Introduction to Subaltern Studies - Bethel College



“‘Screams through earth and stone’:

Subalternity in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”

By Adam Gaeddert

June 2006 – February 2007

Advisor: Dr. Ami Regier

“‘Screams through earth and stone’:

Subalternity in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”

Introduction to Subaltern Studies

Bhubaneswari Bhaduri was a young woman from North Calcutta who, in 1926, hanged herself in her father’s apartment. At the time, her motives for suicide were considered a mystery. It was immediately assumed that her suicide was a case of illicit pregnancy, for which Bhubaneswari would have been socially ostracized, but it was soon found that she was menstruating at the time of the suicide. Almost a decade later, a letter she had left for her elder sister revealed that Bhubaneswari had been involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence, and prior to her suicide she had been entrusted with political assassination, and had found herself unable to carry out the task. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the postcolonial theorist who resurrected Bhubaneswari’s story as an object of critical analysis, posited that the young Indian woman had waited for the onset of menstruation in order to dismiss allegations that her suicide was the result of an illegitimate affair. Spivak was “unnerved” to discover that, only one generation later, Bhubaneswari’s nieces reported that their aunt’s suicide was likely a “case of illicit love” (Spivak 2205-6). In a relatively short amount of time, the fact of Bhubaneswari’s menstruation at the time of her death was lost, even within her own family, and replaced by an interpretation that confirmed a societal expectation of female suicide. This disturbing discovery framed in Spivak’s mind a question that became central to her theoretical work: “Can the subaltern speak?”

The “subaltern” is a broad category that attempts to characterize individuals whose voices and actions have been muted, drastically reinterpreted, lost, or consciously swept away. Implicit in the term are related question of power, agency, and representation: does the subaltern have the ability to define or represent her/himself in the public arena in any sort of lasting way? In different historical contexts, the subaltern has been understood as synonymous with women, children, colonial subjects, the poor, the illiterate, the proletariat, or the religious or ethnic minority. Today’s subalternist scholars, however, do not intend for the term to be reduced to any single oppressed group or minority; Bhubaneswari herself was “a woman of the middle class, with access, however clandestine, to the bourgeois movement for Independence” (2206). Though the study of subalternity has been central for generations of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial scholars, though they may not have used that terminology, it should not be assumed that Subaltern Studies is necessarily in cahoots with any of these intellectual schools. Spivak’s question does not drive toward yet another totalizing theory of human history—as does Marxism, for instance—but rather seeks to dig into specific sections and ask questions of how such totalizing theories, even the most well-intentioned, succumb to representing the subaltern as objects rather than conscious subjects of their own history. One important project of this latest wave of Subaltern Studies, beginning with Spivak and continuing on through Ranajit Guha, Amitav Ghosh, Partha Chatterjee, and others, has been to resurrect specific stories of individuals whose lives mean so little to history that their stories have been all but lost. Another project worth noting has been to track resistance, even to the smallest degree, in attempt to represent the subaltern as an active agent in her/his own (hi)story. In the case of the story of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s death, Spivak describes the act of waiting for menstruation before committing suicide a “displacing gesture,” a “subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide” (2205-6).

