and enterprising wife, Mammachi whom he beats every

night with a brass vase. As he feels that college education was
unnecessary for a girl, Ammu is forced to return to Aymenem after
his retirement from Delhi. On Pappachi’s demise, his son Chacko,
“an Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality” resigns his job as
a lecturer in Madras and returns to Ayemenem (65). Though
Mammachi had been running her pickle business quite successfully
till then, her son displaces her from the management, registers it
as a partnership and informs Mammachi that she was “the sleeping
partner”(57). Despite the fact that Ammu did as much work in the
factory, Chacko referred to anything related to the factory as “his”
and makes it clear to Ammu that “’what’s yours is mine and what’s
mine is also mine’”(57). To carry on his libertine relationships with
the women of the pickle factory, Mammachi had a separate
entrance built for Chacko’s room. She slipped money to the
“objects of his ‘Needs’” which they took because “they had young
children and old parents. Or husbands who spent all their earnings
in toddy bars”(169). This patriarchal domination exhibited by some
other male characters as well, assist the novelist to forcefully put
across the exploitative nature of the society that cruelly crush the
helpless lot of women, children and the downtrodden.

In a closed and claustrophobic society as the Ayemenem

community, the individual acts of resistance and subversion are
overwhelmed by the crushing weight of customs. The moral code
of conduct imposed on its members brings to light the pettiness of
the Ipe family. Roy’s juxtaposition of Chacko’s sexual advances to
the factory workers with Ammu’s “trangressive” affair with Velutha
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brutally exposes the differences meted out to the siblings within

the family. This double morality of the traditional conservative
society is manifest in the lot of the first generation of women in the
novel who willingly succumb to patriarchal dominance.
Mammachi’s acceptance of Chacko’s “Man’s Needs” converts to
one of unmanageable fury when it comes to her daughter:

She [Ammu] had defiled generations of breeding (The

Little Blessed One . . . an Imperial Entomologist, a
Rhodes Scholar from Oxford) and brought the family to
its knees. For generations to come, for ever now,
people would point at them at weddings and funerals.
At baptisms and birthday parties. They’d nudge and
whisper. It was all finished now. (258)

Ammu, a divorcee from a marriage to a Bengali Hindu is forced to

come back to her home in Ayemenem. At the age of twenty-eight
she knew that her life had been lived and she had no more
chances: “There was only Ayemenem now. A front verandah and a
back verandah. A hot river and a pickle factory. And in the
background, the constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval”
(43). Ammu and her children are alienated and undergo
humiliation. The “play” staged in verandah of Ayemenem House on
the arrival of Sophie Mol and her English mother reinforces
Ammu’s “Locusts Stand I” (57) in the house. Roy is here referring
to the personal experiences encountered by her own mother, Mary
Roy who had to return to her family home after her divorce. As
Syrian Christian women were not entitled to any rights in their
parental home, Mary Roy had approached court thereby securing a
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verdict in her favour. Later she had set up a school, Corpus Christie
similar to the one Ammu plans to begin in Small Things. Being the
offsprings of an intercaste marriage and even more the children of
a divorced Syrian Christian mother who had no rights in her
parental home, their standing in the family hierarchy is made clear
from the narrative. Baby Kochamma spitefully addresses the
children as “Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self respecting Syrian
Christian would ever marry” and wants them to realise that they
were living on sufferance in their maternal grandmother’s house.
Her own inability to get married to Father Mulligan which becomes
her lifelong malady makes her resent Ammu whom she saw
quarrelling with her fate –“the fate of the wretched Man-less
woman”(45). Ammu slips into a forbidden love affair with Velutha,
the Paravan knowing quite well the price she would have to pay for
defying the prevailing caste restrictions: “Two lives, Two children’s
childhoods. And a history lesson for future offenders” (336). The
social taboos not only alienate Ammu and destroy Velutha but also
trap the twins into the family’s conspiracy of eliminating Velutha.
This leaves Estha mentally and emotionally wounded plunging him
into a world of silence while Rahel suffers from utter insecurity.
After Estha is “Returned” to his father in Calcutta, Ammu moves
away from the Ayemenem house and Rahel stays back. Roy like
Rahel was educated by the family and she says it was “like being
at the top of the bottom of the heap–without the blinkered single-
mindedness of the completely oppressed nor the flabby self-
indulgence of the well-to-do” (“The Colonization” 34).
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Roy empowers her marginal characters to blossom into their

true selves once they abandon the confines of their home-town.
Ammu elopes with the Bengali she meets in Calcutta to escape
from the stifling atmosphere of Ayemenem. She returns only to be
dragged into a liaison with the Paravan. Rahel leaves for Delhi to
learn architecture where she meets Larry McCaslin who
appreciates her for being “a jazz tune”(18). Later, her job at a
petrol station in New York lands her into a world of violence and
mayhem. Aijaz Ahmad observes: “The leaving of the family home
and the sowing of wild oats endows her with an autonomous self
that would have been denied to her, as it was denied to her
mother, in the stifling world of the provincial, caste-bound gentility
of her family”(“Reading”105). Even Velutha is shown to be
assertive as he ventures out of Ayemenem. Ultimately, Roy’s
characters return to the Ayemenem community of Baby
Kochamma(s) and K.N.M Pillai(s) that fails to come out of its strait-
jacketed conventions. In this context Aijaz Ahmed’s argument is
relevant. He observes that “culture is not always a zone of
freedom, self-expression, self-realisation, community-sharing, etc.
Culture, including traditional culture, is just as frequently a zone of
Un-freedom and entrapment, as any number of oppressed
members of specific communities can tell you”(On Communalism
107).

