AMMU’S MAN: RECONNOITERING THE MACHISMO OF VELUTHA IN THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Abstract

Machismos, as is the instance with feminineness for women, are publically built gender profiles under which men are pigeonholed. The inferred affiliation between male bodies and machismos or masculinity presents us with an understanding of the sex/gender gap where ‘sex’ is seen as remaining a preeminence and ‘gender’ as a set of facets which are ancillary. New directions in feminist studies have begun to take up this issue of reconsidering or rediscovering masculinity, especially in the context of recent works of Literature. Arundhati Roy’s Man-booker award winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997) is predominantly a novel about battle- in and through the body. Velutha, “The God of Loss. The God of Small Things” (Roy 265), whose name in Malayalam means “white” (Roy 73, 175 and 334), the colour affiliated both to sorrow and sunlit, has been depicted by the writer as the emblem of masculinity. Arundhati Roy builds an account that focuses on bodily happenstances that rebel considerable discourses and function as edges of cultural and social acquaintances. This study has been enthused by the comprehension that the subject of masculinity in women’s writing has not yet been explored to that extent, which it was expected to be! Little attention has been given to the analysis of women’s writing with the tools that theories of virilities provide. What masculinities emerge in Roy’s The God of Small Things is the multi-layered, mongrel text, wavering between traversing valuations of indigenous acuities of the standing of the man, the bequest of interventionism, and the impresses of novelty and globalization! Hence, this study, not only reconnoiters the different traits of masculinity present in Velutha as envisioned by a female writer, but it also deliberates in detail the male identity construction.