Title: The God of Small Things Author: Arundhati Roy Creation Date: 1997 Location: India Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things was published in 1997, fifty years after Indian independence and exactly when the country was reckoning with what those fifty years had and had not undone. It was her first novel, written over four years in a Delhi flat in the early 1990s as the Indian economy was opening to global capital and the political ground was shifting toward a Hindu nationalism that would soon define the next decades. The book won the Booker Prize the year of its publication and sold in millions of copies in dozens of languages — the kind of success that announces a writer and burdens her at the same time.
What makes the novel canonical for a reading project on empire is the way it insists that the colonial encounter did not end in 1947. Roy's Kerala is a place where the British have left and the structures they shaped have not. The Anglophile patriarch Pappachi who beats his wife with a brass vase. The Oxford-educated Chacko quoting Marx in an English so polished it gleams. The Syrian Christian family whose pride in not being Hindu is also a pride in being closer to the Englishman. The Naxalite Velutha, whose Communism is the ideology empire bequeathed to its inheritors. The cinema queue at The Sound of Music, the orange drink, the Plymouth car, the Anglophile titles in the cabinet. The Empire's furniture remains; the Empire's grammar runs underneath the Malayalam.
What makes the novel devastating is the love story underneath. Ammu, a Touchable Syrian Christian woman, and Velutha, an Untouchable Paravan carpenter, find each other across a boundary the British codified and Indian society has refused to dismantle. The thirteen nights they spend at the History House — a derelict colonial bungalow across the Meenachal River — are the novel's secret centre, and the catastrophe that follows is the inevitable consequence of a system that the end of empire did not unmake. Roy writes a prose that is shockingly its own, child-perception fused with adult precision, and the political argument arrives as feeling.
The Imperial Machine
The Kerala of The God of Small Things is not a colonial novel's Kerala — there are no district officers, no Club, no flag coming down. The British left India in 1947, fifty years before Roy wrote. What the novel anatomises is the afterlife of empire: the way the structures and the categories and the mental architecture of colonial rule survived independence, ran the new state's institutions, and continued to determine who could be loved and who could be killed.
The Syrian Christian community at the centre of the novel is one of the world's oldest Christian populations, predating European arrival by sixteen centuries. But its modern self-image was decisively shaped by British rule. The Syrian Christians were the colonial administration's preferred local class — English-educated, useful as clerks and traders and minor functionaries — and the Ipe family of Ayemenem carries this inheritance into the post-independence decades like a second nature they cannot put down. Pappachi was an Imperial Entomologist. Mammachi went to Vienna to study violin. Chacko was a Rhodes Scholar. The household speaks English to itself. The Sound of Music, Plymouth cars, Earl Grey tea — the colonial domestic kit, deployed within an Indian household after the colonisers have gone, as the markings of who one is and who one is not.
The caste system that destroys Ammu and Velutha is older than empire — but the British did not abolish it. They codified it. The 1901 census, the village land surveys, the legal definitions of "criminal tribes" and "depressed classes" — these were imperial bureaucratic acts that gave caste a written, administered, modern form. Independence in 1947 did not undo this codification. The Indian Constitution outlawed untouchability in 1950; the police of 1969 in Kerala still recognised an Untouchable when they saw one, and beat him to death for touching a Touchable woman. The state machinery that murdered Velutha was the colonial state machinery, run by Indians, doing the work it had been built to do. Empire's most enduring legacy is not the buildings it left but the categories it hardened, and the policemen it taught.
The Subjected People
Velutha is the most fully realised Untouchable consciousness in modern Indian fiction in English, and Roy renders him with a tenderness that is also a structural argument. He is a Paravan — one of the Dalit communities of Kerala — and he carries his caste like a wound the world reopens daily. He is brilliant: a carpenter who can fix machinery, build furniture, repair anything, who works at the Paradise Pickles factory because there is nowhere else for a man with hands like his to go. He is also a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which held real power in 1960s Kerala and had promised to end caste — and which, at the moment of crisis, will not protect him because Comrade K. N. M. Pillai prefers the family that owns the factory to the man who works in it.