The period the novel is set in, lets Roy use Christianity and
Marxism, the two historically momentous factors in the political
and social formation of Kerala as an engaging backdrop of the
novel. Murari Prasad notes: “Christianity sustains the divisions
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inherited from Hinduism; Marxism just like a superficial graft,

accommodates residual feudalism and traditional caste divides”
(“Articulating the Marginal”162). To the wealthy, estate-owning
Syrian Christians of Kerala who voted for the Congress party,
Communism “represented a fate worse than death” (66). This is
mirrored through the reaction of Baby Kochamma at the
Communist rally on her way to Cochin. The insult by one of the
protestors makes her hold Velutha indirectly responsible for it. Roy
attempts to analyse the reasons for the growth of the Communist
movement especially in Kerala and Bengal:

The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala

insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly
questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden,
extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked
from within the communal divides, never challenging
them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail
revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and
orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
(66-67)

The novelist furnishes details of Kerala being the first state to

democratically elect a Communist government to power in 1957
under the veteran leader E.M.S Namboodiripad. The Communists
find themselves in a piquant situation, “having to govern a people
and foment revolution simultaneously” (67). The next two years of
their regime found Kerala on the brink of a civil war. The
government which was dismissed by Nehru came back to power
ten years later. The peaceful measures now adopted by
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Namboodiripad angered the Chinese Communists who switched

their patronage to the new, militant faction of the communist
party, the Naxalites. Roy gives a description of the atrocities
committed by them in the Palaghat region just as Nair does in The
Better Man. Namboodiripad expelled the Naxalites from his party.
The rally mentioned in the novel that takes place in Cochin as a
result of this also demands certain rights for the labourers and the
Dalits. The keg of ancient anger against caste discrimination fuses
with the class struggle as also the militancy of the Naxalite
movement and amalgamates into the rally of which Velutha
becomes a part of. Nevertheless, they end up being mere pawns in
the complex game of power politics.
The novel brings out the complicity of the Communist leaders
in sustaining the ossified social practices through the caricatured
K.N.M. Pillai. The Comrade being the next candidate for the
Kottayam by-elections and ironically described as “Ayemenem’s
own Crusader for Justice” and “Spokesman of the Oppressed” sees
Velutha’s ‘untouchability’ as a threat due to his position in the
party (303). When accused of the false murder of Sophie Mol and
the rape of Ammu, Velutha, the only card holding member of the
party, approaches the local communist leader for protection.
However, Pillai spurns him saying that “it is not in the Party’s
interests to take up such matters. Individuals’ interest is
subordinate to the organisation’s interests. Violating Party
Discipline means violating Party Unity”(287). Pillai’s Press that
prints labels for the pickle factory surreptitiously holds meetings in
the evenings to urge its workers on to a revolution: “In his
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speeches he managed a clever mix of pertinent local issues and

grand Maoist rhetoric which sounded even grander in Malayalam”
(120). Pillai represents a degenerate political tradition which is
nothing more than a means of self-promotion to cling on to the
citadel of local power by playing the old “divide and rule” game.
Chacko, the self proclaimed Marxist and owner of the pickle
factory(“trying on different costumes that he blurred the battle
lines”[122]) is apprehensive of Velutha’s association with the party
and fears that his low caste status might antagonise the other
workers. As Velutha is adept in handling machines, he is
indispensable to the factory. The problem is solved by Mammachi
who pays Velutha “less than she would a Touchable carpenter but
more than she would a Paravan” (77). The factory is witness to the
replay of the power structure and exploitation of the women.
Chacko entices pretty women to his room on the pretext of
lecturing them on labour rights and trade union law. Roy’s
depiction of the Communist movement and her sarcastic
references to the comrades has evoked sharp criticism. It is to be
admitted that Roy has made certain distortions by evading the
positive attributes of the Communist movement and also the role
of E.M.S in his fight against casteism in Kerala. However, to be fair
to Roy, the novel need not be read as an assault on communism as
it has to be acknowledged that “she has treated all her characters
as well as opinions across the political spectrum alike, with the
same degree of critical detachment and sarcasm” (Raveendran,
Texts 94). The social apparatuses like the church, the school and
the police – all find themselves at the end of the firing line. The
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church ordained to be the upholder of values promotes segregation

and refuses to bury Ammu on account of her “transgressive” act.
The police and politicians forming a nexus turn out to be
“mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine”
(262). Roy satirises the puritanical attitude of the Christian
missionaries through the convent school and exposes the
ideological and political programmes behind the visits of Christian
missionaries.

