The God of Small Things – Book Review

The God of Small Things written by Arundati Roy in 1997 centres around the unfortunate events faced by the Syrian Catholic Ipe family. The grandmother Mammachi is a half-blind aged woman who is immensely fond of her Anglophile sib Chacko. Chacko, the Oxford boy, is an overly-proud man believing himself to be an enlightened man after his brief academic stint at England. Margaret Kochamma is Chacko’s ex-wife who comes down with her daughter Sophie during the Christmas holidays after losing her husband, Joe. Baby Kochamma is Mammachi’s ex-nun sister who converted to Catholicism out of her love for a Catholic missionary. Estha and Rahel, the two central characters are two ‘inseparable’ twins born out of a broken marriage and living with their mother Ammu. The narration in the books shuttles between the past and present yet revealing the various evils that are still practiced in society. The plot consists of two recurring themes: caste and love.

Caste: This forms the main theme throughout the book with either subtle or explicit mention of how lower castes and higher castes are treated. Velutha who belongs to the low-caste Paravan has a love-hate relationship with the Ipe Family. While some members who like and admire him for the person he is, there are the others in family who treat him worse than a bag of scum all because of the caste he belongs to. There is an interesting perspective presented by the author. She claims that caste is not categorised according to a particular religion, rather it is society based. That is why even the Ipe family of the Syrian Christians strongly hold the caste division that is prevalent in society. Roy also brings back memories of strict lower caste practices like walking backwards and sweeping so that even their footprints are wiped off and forgotten.

Love: Following from the theme on caste comes the aspect of love and the ‘Love Laws’ which determines “who should be loved and how.” Here again Roy presents the division of love based on one’s gender. The male is loved more irrespective of his conformity to social norms or not whereas the female is loved less with the back-up of how she conforms to social norms. This division of love becomes one of the causes for the tension and disintegration of the Ipe family. The division of love also extends to where people are born in a family. That is why Sophie Mol, who comes from London to India with her mother, is treated with so much more love than Estha and Rahel can ever dream of receiving. Moreover, even with the caste division, the families are very particular as to who should marry whom. This causes even further division in the family where the one marrying an outsider (a person outside the religion and caste) in India is treated with scorn.

The title of the book is quite appropriate. Arundati Roy presents the rejected low caste as ‘The God of Small Things’. This would be that despite their rejection by society and their abject poverty, they are still able to remain happy and contented with the small things that they have. Though they are oppressed by the upper caste, they still manage to find happiness in the life they live. In the book, Roy has masterfully highlighted the plight of the Paravans (low caste) in Kerala, while narrating the story of a family belonging to the higher caste. The language presentation is so good that the reader does feel part of the whole story, especially with the transliteration of the Malayalam words that makes the book even more interesting. The question driven home at the end is how we are able to hold up and justify the social evils of our times while neglecting the neighbour are our side. Though written about 22 years ago, the messages that Arundati Roy wished to convey are so clear, distinct and ever so relevant in our present day situation. In current global situation, we are left with one task. That is, to search for ‘The God of Small Things’ in the society we live in.