As another similar example of “reclaim[ing] a document for history,” Ranajit Guha examines the story of a young Bengali widow named Chandra who became pregnant during an affair with her brother-in-law, who in turn demanded that Chandra’s family perform an abortion. Chandra tragically died during the operation, and the sister who performed the abortion was subsequently arrested for murder. Their depositions were archived and anthologized at Viswabharati University. Studying these documents, Guha noted that the actual facts of Chandra’s unfortunate death had been interpreted in a way that stripped the characters involved of their own agency in telling the story as it happened: “the narrative in the document violates the actual sequence of what happened in order to conform to the logic of a legal intervention which made death into a murder, a caring sister into a murderess, all the actants in this tragedy into defendants, and what they said in a state of grief into ekrars [depositions]” (qtd. in Gupal 140). There was no conscious attempt on the part of the police or individuals in the judicial system to deviously reinterpret Chandra’s family members as co-conspirators in a crime. To the contrary, the power imbalance was implicit in the system. The oppressive re-writing of the subaltern was not violent and chaotic but orderly and methodical. Guha’s methodology of reading the voice of the subaltern out of obscure, limited documents is similar to the project of novelist Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh’s novel In an Antique Land was inspired by a few brief notes in the letters of a twelfth-century Middle Eastern Jewish trader about an Indian indentured servant named Ben Yiju. Because the “voice-consciousness” of Ben Yiju could only be read out of the fragmentary evidence from obscure texts, In an Antique Land was written as a fictional reconstructed history of the Indian servant, told from the perspective of a researcher in twentieth-century Egypt (Gupal 150). While Ghosh’s novel doesn’t solve the problem of representation—because even the well-intentioned Ghosh cannot claim that his (re)presentation somehow restores Ben Yiju’s actual, unadulterated voice—it does make a strong case that fiction is an appropriate medium, sometimes the only available medium, for doing the difficult work of telling the (hi)stories of the subaltern in a non-oppressive, self-critical manner.

Subalternity in The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1997, can be viewed as an attempt to reckon with some of the main questions driving the field of Subaltern Studies. Just as Ghosh’s In an Antique Land wrestles with the problem of telling a story about characters who are so marginal to history that almost nothing is known about them, The God of Small Things attempts to tells stories of characters whose lives have been rewritten by society’s, and history’s, higher powers. The prototypical stories of Bhubaneswari, Chandra, and Ben Yiju resonate in Roy’s narratives of the Untouchable worker Velutha, the “Imperial Entomologist” Pappachi, the divorcee Ammu, the British-Indian child Sophie Mol, and the twin children Estha and Rahel. With one notable exception, each of these narratives ends in disappearance and loss, due in part to unfortunate turns of events but due primarily to the marginalizing sweep of history. Embedded within the novel are stories of characters whose sexual desires are re-written as social deviancy, characters who have no choice but to internalize society’s Rules and Lessons emphasizing how people are not supposed to act, and characters who are taught to be complicit in their own silencing. To counteract the overwhelming presence of such narratives, though, Roy’s novel participates equally in the subalternist project of tracking resistance. This occurs by way of the narrator’s almost religious devotion to Small Things. Rather than participating in the academic tradition of seeking to “understand” its characters by creating a grand explanatory narrative that depersonalizes those very same characters, the novel speaks through the subjectivity of its children, treating minute sensual details as building blocks of experience and memory, and undermining the Platonic rigidity of the linguistic sign by stripping words down to their sounds and visual qualities. In addition to enacting the tragic plight of the subaltern, The God of Small Things also mirrors the subalternist method of piecing together (hi)stories by examining the fragments and shards of a broken past that get lost in the process of historical explanation. Guha elaborates on the pitfalls of History as it is usually told:

The ordinary apparatus of historiography has little to offer us here. Designed for big events and institutions, it is most at ease when made to operate on those larger phenomena which visibly stick out of the debris of the past. As a result, historical scholarship has developed … a tradition that tends to ignore the small drama and fine detail of social existence, especially at its lower depths. (qtd. in Gopal 140)

The narrator gives a rationale for rejecting Guha’s “ordinary apparatus of historiography” in the first chapter:

In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. (Roy 32)

Considered in light of the novel’s epithet from John Berger (“Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”), these lines assume supreme importance. These paragraphs establish the narrator’s relationship to the text as unofficial and in flux. The narrator hereby takes the first important step of refusing to assume the position of truth-teller, and instead emphasizes her/his own fallibility by acknowledging the “practical” necessity of beginning the story somewhere, even if that same story could just as well begin “thousands of years ago” (33). If the story is to be told, however, then it impels the storyteller not to let the smaller details slip through the cracks. The most important thing is to remember that storytelling involves beginnings, endings, omissions, and points of emphasis, and the choice belongs only to the storyteller. Like the Kathakali dancer, “He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, [or] he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf” (219).