The architect in Roy builds and renovates houses in her novel

with flair and an eye for intricate details. Roy explores her region in
terms of the three different spaces in the novel. The grandiose
Ayemenem house with its pickle factory and the Plymouth is firmly
located in the narrative: “Nine steps led from the driveway up to
the front verandah. The elevation gave it a dignity of a stage and
everything that happened there took on the aura and significance
of a performance” (165). The house is central to the narrative that
unfolds itself by expressing a way of life. The abandoned Kari
Saipu’s house across the Meenachal river which stood in the
middle of a rubber estate constitutes the second space. The house
that had been empty for years is believed to be haunted by the
ghost of an” Englishman [Kari Saipu] who had ‘gone native’” (52).
He was the Black Sahib who had assimilated into the Kerala
culture, “who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s
own Kurtz” (52). Despite being an Englishman, he was alienated
from the Ayemenem society on the grounds of his homosexual
relations and had later shot himself. The ghostly colonial vestige of
Kari Saipu’s bungalow is later mistaken by the twins for the History
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House referred to by Chacko, by which he means the edifice of

European history from which Indians are barred:“’But we can’t go
in,’. . .’because we’ve been locked out”(53). The twins seek shelter
here after running away from home where they witness History re-
enact itself to suppress the subaltern, “to negotiate its terms and
collect its dues“(199). B. Hariharan, in his article “Orienting Spaces
of Living” regards the Ayemenem house to be almost like a mirror
image of Kari Saipu’s house: “Both houses have little secrets and
seem to announce their presence in the landscape”(89). In
contrast to these two houses stands Velutha’s hut huddled by
coconut, mango, cashew and bilimbi trees and the river flowing
behind it:

On the edge of the clearing, with its back to the river, a

low hut with walls of orange laterite plastered with
mud and a thatched roof nestled close to the ground,
as though it was listening to a whispered subterranean
secret. The low walls of the hut were the same colour
as the earth they stood on, and seemed to have
germinated from a house-seed planted in the ground,
from which right-angled ribs of earth had risen and
enclosed space. (205)

Twenty-three years later, when Rahel returns, the Ayemenem

house reflects a tale of the gradual decadence. The house, once a
symbol of grandeur is now a place where “filth had laid siege” (88).
The Plymouth, no longer in use had settled firmly in the ground
and the signboard of the pickle factory “rotted and fell inwards like
a collapsed crown” (295). While the older houses nestled among
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the rubber trees, around Ayemenem, now sprang “the new, freshly
baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-
benders and bank clerks who worked hard and unhappily in
faraway places” (13). Ayemenem’s population had swelled into a
little town still masquerading as a village.

Globalization forges inroads into the landscape of little

towns in the guise of the tourism industry. Manifestations of this
are apparent in Small Things, with the conversion of Kari Saipu’s
house into a Five Star Hotel named “Heritage.” As the waters of
the Meenachal have become thick and toxic, the Hotel has its own
swimming pools. However, as “the trees were still green, the sky
still blue” as Roy sarcastically puts it, the brochures described their
“smelly paradise” as ‘God’s Own Country’ (125). The “Regional
Flavour” is enhanced through the truncated performances of
kathakali staged by the artists near the swimming pools: ”While
the drummers drummed and the dancers danced, hotel guests
frolicked with their children in the water” (127). The back verandah
of the house where Velutha was beaten to death by the policemen
is converted to the airy hotel kitchen where “the disembowelling of
lesser mammals” (127) takes place. As a promotional gimmick, the
hotel staff enlighten their guests that the main building of the hotel
had been the ancestral home of Comrade E.M.S Namboodiripad,
“’Kerala’s Mao Tse-tung’” (126). Cultural artefacts that came with
the House were kept for display “with edifying placards which said
Traditional Kerala Umbrella and Traditional Bridal dowry Box.” In
her discussion of tourism in Kerala, Annapurna Garimella draws
attention to this trend of showcasing: “Like many first-world
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countries that transcended their feudal and later their industrial or

colonial origins only to recoup and recast them as culture and
tradition, Kerala’s middle and upper classes too are embracing
rejected traditions” (47). This “Regional Flavour” using kathakali is
also exploited by Chacko in the billboard of Paradise Pickles &
Preserves (127). It becomes yet another instance in the narrative
signifying “History and Literature enlisted by commerce” (126).
E.V. Ramakrishnan argues: “In the absence of an active public
sphere, culture would become mere entertainment, a leisure
activity with no social significance. The hegemony of globalization
reduces culture to a bazaar of exotica with no deeper history” (13).

Kathakali, the classical performing art of Kerala has been

used as a prominent motif to convey the deterioration that has
seeped into the cultural tradition of Kerala. The novel refers to the
times when kathakali was performed in the local temple courtyards
when the story that unfolded late at night ended only in the early
hours of dawn. Globalization and the market economy have forced
the kathakali artists to turn this traditional dance form to yet
another commodity merely for their survival: “So ancient stories
were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to
twenty-minute cameos”(127). His own children who have become
clerks, bus conductors and class IV non-gazetted officers deride
him: “In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He
hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can
tell”(230). Through her representation of kathakali, Roy implicates
the cultural commodification of this indigenous art form.
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The exposure to the cultures and commodities of the West

increasingly alienates “Foreign Returnees” from their homeland by
creating a “false sense of kinship with non-Western cultures”
(Ramakrishnan 13). Roy’s description of them at the Cochin airport
lays bare her cynicism:

And there they were, the Foreign Returnees, in

wash’n’wear suits and rainbow glasses. With an end to
grinding poverty in their Aristocrat suitcases. With
cement roofs for their thatched houses, and geysers
for their parents’ bathrooms[. . . .]Maxis and high
heels. Puff sleeves and lipstick. Mixy-grinders and
automatic flashes for their cameras [. . . .] With a
hunger for kappa and meen vevichathu that they
hadn’t eaten for so long. With love and a lick of shame
that their families who had come to meet them were so
. . . so . . . gawkish. Look at the way they dressed!
Surely they had more suitable airport wear! Why did
Malayalees have such awful teeth?

