Globalization and Gender: God of Small Things (continued)

And the effect of his silence on his other twin was to give her a hollowness and  emptiness:

that the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other.(21)

 The powerful critique that the story mounts is not only against the entrenched forms of social hierarchy in  India, and their continued tenacity, but also how this society may also seem inhospitable towards love. It is important to point out however, in this context, that the setting of Roy’s story is a village in Kerala,(Ayemenem),  and not a city. Within urban contexts, the question of caste bigotry is less pronounced and in many cases, non-existent. What Roy puts on the stage is a specific kind of truth, perhaps true of some parts of India. But it is not a uniformly national reality, but she has been able to make it global by using the English language.

  What is even more ironic in this story is that the vehemence against broken caste taboos is practiced by a family that is Christian—Syrian Christian, whose forbears came to India in the 4^th century A.D.  And a savagely ironic twist is further given  to the story by the fact  that the person who informed on the illicit lovers is  the Untouchable man’s own father, who was terror-stricken that his son had dared to flout centuries old conventions thereby venturing into the “unthinkable” and “impossible.”  

Critics of Arundhati’s story say that she was playing up to Western audiences by giving them exactly the kind of story that they want to hear about India. In fact, there are references to the “Heart of Darkness”  a couple of times in the novel, referring to the dark jungle in which Velutha takes shelter. Arundhati’s valuation of this jungle seems ambivalent. Does she mean that India is a” heart of darkness”? However,  her work is honest and forthright, delving deep into a tragedy that  by most accounts was deeply personal , herself being one of the twins involved in the story.  In the process she unveils a rural society, where people  like the Syrian Christian  Ipe family may be literate and wealthy, but still ruled by centuries of Indian caste taboos. This is a novel about which one can apply Morrison’s famous pronouncement that all great art is political but irrevocably beautiful as well.