Roy refuses the standard liberal sentimentalisation. Velutha is not a saint. He is a man — desiring, intelligent, capable of fury — and his love for Ammu is a particular love between two people who live on opposite sides of a boundary that will kill them. His friendship with the twins is the novel's most affecting bond: he treats them as equals, makes them toys, and when the police destroy him in front of them they are made witnesses to what the world they are growing into actually permits.
Ammu, the twins' mother, is the novel's other major subjected consciousness — subjected by gender rather than caste, but inside the same architecture of permitted and forbidden love. She is a divorced Syrian Christian woman who has come home to Ayemenem with two children and is treated by her family as a disgrace. The Love Laws — "the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much" — are Roy's most enduring formulation, and they govern Ammu as completely as they govern Velutha. The punishment for their thirteen nights falls on both — on him with a death, on her with exile and an eventual lonely death in a cheap hotel room at thirty-one. This is empire's law, after empire is gone.
The Reckoning
The God of Small Things is a novel about consequences. The events of December 1969 — when Sophie Mol arrives from England, when she drowns, when Velutha is beaten to death, when Ammu is exiled, when Estha falls silent — do not stay in 1969. They run forward through every page set in 1993, when Rahel returns to the decaying Ayemenem house and finds her mute brother and the river dammed to a trickle. The novel's structure is the structure of trauma: it circles, refuses chronology, approaches the unbearable centre and retreats. By the time Roy lets the reader see what the police did to Velutha, the reader has lived with its weight for two hundred pages.
The reckoning is not symmetrical. Baby Kochamma, who lied to the police, prospers and dies old. Comrade Pillai becomes a respectable politician. Chacko emigrates to Canada. No one is punished — not because the world is unjust in some abstract way but because the world is structured precisely to ensure that those who enforce the Love Laws do not suffer for enforcing them. Velutha dies. Ammu dies. The twins are broken. The state machinery and the family architecture and the caste hierarchy continue, slightly modified, into the next generation.
What the novel asks of its reader is to recognise that empire's afterlife is not a metaphor. The police who beat Velutha to death are not vestiges; they are the institution India inherited and chose not to remake. The Anglophile family that produces a Rhodes Scholar and a destroyed daughter in the same generation is the post-colonial elite. The novel's final image — Ammu and Velutha at the History House, on the last of their thirteen nights, the word Naaley (tomorrow) closing the book — is not a consolation. It is a refusal to let the small god of private love be erased by the big god of public order. The Love Laws will win. But for one more night, the Small God lived.
The Reading
The House of Ayemenem
They were twins. Dizygotic. Born from two separate eggs. Estha and Rahel. Esthappen and Rahel. Two-egg twins. "Egg-twins" the nurses called them. They finished each other's sentences and felt each other's pain and thought of themselves as one person — "we" not "I," a single self in two bodies. They were seven years old in 1969, when the Terror happened, and thirty-one when they met again, and by then they were no longer one person but two broken halves of something that had been smashed.
Rahel comes back to Ayemenem in 1993. She has been away for years — in Delhi, in America, married and divorced, drifting. She comes back because she has heard that Estha has been "re-returned" — sent back to Ayemenem by their father, a man who had taken Estha away when the twins were seven and who now, having no further use for him, has sent him back like a package to the house where it all happened. Estha has stopped talking. He stopped talking at some point in the years of separation, and now he is a man who does not speak, who walks for hours through the streets and fields of Ayemenem, who washes his clothes obsessively, who makes no sound at all.
The house in Ayemenem belongs to their grandmother, Mammachi — or did, when she was alive. It is a decaying, once-grand house surrounded by a rubber estate, in the Kerala of spice and rain and rivers. The family is Syrian Christian — one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, tracing its origins to the Apostle Thomas, and as obsessed with hierarchy, propriety, and caste as any Hindu family in India. Perhaps more so, because the Syrian Christians of Kerala added their own layers of stratification to the ones they inherited: Touchable and Untouchable, Syrian Christian and Rice Christian, high-born and low-born, those who married well and those who married beneath them.