And the airport itself! More like the local bus

depot! The birdshit on the building! Oh the spitstains
on the kangaroos!
Oho! Going to the dogs India is. (140)

Globalization’s cultural influence takes its toll on characters like

Baby Kochamma too. She had transferred her unrequited love for
the Irish Jesuit to raise a “fierce, bitter garden”(26). After half a
century’s “pernickety attention, the ornamental garden had been
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abandoned” for a new love: “She presided over the World in her
drawing room on satellite TV” (27). The change was not a gradual
one but something that happened overnight:

Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups

d’état – they all arrived on the same train. They
unpacked together. . . .And in Ayemenem, where once
the loudest sound had been the musical bus horn, now
whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill
Clinton could be summoned up like servants. And so
while her ornamental garden wilted and died, Baby
Kochamma . . . watched The Bold and The Beautiful
and Santa Barbara. . . . (27)

The captivating stuff she encounters does not ease her frustrations
in any way but alienates her from her home and her world. Her old
fears of the Marxist-Leninist menace are rekindled by the growing
numbers of disposed people and she views “ethnic cleansing,
famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture” (28). Roy
posits globalization to be another permutation of the coloniser’s
practice which elides and glosses over socio-cultural moorings of
the varied regions.

By placing the inter-caste relationship at the centre of the

novel, Roy equates it to the entrenched social inequities prevalent
in the Kerala society. She places these socially sanctioned terms
under the umbrella term of History (capitalised). Innumerable such
references to History are strewn all over the novel as “History’s
smell” (55), History in live performance (309), “History’s twisted
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chickens would come home to roost” (283) and “History walking

the dog” (288) to mention a few. The recurrence of the word
History in the novel is not to present a stable pattern of facts and
events but to reinforce the weight it imposes upon the present
lives of its characters. Priyamvada Gopal considers this “persistent
underscoring of ‘History’ not only as a determining force but as a
self-evidently explanatory category [which] has the paradoxical
effect of emphasizing the workings of Big God” (158). For Roy,
History becomes a potpourri of numerous instances from the lives
of her characters, thus sacrificing chronology. Roy reconstitutes
her narrative with a thorough mixing of history and story, fact and
fiction, the private and the public, and the big and small things.
She interrogates western linear historiography through the
metaphor of the Earth woman. Chacko describes the Earth woman,
the four-thousand six- hundred-million-years-old earth to be a
forty-six-year-old woman like their Aleyamma teacher. As the first
animals appeared only when she was forty, human civilisation, the
most recent “began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life”
(54). Hence Chacko makes the twins understand that “the whole
of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the
Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of
knowledge–was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s
eye”(54). By radically deviating from the dominant model of
historiography prevalent for over a century, Roy’s intention is to
deflate man’s claim to superiority over histories on account of his
reason by unlocking the laws of the universe. In doing so, she
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reaffirms the significance of the existence of the “small things”

while contrasting it with man’s diminutive role in the cosmos.

Beneath the grand monolithic narratives of national and

international worlds – caste, socialism and patriarchy– that refuse
to acknowledge the ‘small voices’, there exists another world
belonging to the “small things”. This world is implicit in the novel.
In a conversation with David Barsamian, Roy voices her firm views
on the inconsistencies of the western concepts of using reason to
understand the universe (“The Colonization” 41). Her plea is “to
respect and revere the earth’s secrets.” Roy’s effort is not to
isolate the ordinary man from understanding things happening
around him and to him but “to create links, to join the dots, to tell
politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real” (“The
Colonization” 36). This would be to make a connection between a
man narrating to his child about his life in a village before it was
submerged by a reservoir and connecting it to the WTO, the IMF
and the World Bank. For Roy, her novel becomes a subtle
mediation of this interconnectedness:

The God of Small Things is a book which connects the

very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it is
the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of
the water in a pond or the quality of moonlight on a
river or how history and politics intrude into your life, . .
. into the most intimate relationships between people–
parents and children, siblings and so on.” (“The
Colonization” 36)
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The world as seen mainly through the consciousness of Rahel

intensely registers the minute details of the environment. The
narrative opens with a description of the south-west monsoon in
Ayemenem:“The countryside turns an immodest green.
Boundaries blur as tapioca fences root and bloom. Brick walls turn
mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles . . . . And small
fish appear in puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways”
(1). From this very delightfully realistic opening description to the
very end, the “whisper and scurry of small lives” pulsates
throughout the novel.

The concept of a bioregion where man and the region are not
two separate but interdependent entities, as discussed in the first
chapter, has been exemplified through Roy’s text. The Meenachal
river (originally the Meenachilaru in Aymanam) cuts through the
narrative and into the lives of the members of the Ayemenem
House. The river forms the backdrop of the Ammu-Velutha
relationship and is the silent witness to the tragic death of Sophie
Mol. The river is presented in two time frames in the novel– the old
and the new. The old river was unfathomable and Kuttappen warns
the children of its treacherous nature. The twins learn to fish and
swim in the Meenachal. The river had taught them “the bright
language of the dragonflies” (203) and the lessons of silence,
patience and observance. Roy reveals their intimacy with the river:

They [the twins] knew the slippery stone steps

(thirteen) before the slimy mud began. They knew the
afternoon weed that flowed inwards from the
backwaters of Komarakom. They knew the smaller fish.
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The flat, foolish pallathi, the silver paral, the wily,

whiskered koori, the sometimes karimeen. (203)

The river, in a sense provides solace to the characters of the novel.

Rahel dreams of the river as they anxiously wait for Sophie Mol at
the airport, Estha (re-Returned) walks on the banks of the river and
Ammu spends the best moments of her life with Velutha here.

