The God of Small Things: A Thesis

With The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy produced a valuable perspective on the complex religious, political, and cultural framework of her native Kerala. However, the novel also has broader implications. Noting the historical evolution of civilizations, Roy focuses the characters' struggle around the human propensity to create hierarchical structures, the implications of the laws those structures create, and the fate faced by those who transgress those self-same laws. In Roy's own words "It's a book about how, over years, human society continues to behave in very similar ways, even though the details may be different" (Frumkes). By definition, 'law,' as it is meant for the purposes of this paper involves the social, economic, and political structures created by human beings to control others' actions.

The novel is a cynical comment on the risks of breaking these laws that goes out of its way to deconstruct humanities' hope for making significant change to its condition over time. Roy supposes that it is human nature to create structures that destroy other human beings, and in fact the novel finds those conclusions inevitable.

It is important to realize when talking about the laws present in the novel, that India, and specifically Kerala, has no one set of overriding ideological structures: Christianity brought by the British colonialists is coupled in an ungainly fashion to ancient Hindu traditions. Not to mention a variety of new ideologies filtering in from Maoist China, such as communism, which serves as an umbrella for completely new concepts like equal pay, equal treatment, and the destruction of the caste system. Roy makes several points in the novel about the conflicting nature of foreign cultural systems present in India. The conflict within those laws provides some of the difficulty for the characters, forcing them to constantly contradict themselves in thought and action.

The other half of the problem involves the effect of law upon each individual. Roy flashes back on the lives of each character to show the twisted ways in which they have repressed their desires, destroyed love in favor of bitter hatred, or otherwise stunted their conception of self and/or emotional identity. Roy is very clear from the start about who acts within the structure of law, and who, in desperation, tries to get out. Ammu, Estha, and Rahel are struggling to leave the structure, while Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, and Pappachi act within it.

Velutha is notably not mentioned in the two groups listed above. This is because Velutha is the most free of societal structures, being an outcaste or untouchable, and therefore "excluded from the caste system altogether" (Smith 43). He is the character that has the ability to "transform life rather than simply endure it" (Truax 2). Perhaps Vellya Paapen says it best when he worries about Velutha's conduct: "Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel" (73).

Velutha's station outside of the caste system gives him freedom, but intrinsic to the caste structure is the "wretched state" of outcastes, and a "heredity system that all but forces people to remain in the castes into which they were born" (43). These two factors in a sense make Velutha free, but they also set him on his own in a world that has nothing to give him and in which he has nothing to lose except his life.

Velutha is also the novel's namesake, providing another reason to set him apart from the rest of the characters. Without Velutha the Ayemenem factory could not run, as he is the only person who can fix the machinery, the twins would have no one who could understand their world, and most importantly, Ammu would never have had anyone to love. "He is both essential and taken for granted," and therefore, is the God of Small Things (Truax 2).

But this is not all that Roy means by separating Velutha. He is also symbolic of all the little things that the 'laws' cannot provide for people, and the emotional and psychological destruction this not-providing creates. His destruction is equally symbolic of a larger destruction that echoes outward from the event of his death. The echo is most apparent in the imminent destruction of the family after Sophie Mol's death, and further into the broader frame of the human race. Roy says as much at the time that Velutha is beaten to death by Touchable policemen; an act that Estha and Rahel both witness, writing that "the twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen" (292). Roy goes even further to make very specific statements about the universal implications of Velutha's death, writing that:

What Esthhappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete Monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God's purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience. (292- 293)

Velutha dies to preserve the "Order" that the officers defend. That defense is rooted in the basic tenets of human nature to create and defend "Order," "Structure," and "Complete Monopoly" of political, social, and economic power. That "pursuit of ascendancy" destroyed Velutha in the most literal sense; after all, every hierarchy must have a top and a bottom. Velutha was simply unlucky because 1) he was born on the bottom and 2) he acted outside of the 'laws' that were built for him.