The bulk of The God of Small Things is set in the small Indian village of Ayemenem, near the larger town of Cochin. The plot follows, though not chronologically, the story of one Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem and a pair of nearly simultaneous tragedies that disperse that family’s members to all parts of the world and lead to the surviving characters’ psychological struggles. “In a purely practical sense,” I, Adam Gaeddert, the author of this essay, claim that there are three narratives that form the most significant content of the novel. One, as foreshadowed by the narrator in the passage above, is a visit of Margaret and Sophie Mol Kochamma to India, tragically cut short by Sophie Mol’s drowning in the Meenachal River; the second is an affair between Ammu and Velutha, which is punished severely by the family and by political authorities; the last (and, I argue, most important) is the separation and symbolic sexual reunion of Rahel and Estha. Emerging through the intertwining of these three narratives is the ever-present but never-answered question: “Can the subaltern speak,” or is s/he doomed to a life and death of submission and irrelevancy? Further, the novel invites the reader to follow in Rahel’s footsteps as she returns on a subalternist-like journey to Ayemenem to make sense of the past by sifting through the minor details, fragments, and silences.

Roy presents a cast of characters strategically designed to explore subalternity from a number of different angles. Perhaps most obvious to the novel’s Western readers is the form of subalternity introduced by the postcolonial situation; British film, culture, and educational values seem to have an almost oppressively entrancing hold on many of the Indian characters, even half a century after India’s national independence. Through this lens, the death and glorifying funeral ceremony of the British child Sophie Mol contrasts sharply against the irreverent, unceremonial deaths and burials of Velutha and Ammu. It becomes evident in comparing these exactly which deaths matter and which do not, and the difference seems to be accounted for by the British/Indian dichotomy. Spivak, however, wrote that her intention was “not to describe ‘the way things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of the history as imperialism as the best version of history. It is, rather, to continue the account of how one explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one” (Spivak 2198). A strictly “postcolonial” subaltern reading of the text neglects to account for other significant forms of subalternity. Velutha, for example, becomes a victim of oppressive caste politics. Ammu’s identity as female divorcee, particularly after the discovery of her love affair (my term, not the narrator’s, only for the practical necessity of describing that silent relationship in words) with Velutha, renders her politically and socially worthless according the local gender rules and constructions. All three of the children, Rahel, Estha, and even Sophie Mol, are forced, by virtue of their age, into roles in a Play over which they are to have little or no control. “The critique of the many oppressions and discriminations is all the more felt because it is performed in the language of children and their world is shown as one of love, communication, fierce loyalty, gentleness, resistance and survival” (Singh 17). The novel even critiques Communism (“another religion turned against itself,” Roy 272), a theoretical system designed to combat economic domination in a manner that supposedly looks past boundaries of nation and race, for its failure to give voice to the subaltern in its multiplicity of forms, one of those forms being the Paravan Velutha, a devoted party member whom the party in the end betrays.

Enforcing Subalternity

While the question of why it is that the power structures in the novel exist in their current form, such that the main characters must shoulder the burden of subalternity, is outside the scope of this novel, The God of Small Things does comment on how such subalternity is enforced. In a certain sense, the novel is the narrator’s attempt to theorize about ways in which elements of language reflect and re-present systems of domination. It is through language that some people are represented as important and others not; that some people are represented as keepers of the peace and others as social deviants; that some people are remembered and others are forgotten. The result of the narrator’s theorizing is, in general terms, a threefold theory of how subalternity works. First, common in the language of subaltern studies, relates to (hi)story-telling as a means of exclusion. The second, in the tradition of Michel Foucault, relates to the construction of rules, laws, and lessons as means of punishing transgressors of a dominant social code. The third, explored in greater depth by many postmodern theorists from Jacques Derrida to Edward Said to Judith Butler, is the binary structure of language, the construction of social boundaries and dichotomies which disallow, and label as “dangerous,” hybrid entities.

(a) Storytelling/narrating/historicizing

A telling moment occurs in the second chapter when Chacko, Ammu’s Marxist, Oxford-educated brother, sits down with Estha and Rahel with the intention of giving them a “sense of Historical Perspective.” In his “Reading Aloud voice,” he tells them a story requiring them to think about the four-thousand-six-hundred million-year-old Earth as the forty-six year “Earth Woman.” By the internal logic of Chacko’s story, “the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge … was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.” Staring at the ceiling, Chacko says to the children, “And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye” (Roy 52-53). Chacko’s story contradicts his earlier proclamation that “To understand history … we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells” (51). The dilemma in Chacko’s mind is a question of historical scope. Which version of History is most correct—the one in which “we” actually matter, or the one in which “we” “are no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye”?