The environmental crisis which has been a major issue of

discussion in Roy’s essays could be extrapolated from her fictional
narrative. Human actions such as destruction of forests and
building of dams result in regional imbalance. Radhakamal
Mukherjee observes that “the region is not a passive entity but a
living organism which exhibits the harmonious working of different
living systems such as vegetable, the animal and the human
worlds” (23). The new Meenachal river with its “smell of shit”(125)
and plastic bags floating on its weedy surface presents the pitiable
plight of most rivers in contemporary Kerala. Owing to the
excessive use of pesticides bought with the World Bank loans, the
fish in the river had died and those that survived suffered from fin-
rot. The old river which could evoke fear had shrunk into a mere
trickle but “she had grown” (124). The saltwater barrage built to
regulate the inflow of saltwater from the backwaters (that opened
in the Arabian Sea) makes explicit the dubious motives of the
political parties and the government who vied for votes from the
influential farmer lobby. Ayemenem now had two harvests instead
of one: “More rice, for the price of a river” (124). Roy’s indictment
is also towards the Green Revolution for its failure to address the
issue of the diminishing productivity of the land by bringing canal
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irrigation, digging bore wells and by the indiscriminate use of

chemical fertilisers. “The fight against the Sardar Sarovar dam”,
says Roy, “has come to represent far more than a fight for one
river” (“The Greater Common”49). It has raised doubts about an
entire political system:

What is at issue now is the very nature of our

democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers?
Its forests? Its fish? These are huge questions. . . .They
are being answered in one voice by every institution at
its command- the army, the police, the bureaucracy,
the courts. And not just answered, but answered
unambiguously in bitter, brutal ways” (“The Greater
Common”50).

Roy strikes at the Indian government and the World Bank for their
insensitivity to the despair of the innumerable tribals in the
Narmada Valley and her observations are reminiscent of Small
Things: “Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to
their powers?”(132).

In a perceptive study of the novel, “Of Gods and Gods and

Men”, M.K. Naik writes that it is Velutha who gives the novel its
title (225). Ammu visualises him as the God of small things, of
belonging to the history and culture of the land: “That he
belonged to it. That it belonged to him. The water. The mud. The
trees. The fish. The stars” (333-34). It could be one of the ways in
which Roy gives agency to “the small voices of history” through
her text. Though Roy presents the subaltern male to be efficient
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and talented, he suffers at attempting to make an upward social

mobility from his “untouchable” status. Arguably though, the title
does not equate to Velutha alone. The novel glorifies the trivial and
insignificant things. Jason Cowley, one of the five Booker prize
judges, deliberating on “Why we Chose Arundhati” opines that her
achievement lies in never forgetting the small things of life, “the
insects and flowers, wind and water, the outcaste and the
despised” (28). The symbolism is inherent in the very title of the
chapter entitled “Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti.”
The Laltain signifies the grand narratives of religion, caste, society
and tradition which combine forces to crush the individual. The
“small things” that Rahel describes are the ones that are often
glossed over by history and its various representations. She alludes
to the larger hegemonic forces operating in the name of societal
norms that wipe the “small things” out of existence. Indirectly, Roy
says it’s time we supported our small heroes “to fight specific wars
in specific ways”:

Who knows, perhaps that’s what the twenty-first

century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big.
Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big
contradictions, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes.
Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small
god up in heaven readying herself for us. (“The Greater
Common”53 )

The title also suggests, as John Mee puts it “the dislocations

between the ‘Small God’ of individual lives and the Big God of the
 273

nation”(375). The Big/ Small binary is juxtaposed throughout the

text:

The life in the novel is divided into two set forces,

locked in a grim mortal fight. The upper world consists
of the burden of history, dead limbs of tradition, family
culture and pride, patriarchy and political opportunism–
the God of Big Things. The other layer comprises
children, insecure women, untouchables and working
people with their struggle for identity and
independence, and natural urges and desires- the God
of Small Things. (Sharma and Talwar 46-47)

While Naik traces the title to be an echo of the Shakespearean

lines ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for
their sport’[King Lear IV.i. 36-37] (“Of Gods”226). P.P. Raveendran
detects the theme of sin and guilt consciousness in the novel to
have an ideological affinity with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” and traces the title to be an “unconscious take-off
“of the following lines from Part VII of Coleridge’s poem: “He
prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things great and small; / for the
dear God who loveth us,/ He made and loveth all”(Texts 93).

Though the narrative is chronologically divided between the

1960s and the 1990s, a major portion of it hinges itself to the past
and around the events of December 1969 with the arrival of Sophie
Mol. The narrative mode, however, makes it apparent that it was
“only one way of looking at it” and “it could be argued that it
actually began thousands of years ago” (33). Roy maps those
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thousand years with references to concrete historical facts relating

to the conquests of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and then
even to times before Christianity came to Kerala and to the days
when the Love Laws were made. The constant back and forth
shifting of the narrative indicates the non-linear progress of the
novel. Roy makes use of the devices of cinematic technique with
flashbacks and flash forwards as William Faulkner does in The
Sound and the Fury (1929) to narrate the story of the Compson
family.