So Velutha was destroyed. Why? The question is at least as important as Roy's exposure of the basic human urge to objectify and destroy obstacles that stand in the way of the status-quo. Velutha falls in love with Ammu and her with him. The problem is that Ammu is Touchable.

Ammu is one of the characters listed as struggling against the 'laws' inherent in the social system she is born into. Her first wish is to leave her bitter and abusive family. The only way to do so in Ayemenem was "to wait for marriage proposals while she helped her mother with the housework" (Roy 38). When the marriage she impulsively enters into goes bad, Ammu divorces her husband despite the "...the constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval" (Roy 42). She returns to her family, finding that "[her] status within the family is tenuous because of her marital disgrace" (Truax 2). She then marries Chako out of necessity - for a woman by herself is not tolerated in the patriarchal society of Kerala, and resigns herself to a slow psychological death by asphyxiation. At least, until she falls in love with Velutha. Their love-making is one of the most poetic and wrenching scenes in the novel, mostly because of the implicit understanding that their love would, if not now, then eventually, destroy them both. Roy writes of their first sexual encounter:

Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they knew already that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken. (317)

Explicit in this description of love-making is a high risk-factor. For Ammu the risk is for both committing adultery and of making love to a Paravan, an untouchable. For Velutha, the risk is in moving out of his place as untouchable and invading a world in which he is not welcome - so un-welcome that it would cost him his life.

Ammu's destruction would not be much different than the literal physical destruction of Velutha. She is fated to the same psychological asphyxiation that she tried so hard to avoid as well as a physical one. After Sophie Mol and Velutha's death, she is sent into exile by Chako, who tells her to "get out of my house before I break every bone in your body!" (214). Ammu prophesizes her own death when she stands at the bathroom mirror and thinks "with that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that life had been lived. That her cup was full of dust" (212) Later on, in Ammu's exile she visits Rahel - a different woman:

She was swollen with Cortisone, moonfaced, not the slender mother Rahel knew. Her skin was stretched over her puffy cheeks like shiny scar tissue that covers old vaccination marks...Each breath she took was like a war won against the steely fist that was trying to squeeze air from her lungs...each time she inhaled the hollows near her collarbones grew steep and filled with shadows. (153)

Separated from her family, Ammu dies a lonely death in a cheap hotel with no one to comfort her.

Both Velutha and Ammu lose everything to the risk they took.

The human urge to create and maintain hierarchical structure, along with the human "will to power" to quote Nietzsche, destroys the two lovers. But what of those who act within the structure?

Baby Kochamma serves as what is perhaps the most diabolical character in the entire novel, scheming and plotting against everyone and everything. But Baby Kochamma is not without reason, as Roy explains earlier in the novel Baby Kochamma was also in love once, having fallen for Father Mulligan when she was quite young. She never approaches Father Mulligan about her feelings, something which would not have been proper as it was against the "laws" that a woman marry for love.

Baby Kochamma goes so far as to follow the Father to a convent and convert to Roman Catholicism. Needless to say, her love goes unrequited. When she returned, "Reverend Ipe realized that his daughter had now developed a 'reputation' and was unlikely to find a husband" (Roy 26). Therefore Baby Kochamma remains single and obsessive of her one true love for the rest of her life. Even after Father Mulligan's death Baby Kochamma still writes in her diary about how much she loves him.

The bitterness of never being allowed to love is what makes Baby Kochamma cruel, resentful, and anal. After all, is it not human nature to resent others for having what we ourselves have been deprived? This would not be problematic, except that her "petty snobbery and envy have grave consequences" (Rubin 11). As a result she becomes something of a hypocrite, taking offense at the very existence of the twins as dependents in Mammachi's household, despite the fact that she also is a dependent. She becomes violently attached to the all of the "laws" that she can grasp for two reasons, 1) human nature, and 2) they give meaning and shape to a wasted life. For example, "She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents' home. As for a divorced (Roy's emphasis)daughter-according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma's outrage" (Roy 45)

Arguably, her most important role in the novel is in orchestrating Velutha's demise. While she schemes and hates elsewhere- this is where her actions become blameworthy in the readers' eyes. To save herself from the stain of a police charge she conjures up a false story, and threatens the children into verifying it in order to 'save Ammu.' She also scars their innocent minds for life by telling them that " 'it's a terrible thing to take a person's life...It's the worst thing that anyone can ever do...You know that , don't you?...and yet...you did it...You are murderers'" (Roy 300). That is, that they are the murderers of Sophie Mol.