Ammu, the twins' mother, married beneath her. She married a Bengali Hindu, a tea-estate manager in Assam who turned out to be a drunk and who offered her to his English employer in exchange for keeping his job. Ammu took her twins and came home to Ayemenem, where she was treated as a burden and a disgrace — a divorced daughter with two children, a woman who had broken the rules and must be punished for it. The rules. The Love Laws. "The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."
The Pickle Factory and the River
The family runs a pickle factory — Paradise Pickles and Preserves — which is Mammachi's enterprise, though it is managed by her son, Chacko. Chacko is the favoured child, the son, the Oxford-educated man who married an English woman (Margaret) and was divorced by her and who now lives in the Ayemenem house lording over his mother and sister with the easy entitlement of an Indian man in a family of women. He owns the factory, he says. Legally. Because Indian law gives him the right. "What's yours is mine and what's mine is also mine," he tells Ammu, and he means it, and the law agrees.
Mammachi — blind, talented, fierce — plays the violin and makes pickles and holds the family together with her will. She was beaten regularly by her husband, Pappachi — a retired Imperial Entomologist who discovered a new species of moth but was never credited for it, and who took out his bitterness on his wife's body. Pappachi's Moth. It is mounted in a glass case in the house, and it haunts the novel as a symbol of thwarted ambition turned to violence.
The river runs through everything. The Meenachal River, which flows behind the house and past the History House — an abandoned colonial bungalow on the other side — and which will carry away one child and deliver up another. The river is the boundary between the family's world and the world beyond, between respectability and transgression, between the living and the dead. In 1969, when the twins are seven, the river is full and dangerous. By 1993, when Rahel returns, it has been dammed and polluted and reduced to a trickle. "Some things come with their own punishment," the novel says. The river is one of them.
Sophie Mol
The catalyst for the catastrophe is a visit. Chacko's English ex-wife, Margaret, is coming to Ayemenem with their daughter, Sophie Mol. Sophie Mol is nine years old, half-English, half-Indian, and to the family in Ayemenem she is precious — more precious than Estha and Rahel, because she is Chacko's child, because she is half-white, because she is a Doer rather than a Haver, because she belongs to the legitimate, acknowledged, English-speaking world in a way that Ammu's children, the products of a failed and shameful marriage, do not.
The twins feel it. Children always feel it — the precise calibration of love, the exact measurement of who matters more. They see how the family prepares for Sophie Mol, how the house is cleaned and decorated, how Mammachi puts on her good sari, how Chacko puffs with pride. They understand, with the devastating clarity of childhood, that they are the less-loved children, the inconvenient ones, the ones who are tolerated rather than celebrated.
"Pappachi's Moth" — Rahel calls it — the feeling of being the wrong thing in the right place, the insect that doesn't belong in the display case, the child who is always slightly in the way.
Velutha
And then there is Velutha. The God of Small Things.
Velutha is a Paravan — an untouchable — who works in the pickle factory. He is brilliant with his hands, able to fix anything, build anything, create anything from wood and metal. He is also a member of the Communist Party, and he is beautiful — dark-skinned, muscular, with a smile that the twins adore. They have known him since infancy. To them he is not an Untouchable — he is Velutha, the man who makes them toys, who fixes their things, who swims with them in the river, who belongs to their world of Small Things rather than the adult world of Big Things (History, Politics, Caste, Love Laws).
Ammu looks at Velutha and sees a man. Not an Untouchable, not a Paravan, not a member of a caste that her family has despised for generations — a man. And Velutha looks at Ammu and sees a woman. The recognition is mutual, electric, and absolutely forbidden. It is the one transgression that Indian society will not forgive: a Touchable woman and an Untouchable man.
They meet at night, at the History House across the river. They swim through the dark water and find each other on the veranda of the abandoned bungalow, and what happens between them is rendered by Roy with a tenderness and sensuality that insists on the beauty of the forbidden:
"She could feel his smile in the dark... His hand on her back. His skin on her skin... That she had loved him. That she had always loved him. That he had always loved her."
The affair lasts thirteen days. Thirteen nights of crossing the river. Thirteen nights of touching, of speaking without words, of the Small God who governs private happiness asserting himself against the Big God who governs public order.
The Terror
It ends. Everything ends.