Roy weaves her narrative strategies with the oppressive

socio-cultural realities that her characters are confronted with. In
doing so it closely overlaps Ranajit Guha’s theorising of the “small
voices of history.” Guha observes that when the small voices get a
hearing, it will do so only by “interrupting the telling in the
dominant version, breaking up its storyline and making a mess of
its plot” (“The Small Voice” 316). As a major part of the story is
narrated as seen through the eyes of Rahel, it is only natural that
the trauma encountered by the children has forced her narrative as
well as Roy’s to shudder and “to leave none of its nuances, values,
associations, and contests standing where they had been in the
original” (Guha, “The Authority” 476). In a novel which gives
prominence to the small voices such tremors are bound to happen.
Dieter Riemenschneider commenting on her technique observes
that it breaks up “the linear time sequence of the story and
mingles and combines present, past and future, memories, dreams
and allusive foresight as effortlessly as it shifts from one point of
view to another”(“. . .In the Days”128).
 275

The text succeeds in “writing back to the empire” through

the linguistic processes of appropriation and abrogation, as
described by Ashcroft et al. Roy has freed herself from the
shackles of traditional stiffness in the usage of English and has in
the process created a new “english” to absorb the nuances of her
region. Referring to her innovative use of language, Nancy Ellen
Batty observes:

Through the use of free indirect discourse, occasional

lapses into stream of consciousness narrative, and
frequent recourse to word play, Roy manages to
capture the immediacy of perception from a child’s
point of view, using its juxtaposition against the
impoverished and often cynical interior lives of the
adults to condemn the latter’s self-interested actions.
(334)

The language of the text highlights the rich overpowering regional

element. On examining the concept of regionalism in this study, a
closer look at her appropriation of the Malayalam language in
Small Things is warranted. Aijaz Ahmad who has been critical of
her ideology and political positioning vis-à-vis communism
acclaims her as “the first Indian writer in English where a
marvellous stylistic resource becomes available for provincial,
vernacular culture without any effect of exoticism or
estrangement, and without the book reading as a
translation”(108). Through her interpolation of words from
Malayalam, Roy ascertains that the intensity of the world she
perceived remains intact. The rhyme on trains, one of the first
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lessons learnt in school (“Koo-koo kokum theevandi” [285]) and

the vellam song (“Thaiy thaiy thaka thaiy thaiy thome”[211]) sung
by the children are some of the favourites of Keralites. Similar to
the Kathakali man’s association with the stories of Bhima,
Duryodhana and Dushasana, Roy’s use of the language draws
succour from the events of her own childhood and life:

To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and

his childhood. He has grown up with them. They are
the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in.
They are his windows of seeing. 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
laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across
whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to
examine a wilting leaf. . . .He can reveal the nugget of
sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of
shame in a seal of glory. (229-30)

Roy’s style of toying with the language and the perception of her
region, the world and the universe is all contained in the above
quote.

The essence of her Ayemenem is captured through the

graphic descriptions of the weather, the Meenachal river, the flora
and fauna, the kathakali performances and its people. The local
colour is further established through Adoor Basi, the ace comedian
of Malayalam movies of yesteryears (143), the song from the
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popular Malayalam movie, Chemmeen (219-20) and the folk song

sung by Kuttappen (206). mittam(295), chenda(192), Akkara(196),
’Aiyyo paavam’(131), ickilee(177) are among the numerous words
used from the vernacular.

The untranslated expressions in the text begin from the very

kinship terms associated with the names of the characters as
addressed in the Kottayam region among Christian families–Baby
Kochamma, Pappachi, Mammachi, Ammachi, Esthappen and
Sophie Mol. Names of food items like “chakka vilachethu”(138),
“idi appams for breakfast, kanji and meen for lunch”(210) “avalose
undas”(273); items of clothing and ornaments(14) appear in the
text as unitalicised whereas terms like veshya used by the
Inspector on account of Ammu’s connections with the untouchable
have been italicised.

Belonging to avowed Anglophile family, the use of English

authenticates their aversion for the mother tongue. Chacko insists
on speaking in English at home but resorts to Malayalam when he
thanks the protestor in the rally for shutting the car’s bonnet at the
level crossing in Cochin (“‘Thanks, keto!’...’Valarey thanks!’”[70]).
Mammachi addresses the servant as “’Kando Kochu Mariye’” (178)
and Baby Kochamma uses “meeshas” in Malayalam in connection
with Inspector Thomas Mathew. This stresses not only the deviance
from standard English but also makes clear the power relations
imbricated within the society. Under Chacko’s influence, the twins
seem to enjoy speaking English, though in private they speak their
native language Malayalam. They are punished to write
“‘impositions’– I will always speak in English” a hundred times each
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by Baby Kochamma for the sin committed (36). The use of English,
through its very utterance, was an indication of the supremacy of
the white civilisation against the vernacular. Their naughty
behaviour of reading English backwards signifies the rebellion of
the colonised against the coloniser. This recalls Bhabha’s concept
of mimicry, mentioned earlier, which simultaneously discloses the
ambivalence of the colonial discourse as well as disrupts it. This
obsequiousness to English, in a sense, recycles a similar history of
the colonialist enterprise. Hence in the novel, Pappachi and his
sister, Baby Kochamma are akin to the coloniser imposing new
regimes on the women and children of the family.