In the eyes of the children and Ammu, however, the Earth Woman story was not a comforting, “awe-inspiring,” “humbling” story. It was, to the children, not close enough to their own personal, sensual lives to truly intrigue or satisfy them. Chacko’s “Reading Aloud voice,” says the narrator, gave the impression that “[he] didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not.” To Ammu, that voice reflected one of Chacko’s “Oxford Moods,” an arrogant voice issuing from an elitist, Western-educated culture in which the story’s listeners do not matter and do not play any significant role in the story. It is the exclusiveness, amidst all the aesthetic grandeur, of Chacko’s story which introduces the trope of (hi)story-telling as means of exclusion. The reader of this novel will note a connection between Chacko’s selective exclusion and the story of his grandfather Pappachi, a respected Entomologist in the British Empire, whose own discovery of a new species of moth was forgotten by history. By the time British lepidopterists had “decided” that Pappachi’s claim to a new species was actually correct, Pappachi’s name had faded into irrelevance, and the moth was named after the Acting Director of Britain’s Department of Entomology. The exclusion of Pappachi’s name from official history, the history into which Pappachi had spent his whole career working toward, “haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children’s children” (48).

(b) Rules/laws/lessons

The narrator’s reflection on possible points at which to begin this particular story follows a timeline backward through history, starting with the day Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem, and moving through the occupation of the British, the ascendancy of the Dutch, and the arrival of Christianity, until eventually the narrator arrives at an indeterminate, imaginary moment in history, “the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much” (33). The narrator’s movement out of known history and into the “days when the Love Laws were made” implies that subalternity can be attributed, at least in part, to a set of legalistic rules that govern the social behavior and social worth of certain individuals. Once again, it is the children characters through which Roy chooses to elaborate on the theme of imposition of laws, rules, or lessons upon obedient subjects. In the initial scenes upon Margaret and Sophie Mol’s arrival in Cochin, the twins’ conduct becomes subject to strict rules of politeness and decency imposed by Ammu and Baby Kochamma in an attempt to impress, or at least not be embarrassed in front of, their British guests. Ammu sharply scolds Estha for refusing to respond to Margaret’s “How d’you do, Esthappen?” with “How do YOU do?” The narrator explains that Ammu “felt somehow humiliated by this public revolt in her area of jurisdiction. She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for her children in the Indo-British Behavior Competition.” Later in the drama surrounding Margaret and Sophie Mol’s arrival, Ammu sternly teaches Rahel the difference between “CLEAN and DIRTY” and Baby Kochamma corrects Estha on his incorrect “Prer NUN sea ahsyun” of “Thank God” (137-147). The dominant metaphor through this section, one which later in the text is expanded into a metaphor for History itself, likens the arrival of the British relatives to a Play, in which failure to act according to the adult-imposed script warranted scolding. Estha and Rahel internalize the idea of “learning lessons” so much that when they witness Velutha being beaten by police for his transgression of society’s laws, they conceptualize their response in terms of lessons learned (even though those “lessons” articulate sensory associations instead of rules of conduct):

Lesson Number One:

Blood barely shows on a Black Man. (Dum dum)

And

Lesson Number Two:

It smells though,

Sicksweet.

