Analysing The God Of Small Things English Literature Essay

Analysing The God Of Small Things English Literature Essay ‘May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid’. This luscious and mysterious description of India sounds unmistakably like a tourist novel yet this example of post colonial exoticism is used to lure in readers to the novel ‘The God of Small Things’. Whilst being better known for its celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize, the author Arundhati Roy is ethnic, a strong activist and her cultural authenticity passively provides an authentic Indian voice through her idealised western way of talking and thinking about the east. Roy plays into a colonial style known for its dominating, restructuring and authoritative power over India using references from politics and history to keep the story real and dangerously intoxicating for her western readers. It serves the dual purpose of being able to write back to the ’empire’ whilst becoming a product of global capitalism, hybridity of the west and the east, using eastern examples of western ideals through examples of critiqued power relations and subverted ideas of the ‘exotic’. The society of Ayamenem strongly follows westerns ideas adopted from its colonial background by living with a caste system in which there are two classes, the inferior ‘touchables’ who are of a higher class than the ‘untouchables’. This idea is borrowed from the class system of the British so the inequality between both is familiar to its readers but is also exotic in the way that it controls society and influences everyday life. The extremity of having the ‘untouchables’ so grateful to the ‘touchable’ class that a man is willing to kill his own son when he discovers that he has broken the most important caste rule, that there is no interclass relations. These rules of society are unknown to that of the reader; it provides them with the mystery and danger of the exotic. Also having no interclass relations means that there is a lot of tension in the relationships between characters in the novel. The ‘untouchables’ have internalized class segregation and are aware of the limits of their place in society. Relationships with these people are strongly discouraged but the members of this family find reason to cross and defy these rules. This is unusual behaviour and the idea of resistance against the adopted colonial system is exciting to its western audience who believe that the underdog can win although Roy’s account provides enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing the consequences of the characters defiance. The novel also exoticises India’s inequality, making it light hearted and approachable for its western audience. The style of writing suggests that Roy has written the story from an outsider’s perspective, looking, observing and commenting on daily life, ‘strange insects appeared like ideas in the evening’, questioning her authenticity thro ugh her strategic use of words and in this example she tells the reader of ‘strange’ insects in the afternoon yet these insects should be familiar to the teller of the story. This westernisation becomes more apparent through Indian society who seem like they are trying to appeal to the wider western audience. While choosing a name for the family pickle company the relevance of the name was an important factor, ‘At first he wanted to call it Zeus Pickles and Preserves, but that idea was vetoed because everybody said that Zeus was too obscure and had no local relevance, whereas Paradise did. (Comrade Pillai’s suggestion -Parashuram Pickles was vetoed for the opposite reason: too much local relevance).’ Instead of marketing to their local community, the name Paradise seemed more suitable which shows how self aware their society has become knowing that the pickling company could be seen on a global scale promoting its exotic feeling to produce global pro duct. Roy promotes this kind of thinking throughout her novel and in a sense she is able to ‘sell’ her culture through her strategic storytelling. She tells of hotels that have truncated traditional kathakali performances from ‘six hour classics – to twenty minutes cameos’ for the small attention spans of the tourists. It shows how Indian society has given into its colonialisation, allowing their cultural values and actions to be altered so that it can be marketed on a global scale. The strategic use of how India will be seen from a tourist point of view appeals greatly to those who have never seen India and in these terms Roy provides the idealistic tourist guide that they have been seeking with bite sized portions of a culturally authentic experience such as her use of traditional Malayalam words throughout the text.