SUBALTERNITY IN ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Abstract

Subaltern Studies, particularly in the field of social and cultural anthropology, has provided critical contexts that restore suppressed histories while criticizing Eurocentrism, imperialist biases, Enlightenment rationality, and the idea of nationalism. After the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the terms subaltern and Subaltern Studies have become profoundly entangled with postmodern and postcolonial cultural studies, underlining the need for a conscious and deconstructivist approach for reading the history in order to get at the different ways in which European forms of knowledge represented the “subaltern”. Arundhati Roy’s famous novel The God of Small Things, while touching on many post-colonial issues ranging from linguistic imperialism to hybridity, is a striking display of the plight of subalterns. The subaltern in the novel can be grouped into three as “the inhabitants of Ayemenem”, “the untouchables” and “the women”. The novel scrutinises first colonial discourse and Western style of thinking about and studying the subaltern, and then how the colonizer and the colonized evolved within an unequal power relationship. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the ways in which hegemonic discourses constitute class, marginality and the objectification of the subaltern.