Vernacular speech is mainly resorted to by the characters

who do not belong to the Ipe family as also those of the lower
strata of Ayemenem society. Cynthia Van den Driesen considers
Roy’s use of untranslated words as “perhaps the most arresting
mode of appropriation” which forces “the reader of the master text
to negotiate this encounter with the opposed cultural identity of
the racial Other” (369). The critic further points out that by
reverting to the vernacular it “serves as a mode of reinforcing a
sense of special intimacy, even a collusion between speaker and
person addressed.” Comrade K.N.M. Pillai who converses to Chacko
in stilted idiomatic English switches to Malayalam when he
discusses the role of Velutha as a communist and the undue
privileges he obtains at the pickle factory (“Oru kariyam
parayattey“[277] or when affectionately addressing his wife as “
‘Allay edi, Kalyani?’” [278]). Other such expressions are used by
the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man(101), Murlidharan at the level
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crossing(64), the workers of the pickle factory(171), Kochu Maria

(179, 185) and Kuttappen(206). This moulding of a new hybrid
vocabulary assists the overall framework of the novel in staging a
protest against the marginalising of local cultures. U.R.
Ananthamurthy considers that the best effects of Roy’s language
“lie in her great ability to mimic the Syrian Christian Malayalam”
(132). The Kottayam dialect of Malayalam is brought into the
dialogue to create a sociolinguistic authenticity (Small Things 128).
An imitation of the Malayalee speaker’s English accent is created in
the rendering of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Lochinvar”(271-72) and
Mark Antony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “I
cometoberry Caesar, not to praise him./ Theevil that mendoo lives
after them/ The goodisoft interred with their bones;’”(274-75).
Other such indigenised pronunciation of English words are found in
Amayrica (129), Die-vorced (130) one mint(134) and stoo (210).
Priyamvada Gopal notes that “a bilingual sensibility where English
is not taken for granted as a first language opens up literary
possibilities in this novel, which is constantly aware of the joys and
pitfalls of language acquisition” (154). This is illustrated in the
following dialogue:

‘Thang God,’ Estha said.

‘Thank God, Estha,’ Baby Kochamma corrected
him. . . .
Their Prer NUN sea ayshun was perfect. (154)

At times, words from the vernacular have their English equivalents

juxtaposed for the sake of better comprehensibility (Emperors of
the Realm of Taste as a literal translation for Ruchi lokathinde
 280

Rajavu[46]). Critics like Vanajam Ravindran who have applauded

Roy’s ability to craft “words and phrases with panache”(100) have
pointed a few flaws in Roy’s use of Malayalam words. Modalali has
been explained for the reader as landlord and Kochu Thomban
used instead of Kochu Komban (102). Kombu meaning “tusk” in
Malayalam, the tusker should have been named as Kochu Komban.
The Malayalam words sprinkled throughout Small Things
seamlessly blends together with the narrative to evoke the
ambience of the region. Rarely does one feel it as a self-conscious
attempt to lend local colour. Roy disperses Malayalam words in her
text which allows her to “inscribe locality and difference” in her
text (Mullaney 65). The interesting feature to be noted here is that
Roy’s striking use of the language attempts to not only make
aware the metonymic gap that exists between the indigenous
culture and the colonialist on the other but also reflects a world
located in its own difference of experience. As Ashcroft notes, this
use of the language can be attributed to a writer’s creativity or
“the sign of an ethnographic function by which the ‘truth’ of
culture is inserted into the text by a process of metaphoric
embodiment” (Post-Colonial 76).

Roy‘s linguistic strategies function as a tool of resistance to

the West not just by appropriation but by endowing a new
legitimacy to this hybrid form. Recognising her innate ability to
sport with the language, Kamala Das observes that “Arundhati
uses English as a plaything” (qtd in Ghose 125). Roy‘s text tears
apart standard English as she subverts the traditional rules of
grammar and syntax, discards standard punctuation, invents
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neologisms (vomity [107], outdoorsy [13], stoppited [141]),

telescopes words (“furrywhirring”, “sariflapping”, “whatisit?”[6]) ,
splits them apart (“Bar Nowl”[193], “Mo-stunfortunate”[130 ]) and
reads them backwards (“NAIDNI YUB, NAIDI EB”[58], “’nataS in
their seye’“[60]). Commenting on her verbal wizardry and
exuberance, Jaydeep Sarangi states that she “re-pidgins” (Indian)
English through her stylistic experimentations (151). Rushdie’s
penchant for framing compound words has found a “feisty
contender“in Roy(Anjali Roy ”Making”79), few of which are “viable
die-able age” (3) “kind-schoolteacher-voice” (146), “dinner-plate-
eyed”(308). She also uses literary strategies such as repetition (of
lines and instances) thereby suggesting that each instance can be
metonymically extended to the larger social world. Commenting on
the structure of her book, the architect in Roy says in an interview
to Taisha Abraham:

To me the architecture of the book is something that I

worked very hard at. It really was like designing a
building . . . the use of time, the repetition of words
and ideas and feelings. It was really a search for
coherence—design coherence — in the way that every
last detail of a building — its doors and windows, its
structural components—have, or at least ought to
have, an aesthetic, stylistic integrity, a clear indication
that they belong to each other, as must a book. I
didn’t just write my book. I designed it. (90-91)

As in ethnographic narratives mentioned in the case of Pepper,

Roy’s novel too abounds in the delightful use of sight, sound, smell,
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taste and touch. She revels in capturing the colourful exuberance

permeating through the landscape (1, 79, 173). I. Shanmughadas
affirms that the sense of smell has been used to a telling effect by
the novelist (132). The smells of the pickle factory, of the “new”
river, of the Paravan and the smell of the river on Velutha’s body
are a noteworthy few. Innumerable descriptions of sound (6, 65,
319) taste (79, 211) and tactile sensations(179, 285, 335) also
feature in the novel.