Like old roses on a breeze. (Dum dum) (293)

(c) Boundaries/borders/dichotomies

The physical geography of Ayemenem serves to represent and visually reinforce the pervasive theme of binary opposition and the subsequent dangers of hybridity and middle ground. The Meenachal River runs right through the center of the town, cleanly dividing one side from the other. On one side of the River is Ayemenem House; on the other side, gazing back at Ayemenem House like a reflection in a mirror, is “History House,” the former residence of an Englishman who had “‘gone native,’” likened by the narrator to Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (51). Flowing between these two houses, the Meenachal River acts as both an alluring, natural, and benevolent escape from the harsh social conditions during the two weeks of Margaret and Sophie Mol’s visit and a deceptively dangerous, consuming, cruel metonym for History. “No one knows the Meenachal. No one knows what it may snatch or suddenly yield. Or when” (245). It is actions and events that take place in or alongside the River which lead to both central tragedies of the novel; the Meenachal River is the site of Sophie Mol’s fatal decision to cross to the other side with Estha and Rahel, and it is also the site where Ammu and Velutha met to make love. Though it is not until later in the novel that characters physically interact with the River, the Meenachal is an ominous background presence almost from the beginning: “Though you couldn’t see the river from the house anymore, like a seashell always has a sea-sense, the Ayemenem House still had a river-sense. A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense” (30).

The physical landscape thus provides added weight to other binaries which figure prominently in the text: old/young, jam/jelly, natural/man-made, Touchable/Untouchable, British/Indian, Rahel/Estha, etc.:

Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and [Estha and Rahel] are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.

Not old.

Not young.

But a viable, die-able age. (5)

The phrase “viable, die-able age” furthers the narrator’s insistence that in-between-ness plays out in this novel as a form of subalternity. The jam-jelly distinction is a clear example. Rahel’s grandmother used to own a factory called Paradise Pickles & Preserves which produced and sold, among other things, a banana jam which the Food Products Organization deemed illegal because it was, according to “their books,” “too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency” (30-31). What was once a successful and tasty product is now re-classified as an illegal substance, and those who persist in producing that substance have now been re-written as criminals. The powerful imposing their binaries, classifications, and distinctions on the powerless, the subaltern.

The aforementioned binary of Rahel/Estha is also worthy of explanation. Very early in the novel, the narrator explains the nature of the relationship between the two twins from birth:

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.

Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha’s funny dream. (5)

Just as the narrator located the “beginning” of the novel in an imaginative time outside of history known as “the days when the Love Laws were made,” s/he situates the “beginning” of Estha and Rahel in an imaginative time “when memory had only just begun.” The descriptions resonate with the Genesis narrative of original sin; the introduction of “Love Laws” and dualistic thinking into the world is concurrent with banishment from an Edenic utopia. Indeed, the twins’ reunion later in life has echoes of Genesis and also incorporates water imagery in reference to the Meenachal River: “He was a naked stranger met in a chance encounter. He was the one that she had known before Life began. The one who had once led her (swimming) through their lovely mother’s cunt” (89). Though Estha and Rahel are physically very different, their relationship undermines traditional boundaries of Self, so much so that they once considered themselves at times to be of one mind or identity. As they grow up (and into history), they are gradually pulled away from each other, first in terms of linguistic distance (“We” and “Us” becomes “You” and “Me”) and finally in terms of physical distance (although this physical distance is later overcome).

Silencing the Subaltern

He left no ripples in the water.

No footprints on the shore.

He held his Mundu spread above his head to dry. The wind lifted it like a sail. He was suddenly happy. Things will get worse, he thought to himself. Then better. He was walking swiftly now, toward the Heart of Darkness. As lonely as a wolf.

The God of Loss.

The God of Small Things.

Naked but for his nail varnish. (274)

The recurrent pairing of Small Things with Loss in this description of Velutha draws attention to the centrality and interrelatedness of those themes. It is a pairing very familiar to the field of Subaltern Studies. Guha displays unceasing commitment to intellectually resurrecting and studying “the small drama and fine detail of social existence, particularly at its lower depths,” in attempt to restore to historical consciousness those details which have been all but lost, drowned out by the “‘stentorian voice of the state’ that has made a univocal ‘case’ out of the ‘many sided and complex tissue of human predicament’” (qtd. in Gopal 140). Small Things, made big in this novel, are the things in greatest danger of being lost and swallowed up by the powers of History, the state, the Socialist movement, capitalism, and globalization, to name a few.