But Baby Kochamma does not stop there in her elaborate manipulation. She paints the most vivid picture she can of the terrors of Indian prisons, which as she says, both Estha and Rahel will be inhabiting soon with their mother. "When she had stamped out every ray of hope, destroyed their lives completely, like a fairy godmother, she presented them with a solution" (Roy 301).

That solution involves another lie. Baby Kochamma tells the twins that the only way to save themselves and their mother is to condemn Velutha, for he is to die anyway. The choice for two small children is obvious and they "hadn't given it a second thought before they looked up and said (not together but almost) 'Save Ammu.' Save us. Save our mother" (Roy 302).

The subversive nature of Baby Kochamma exposes another facet of the novel that is an effect of the human need for power and structure. For if these two things are part of human nature, and Roy argues that they are inevitable and destructive forces, then an effect of that destruction is that it acts cyclically. For instance, in Baby Kochamma we find a story of unrequited love because of the 'laws,' and her bitterness psychologically scars both Estha and Rahel, putting the death of their beloved friend on young consciences that will have to live with that burden for the rest of their lives.

The path of these effects traces itself even beyond Baby Kochamma. Chako's parents further illustrate the concept of a cycle. Pappachi is the product of a patriarchal society that sees women as objects to be controlled and manipulated. He takes out all of his aggression upon Mammachi, beating her with a brass vase, and even breaking her violin, one of her only sources of joy. Pappachi's aggression stems from his being an entomologist. That is, he discovers a new species of moth that should have been named after him, but instead of getting his due credit, it is denied. He takes the bitterness out on Mammachi.

Mammachi, much like Baby Kochamma is locked in the structure of the 'laws', and it embitters her as well. Her only savior is her son, who one night "strode into the room, caught Pappachi's vase hand and twisted it around his back. 'I never want this to happen again,' he told his father. 'Ever'" (Roy 47). Mammachi acquires the same strictured nature of Baby, but does more out of internalization of the 'laws' than out of embitterment. An example of such internalization when her hatred of Margaret Kochamma is written about: "Mammachi had never met Margaret Kochamma. But she despised her anyway. Shopkeepers daughter was how Margaret Kochamma was filed away in Mammachi's mind" (160).

Thus the bitterness has a trickle-down effect, which despite its unfeasibility in economic terms, works quite well in the social world of human interaction. The laws destroy Mammachi, Pappachi, and Baby Kochamma, and their bitterness poisons the lives of those around them. That poison aids in the destruction of Ammu and Velutha. But there is one last part of the cycle, one last generational gap which Roy tears to pieces - Estha and Rahel.

Indirectly, this paper has been talking about Estha and Rahel the entire time, especially in terms of Baby Kochamma. They witness Velutha's violent death, are manipulated into slaughtering him, and then torn from each other. It is no accident that Estha stops talking when Rahel is gone. They had a bond that transcended the physical bond of children's play or friendship, but a psychological bond that is broken when Ammu leaves with Estha, returned, and then leaves again with Chako. Even worse, because of this bond Rahel and Estha know something that no one else does about Sophie Mol: when she is buried, she is not dead:

When they lowered Sophie Mol's coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn't dead...She heard the dull thudding through the polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. The sad priest's voices muffled by mud and wood...Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can't hear screams through earth and stone. (8-9)

Near the end of the novel, When Rahel and Estha finally meet once more at the Ayemenem house of their childhood, they make one attempt to retrieve the connection they had lost They have sex and "once again broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And How. And How much" (Roy 311). The fail at the retrieving the connection, since "what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief" (311). They may not have been destroyed, but their relationship, what possibly was the most important relationship in both of their lives, was destroyed instead.