Roy presents contemporary India as a multilingual society in

which Indian English operates as just one of its languages. In his
essay “Imagining India in English”, Murari Prasad traces her art of
unique phrasing and rhythm to the early Indian English writer G.V.
Desani (All about H. Hatterr [1948]) as well as Salman Rushdie. But
Prasad argues that she goes well beyond them in her “multi-level
linguistic manipulation”(128). Comparing the two, Aijaz Ahmad
claims that unlike Rushdie, Roy writes of the vernacular culture
with an assuredness and is “deeply committed to Realism to take
flight into magic Realism”(108). He applauds the naturalness in
which Roy uses English and adds that “the novel is actually felt in
English.” This would exonerate Roy from C.D. Narasimhaiah’s
charge that she has only a mere “feeling for words” (15) and not
into them as she fails to realise that “words are meant to mediate
experience while she is busy peddling them” (“Makers”17).

Roy observes that a writer “spends a lifetime journeying into

the heart of the language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the
distance between language and thought” (“Power Politics” 152).
“Language”, she says “is the skin on my thought” (T.Abraham 91).
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In Small Things, she “wrenches the English language from its

cultural roots” by using “collaged words, regional aphorisms, and
culturally eclipsed meanings” to create, as Taisha Abraham terms
it “her own ‘Locusts Stand I’” (89).
The novel’s preoccupation with the issues of social relevance
is presented by Roy through her natural and spontaneous wit
which supersedes all traces of sentimentality. Resorting to many of
the conventional devices such as irony, exaggeration and sarcasm,
she assaults the lopsided values of the male dominated society.
Roy’s prowess at characterisation and “her genius for individuating
detail” stems from her close acquaintance with the community
(Ahmad,”Reading”108). This is evident in her caricature of Kochu
Maria. She sports a head too large for her body like “a bottled
foetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology
lab and unshrivelled and thickened with age” (170), a nose like a
snout and fingers short and thick like cocktail sausages. Her
earlobes have been “distended into weighted loops that swung
around her neck” with earrings “sitting in them like gleeful children
in a merry-go-(not all the way) round.” Roy continues her
portrayal:

Though even in those days most Syrian Christian

women had started wearing saris, Kochu Maria still
wore her spotless half-sleeved white chatta with a V-
neck and her white mundu, which folded into a crisp
cloth fan on her behind. . . . .

She kept damp cash in her bodice which she tied

tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian
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breasts. Her kunukku earrings were thick and

gold. . . .Her right [ear] lobe had split open once and
was sewn together again by Dr Verghese Verghese.
Kochu Maria couldn’t stop wearing the kunukku
because if she did, how would people know that
despite her lowly cook’s job (seventy-five rupee a
month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a
Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. (170)

Small Things has been applauded for its fresh innovative

language, its narrative energy and its willingness to raise questions
that are socially relevant. P. P. Raveendran suggests that these
very same traits along with its strange and exotic theme make
India an “excellent saleable material” for the European literary
market( Texts 96). The veteran critic and writer, Sukumar Azhikode
remarks that the book is replete with sights for the foreign reader
as she hovers on the periphery and fails to delve into the region’s
intricacies (qtd in Krishnan 2). In his editorial entitled “The Booker
Prize: A Curse to Creativity”, Narasimhaiah’s finding fault with her
locale as a fanciful picture with only a remote resemblance to
Kerala (iv) is overly presumptuous. The critic accuses Roy for
creating an effect not through her keen observation but by the
manipulation of words whereby the place becomes “any place,
with her seeking in vain to invest airy nothing with a local
habitation and a name” (v). O.V. Vijayan supporting Roy, claims
that the novel lacks any parading, and hence she cannot be
blamed if the Westerners are allured to her writing. The
Malayalam novelist and short story writer, Paul Zacharia affirms
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that she has far more endearingly presented their little village of
Ayemenem and the stream which is no celebrity river like the
Pamba or the Periyar (Padmanabhan 107). Indira Nithyanandam
affirms that the novel is born in the soil of Kerala and is incapable
of taking root elsewhere (179).

A study of the novel leaves no doubt about the specificity of

the locale. As Roy confesses–“I wanted to drive my stake in here
[in Kerala]. I wanted to say that this is my place, that it deserves
literature. It was very important to me that it be real, these stars,
these leaves”(Mullaney 28). The novelist as an insider describing
her community draws a good deal of autobiographical matter from
her life and that of her family. In his article “Ayemenem Country”
Vinu Abraham points out that “Arundhati Roy has borrowed brick
and timber from two old buildings in the village – Pulliyampullil
House and Shanthi House – to construct her Ayemenem
House”(42). Rahel who shares Roy’s regional and religious
background is undoubtedly Arundhati and her mother, brother and
uncle bear resemblances to Ammu, Estha and Chacko in the novel.
Even the character of Kari Sapu, the cigar-smoking gay planter is a
grand uncle and the legend of his “sickled” ghost haunting the
estate seems to be drawn from Roy’s life at Ayemenem (M.Roy
26). The novel is soundly rooted in Ayemenem, though as Roy
states in the copyright page of the book that “liberties have been
taken with the location of rivers, level crossings, churches and
crematoria.” Though Roy deals specifically with the Syrian
Christian community, their myths and rituals are sparingly dealt
with, save for a description of the funeral ceremony of Sophie Mol
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at the Ayemenem church (4-5). Through Small Things, Roy has

achieved her objective of creating her fictional world to address
issues encompassing a greater significance. The need to preserve
one’s identity and culture to resist the hegemony of globalization
remains the most pressing concerns confronting the regions.