The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things is a family drama novel written by Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in the 1960s Kerala, India. The novel explores how small, seemingly insignificant occurrences, decisions and experiences shape people's behavior in deeply significant ways. The novel also explores the lingering effects of casteism in India, lending a culturally specific critique of British colonialism in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
The God of Small Things was Roy's debut novel, published in 1997. It was followed by the 2017 publication The Ministry of Utmost Happiness twenty years later. Roy began writing the manuscript for The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished four years later, in 1996, leading to its publication the following year. The potential of the story was first recognized by HarperCollins editor Pankaj Mishra, who sent it to three British publishers. Roy received a £500,000 advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.
Arundhati Roy, after being involved with making films and writing screenplays, popularly In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Electric Moon, "wanted to do something where I didn't have to deal with people; I wanted to do something alone." She bought a computer and soon figured out how to use it. She noted she didn't know she was writing a novel. Roy took inspiration from her childhood experiences in Aymanam, a village in the Kottayam district of Kerala, India, where she led an unprotected child's life. Being an "adult child", Roy observed and remembered what she sensed in the village and "said everything I wanted to say at that point of time" through writing the novel.
Roy began writing her first novel on her computer in 1992 in New Delhi, though the first few months she "was just fooling around before I realized what was happening and got down to writing the book properly" and completed it in 1996. Without a plan, she enjoyed that her writing "kept surprising" her and was unsure if she would ever finish it. She didn't tell to her friends or her husband Pradip Krishen about her writing, "afraid she would talk the tale out". Krishen adored when she showed him her final draft. She "wrote it out of sequence. I didn't start with the first chapter or end with the last chapter. I actually started writing with a single image in my head: the sky blue Plymouth with two twins inside it, a Marxist procession surrounding it. And it just developed from there. The language just started weaving together, sentence by sentence."
Roy stated that she never re-wrote a written sentence in the novel and that arranging the plot took time "but was never painful." Roy said that the novel is semi-autobiographical. For instance, she modelled some of her characters from those she knew in real life, like her mother Mary Roy as Ammu, her maternal grandfather father P.V. Issac as Pappachi, her uncle George Issac as Chacko, his ex-wife Cecilia Philipson as Margaret Kochamma just to say a few. Roy's mother confirmed she was very similar to the character Ammu, however, she was never involved with a man of lower caste, as was the case in the book is another instance.
Training as an architect influenced her writing. One day, she "woke up and sketched the plot graphically with a series of drawings. That's when I understood what I was getting at." Writing the novel was "about design" and "like architecture" for her. She told Salon in 1997:
The title of the novel was conceived at "the very last minute" while printing out the manuscript. Speaking to HarperCollins, she said: "One of the chapters was called The God of Small Things, I don't know how that happened, ... When I read the book now I can't believe the amount of references there are to small things, but it was absolutely not the case that I started with the title and built the novel around it."
The story is set in Ayemenem, Kerala, with a disjointed narrative shifting between 1969 and 1993. Rahel and Estha, fraternal twins, reunite in 1993. Ammu Ipe, their mother, marries Baba to escape her father and returns to Ayemenem after leaving her abusive husband. Chacko, Ammu's brother, returns from England after his divorce. The family home includes Baby Kochamma, Pappachi's sister, who remained unmarried due to unrequited love. She manipulates events to cause misfortune.
The death of Margaret's second husband in a car accident prompts Chacko to invite her and their daughter, Sophie, to spend Christmas in Ayemenem. On the road to the airport, the family encounters a group of Communist protesters who surround the car and humiliate Baby Kochamma. Rahel thinks she sees amongst the protesters Velutha, an Untouchable servant who works for the family's pickle factory. Later at the theater, Estha is sexually molested by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man", a vendor working at the snack counter. Rahel's claim of seeing Velutha in the Communist mob leads Baby Kochamma to associate him with her humiliation. Rahel and Estha develop a bond with Velutha, while Ammu is drawn to him, sparking a forbidden romance. Velutha is depicted as sympathetic but faces tragedy due to his caste and relationship with Ammu. When Velutha's father exposes their affair, Ammu is locked up, and Velutha is banished. Ammu blames the twins for her plight, leading them to flee with their cousin Sophie. Their boat capsizes and Sophie drowns; Margaret and Chacko return to find Sophie dead on the sofa.
Baby Kochamma accuses Velutha of Sophie's death, leading to his brutal beating and arrest by the police. The twins witness this traumatic event. The chief of police, aware of Velutha's Communist ties, fears unrest if the wrongful arrest is exposed. He threatens Baby Kochamma for falsely accusing Velutha. To save herself, Baby Kochamma manipulates Estha and Rahel into implicating Velutha in Sophie's murder. Velutha dies from his injuries. Despite Ammu's attempts to tell the truth, Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins are responsible for Sophie's death. Chacko ejects Ammu from the house, separating Estha from her forever. Ammu dies alone in a motel at 31. Rahel moves to America to attend university but returns to Ayemenem after a tumultuous life. She reunites with Estha, who has lived a solitary, mute existence with Baby Kochamma. They have sex. Despite their reunion, their lives remain sorrowful. The novel concludes with a reflection on Ammu's and Velutha's love affair.
