ENGLISH AS POETIC AND NARRATIVE EROS INTHE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

When we read The God of Small Things we will see how far the English language in Indian writing of narrative in English, has come from an uneasy balance between language and context, sometimes creating an alienation in the reader from the narrated realities of the text,  to a point where language and context enact a magical coalescence. It is certainly narrative, in that it tells a story; furthermore it is also a novel, because it holds up an entire society, inflected as it is by specific socio economic modalities, for the reader’s extension of her/his `own world. As Morrison says in a famous quote, ‘But narrative remains the best way to learn anything, whether history or theology, so I continue with the narrative form’.¹ This  is specially so because it does it through pleasure, through the medium of the story, and through affect, and that affect is what often leads the auditor to cognition.

The God of Small Things(1997), hereafter referred to as TGST, is also that Indian novel in English which represents the arrival of the Indian novel in English, in a definitive and resounding manner on  the global scene of novel writing in English.  It is a consummate moment not only validated through the author’s winning of the Booker Prize (1997), but through the bridging of  possible gaps between language and context since the language is English and not and indigenous one, between language and experience, between affect and cognition, grammatical structure and the highest levels of poetry, a linguistic space where the plenitude of imagination and that of language meet and reach spectacular and dramatic heights.Of course, one needs to be an anglophile to a certain extent to feel this subliminal reach of  the language, which takes us back to the old debates over whether  English is at all a suitable medium for artistic expression, within Indian contexts. 

That it is also a woman who performs this feat, is important if we wish to clinch issues of gender and creativity. in the writing of novels in English in India, where all doubts as to whether English is an adequate medium for representing Indian realities, should be erased. The artistic continuum we are studying here—peculiar triumph of gender and genre. Ashapurna writes the definitive feminist novel in Bengali and Arundhati in English.