Sophie Mol drowns. The children — Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol — have taken a boat across the river at night, running away from the unhappy house, heading for the History House where Velutha sleeps. The boat capsizes. Sophie Mol, who cannot swim well in the strong current, drowns. The twins survive. Sophie Mol's body is found in the river the next day.
Baby Kochamma — the twins' grandaunt, a vicious, frustrated woman who was in love with a priest in her youth and who has spent her life punishing others for the love she was denied — sees her opportunity. She knows about Ammu and Velutha. She goes to the police. She tells them that Velutha — the Untouchable, the Communist — has kidnapped the children, that he has raped Ammu, that he is responsible for Sophie Mol's death. None of this is true. All of it is believed.
The police come to the History House. They find Velutha sleeping on the veranda. The twins are there too, but the police do not see children. They see an Untouchable man who has dared to touch a Touchable woman, and they beat him. They beat him with their boots, with their batons, with their fists. They beat him for hours. They beat him until his body is broken, until his ribs are crushed, until his skull is cracked, until the man who could fix anything and build anything is a thing that cannot be fixed or built.
"His skull was fractured in three places. His collarbone was shattered. His kneecap was split in two."
Estha watches. Estha, seven years old, watches the police beat Velutha to death, and something inside him closes like a door. Something stops.
Baby Kochamma, terrified that her lie will be exposed, takes the twins to the police station and forces them to confirm her story — to identify Velutha as their kidnapper, to say that he took them against their will. Estha nods. He is seven. He is terrified. He nods, and the nod kills Velutha, who dies in his cell of his injuries, and the nod kills something in Estha that will never come back.
Velutha is the God of Small Things — the small god of love, of hands that make and mend, of the private happiness that the Love Laws exist to destroy. He dies because he loved a woman across the boundary of caste, and because the world would rather kill a man than admit that the boundary is false.
The Aftermath
Ammu is cast out. She is sent away from Ayemenem with nothing. She dies alone, in a cheap hotel room, at the age of thirty-one. She dies of a "womb disease" — the novel does not specify, but the implication is clear: she dies of being a woman who broke the rules, and the world punished her body for what her heart had done. Her children are not with her when she dies. They have been separated: Estha sent to live with his father in Assam, Rahel left in Ayemenem with the family that despises her.
The twins grow up apart. The separation is the second violence — after the night at the History House, after the beating, after the forced identification, after the loss of Velutha and Ammu — the tearing apart of the one thing they had left, which was each other.
The Return
In 1993, Rahel comes back. The house is decaying. Mammachi is dead. Pappachi is dead. Baby Kochamma is ancient and bitter, watching television. Chacko has gone to Canada. The pickle factory is closed. The river is dying.
Estha is there. He does not speak. He walks. He washes his clothes. He lives in the silence he entered at the age of seven, when he nodded in the police station and everything stopped.
The twins find each other in the old house, among the ruins of the family, in the rooms where they were children. What happens between them is the novel's final transgression — they make love, the two-egg twins, the broken halves, in a union that is not sexual so much as an attempt to become one person again, to close the wound that was opened when they were seven, to go back to the time before the Love Laws tore them apart.
Roy does not judge. The novel's moral architecture does not permit easy judgment. The Love Laws — which dictate that a Touchable woman cannot love an Untouchable man, that a mother must love the right child more, that twins must be separated, that desire must follow caste, that the heart must obey the hierarchy — these laws have destroyed everyone. Every character in the novel is either a victim or an enforcer of the Love Laws, and some are both. The twins' final union is the last small thing in a world that has crushed every small thing, the last assertion of private love against the machinery of public order.
The novel ends where it began: with Ammu and Velutha in the History House, on the last of their thirteen nights together, making love while the river flows past and the world prepares to destroy them. "Tomorrow," Roy writes. The word is the last word of the novel, and it contains everything — the knowledge that this will end, that the police will come, that Velutha will die, that Ammu will die, that the twins will be shattered. "Tomorrow." But tonight, for one more night, the Small God lives.
"She whispered. He whispered back. She laughed. She made him laugh. His body against hers. She smelled the river on him. His Particular Smell. She kissed his hand, his wrist, the hollow of his throat."
"Naaley," he whispered. Tomorrow.
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