Roy uses various techniques to represent the children's viewpoints and their innocence. One technique she employs is the capitalization of certain words and phrases to give them significance (for example, "Because Anything Can Happen To Anyone"). The children also restate things that adults say in a phonetic way, separating and recombining words. This echoes the children's way of looking at the world, distinct from the perspective of the grown-ups who surround them. Roy often uses metaphors that feature elements that are more prominent in the lives of children, such as toothpaste, secrets, or portable pianos. They place significance on words and ideas differently from the adults, thereby creating a new way of viewing the world around them. They pick up on certain feelings and ideas that the adults around them either fail or refuse to recognize, and give new significance to things that the adults ignore for their own purposes.
The children use and repeat these phrases throughout the story so that the phrases themselves gain independence and representational meanings. When writing, Roy said, "Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot -- death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings -- a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater."
Another way she plays with language is to join words together without punctuation, which we see in the description of the 'Orangedrink Lemondrink man' or 'bluegreyblue eyes'. This subversion of the usual rules of syntax and grammar not only places us in a child's view of the world, but it also draws attention to the role of language in colonialism. By corrupting standard use of English (the colonial language of India) Roy is rebelling against colonial influence still present in India, represented by characters such as Margaret Kochamma and Chacko who always speak correctly.
Roy also employs a disjointed, non-sequential narrative style that echoes the process of memory, especially the resurfacing of a previously suppressed, painful memory. The story of three different generations is told simultaneously going back and forth in time.
The uncovering of the story of Sophie's death, concurrently with the forward-moving story of Rahel's return to Ayemenem and reunion with Estha, creates a complex narrative that emphasizes the difficulty of the subject of the story and the complexity of the culture from which the story originates. Time is rendered somewhat static as parts of one narrative line are intertwined through repetition and non-sequential discovery. This is also part of the way Roy uses real-life places and people that she has shifted and altered for use in the story. The story's many elements come together to construct a diverse look at one instance of Indian culture and the effect of the caste system on life and love during a time of post-colonialism. As the children try to form their own identities, naming and renaming themselves in the process, Roy places in parallel the effect of the process by intertwining the past and the present.
This process also echoes the progression of the Indian people, like that of all cultures that try to find ways to maintain their traditions in a time of increasing globalization.
The God of Small Things is a work of fiction but some critics have tried to find autobiographical parallels in the novel, while at the same time warning against drawing any simplistic connections between the novel and the writer's life. Some of the similarities between Roy's life and that of the characters she creates include her own Syrian Christian and Hindu lineage; the divorce of her parents when she and her brother were very young; her return to the family home in Ayemenem after her mother's divorce; and her education in an architectural school, to name a few. Some critics also attribute the political awareness manifested in The God of Small Things to Roy's early life-influences from her mother, who was an activist and feminist.
The God of Small Things received stellar reviews in major American newspapers such as The New York Times (a "dazzling first novel", "extraordinary", "at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple") and the Los Angeles Times ("a novel of poignancy and considerable sweep"), and in Canadian publications such as the Toronto Star ("a lush, magical novel"). Time named it one of the best books of the year. Critical response in the United Kingdom was less positive, and the awarding of the Booker Prize caused controversy; Carmen Callil, a 1996 Booker Prize judge, called the novel "execrable", and The Guardian described the contest as "profoundly depressing". In India, the book was criticised especially for its unrestrained description of sexuality. E. K. Nayanar, then Chief Minister of Roy's home state Kerala, voiced criticism about the book's depiction of women and sex, and she had to answer charges of obscenity. Some critics have pointed out that the reader reviews of this book on bookseller websites are so extremely opposed at times that it is difficult to imagine readers are talking about the same book.
The book has since been translated into Malayalam by Priya A. S., under the title Kunju Karyangalude Odeythampuran (Malayalam: കുഞ്ഞുകാര്യങ്ങളുടെ ഒടേതമ്പുരാൻ).
In 2014, the novel was ranked in The Daily Telegraph as one of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels. On 5 November 2019, the BBC News listed The God of Small Things on its list of the 100 most influential novels. Emma Lee-Potter of The Independent listed it as one of the 12 best Indian novels.
In 2022, the novel was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
In 2013, Talkhiyaan, a Pakistani television series based on the novel, was aired on Express Entertainment.
The band Darlingside credits the novel as the inspiration for their song "The God of Loss".