Their psychological destruction is the last chapter in the massive deconstruction of the family in the Ayemenem house. Their cyclical history of despair due to the 'laws' that tell "who should be loved, how, and how much" annihilates those who struggle to break them, and also those who live within them, with the help of the bitterness of jilted and unrequited love, along with physical, psychological, and emotional abuse, all of which is handed down by generation. One generation poisons the next, and on like that. The hierarchical structures created by humans along with the need for power and structure also serve to help eliminate resistance to the 'laws.' All of this inevitable.

Though the entire novel makes this conclusion, there is one problematic passage that seems to grant a ray of hope:

That first night, on the day that Sophie Mol came, Velutha watched his lover dress. When she was ready she squatted facing him. She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. Like flat chalk on a chalkboard. Like breeze in a paddy field. Like jet streaks in a blue church sky. He took her face in his hands and drew it towards his. He closed his eyes and smelled her skin. Ammu laughed.

Yes, Margaret, she thought. We do it to each other too.

She kissed his closed eyes and stood up. Velutha with his back against the mangosteen tree and watched her walk away.

She had a dry rose in her hair.

She turned to say it once again. "Naaley."

Tomorrow. (321)

This is the last section of the book, and 'Tomorrow' is the closing word. As if to say that there is always a tomorrow. As if that should give hope that love is the answer after all. That section taken by itself may seem to say something to that effect, but when contextualized with the destruction of the lovers, it is contradictory to say so. Completely to the contrary, this is where the despair of the novel is most apparent. For tomorrow, Ammu and Velutha will be destroyed along with countless others who disobey the 'Love Laws,' tomorrow some other life will be traumatized by violence caused by the human need for order and power, tomorrow an Untouchable will get beaten to death. There is no hope, but a series of despairing tomorrows. Human history will never stop creating hierarchies, it is in their nature to enforce them.

Ammu and Velutha were crushed by that enforcing hand, as was Estha, Rahel, Pappachi, Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma. Life is an un-ending cycle of despair. The context of the novel, upon which this paper is based does not allow for a happy ending, or even a ray of hope regarding the malleability of the human condition. If Roy had wanted a different interpretation to her novel, then she seems to have gone about it the wrong way. She could perhaps have left someone standing, instead of destroying all of her characters; rending them apart with grief, bitterness, love, and abuse, just to name a few.

In the end, Roy may not have intended her work to be a production in cynicism, thus the ending. However, she left herself but little room to change except for direct contradiction at the end of her novel. But despite its cynicism, it is nevertheless profound. Human beings do setup up hierarchical structures that have tops and bottoms. Those who are on the bottom in this country, for example, are the poorest of us, and often minorities. For the Romans, the Christians. For the Europeans, the Irish. And on like that. It just so happened that for the Indians it is the Untouchables. It is true that governments and citizens go out of their way to hold what power they have and use it to defend their place in the social framework. We must only look to the repression of revolutions throughout the world for examples of government that do this. China outlaws entire religions to that purpose. And those who 'tell' on others who are breaking the social/political structure are upholding the status-quo to preserve their own self-interest. There are studies that indicate that many German people did just such things before and during WWII to the Jews.

What Roy does is to bring those ideas to the forefront, look at them in the face, and draw conclusions about them. In this way God of Small Things is a very important, and well-crafted first novel.
Works Cited

Dharwadker, Vinay. "Indian Writing Today: A View from 1994." World Literature Today.

68 (1994): 237.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York, New York: Random House Inc.,

1997.

Frumkes, Lewis Burke. "A Conservation with Arundhati Roy." Writer. Nov98, Vol. 111

Issue 11, p23, 2p.

Smith, Huston: The Illustrated World's Religions: A Guide to our Wisdom Traditions.

New York, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994.

Truax, Alice. "A Silver Thimble in Her Fist." The New York Times: Books. 25 March 1997. 8

January 2002.

Rubin, Merle. Christian Science Monitor. 11/24/97, Vol. 89, Issue 251

p11,3c.