At the novel’s moments of Loss, in which subaltern characters become subject to the totalizing and devastating sweep of Big Things, Silence becomes another important trope. Spivak’s famous negative answer to the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” implies that silence is a critical component of subaltern identity. The subaltern cannot represent her/himself publicly and in an enduring way. The God of Small Things represents this theme in the narratives of many of its characters—young and old, male and female, Touchable and Untouchable, British and Indian. By representing these instances of loss and silencing, Roy encourages the reader to participate in the subalternist project of reading the silences and re-formulating narratives out of fragments.

Sophie Mol

The opening pages of the novel narrate Rahel’s return to Ayemenem after twenty-three years and then flash back to describe the funeral of Sophie Mol, without divulging the circumstances of her death. Both of these events work to establish spacing between a significant event and the residual aftermath of that event. In both cases, the looming question as presented by the narrator is about how to talk about what has happened in the past, the “elephant in the room” as one might say (which takes on an interesting meaning after of the incidental death of the elephant Kochu Thomban, leaving an “elephant-shaped hole in the universe,” later in the novel). The space between past and present is a gap that must be negotiated by language or reconciliatory action, as eulogies and funerals negotiate the meaning of specific deaths. However, it is also implied in these opening pages that such a negotiation, in addition to remembering the past, alters and buries the past, framing people and events of the past in a new light. During Sophie Mol’s funeral, the young Rahel uncomfortably notices this covering-up:

When they lowered Sophie Mol’s coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn’t dead. She heard (on Sophie Mol’s behalf) the softsounds of the red mud and the hardsounds of the orange laterite that spoiled the shining coffin polish. She heard the dullthudding through the polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. The sad priests’ voices muffled by mud and wood….

Inside the earth Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can’t hear screams through earth and stone.

Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe.

Her funeral killed her. Dus to dus to dus to dus to dus. On her tombstone it said A SUNBEAM LENT TO US TOO BRIEFLY. (8-9)

Sophie Mol is thereby established as a subaltern character. The circumstances leading to her drowning, the reader later finds out, were very different than what was said in the aftermath of her drowning: she had approached the river because she had, out of loneliness and a desire to escape the world of adults, convinced Rahel and Estha to let her come along, but Margaret Kochamma later interpreted Estha and Rahel as being responsible for her daughter’s death. At the moment of her death, Sophie Mol became subject to radical re-interpretation that did not account for her own wishes and desires in life. Her identity was re-defined by her death instead of her life: “Sophie Mol became a Memory, while the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive” (253). It is the fact of Sophie Mol’s loneliness and spirit of subtle protest against an adult world that the funeral effectively buried, and this was possibly one reason for Sophie Mol’s posthumous screams during the funeral.

The drowning of Sophie Mol in the Meenachal, the reader finds out much later, did not allow even the slightest scream:

There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy.

Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist. (277)

The incident is a coming-together of the twin associations of the Meenachal River with boundary transgression and with silence. It is in or around the Meenachal River that deviant acts against the social order are performed, but these deviant acts in the end lead to punishment by the more powerful upholders of that social order. However, punishment is a silent, negative act of purging, forgetting, and washing away. Even though the death of Sophie Mol is purely accidental, the incident strongly interacts in the text with the figurative washing-away of Velutha. It is these types of silent deaths, aimed at tacitly ridding the environment of a certain presence, that the texts implicitly suggests are most violent.

Velutha

Indeed, the brutal beating by the police of a helpless Velutha, the novel’s only instance of bloody violence, is dealt silently and efficiently. Viewed through the eyes of the unfortunate witnesses Estha and Rahel, the narrator characterizes the event in terms of its dampened sounds and its noticeable absences. The onlooking children hear “the muffled grunt when the stomach is kicked in,” “the muted crunch of skull on cement,” and “the gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib” (292; emphasis mine). Gauging the emotion in the room, the children notice “the absence of caprice in what the policemen did,” “the abyss where anger should have been” as if they were “opening a bottle. Or shutting a tap. Cracking an egg to make an omelette.” The narrator thus lays bare the inhumanity of Velutha’s treatment by emphasizing the backwards nature of the violence as efficient, responsible, and silent:

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak. (293)

The text does not identify the policemen, called “history’s henchmen,” as primary perpetrators of the injustice, because to do so would be to diminish the broader social system that allows such justice to occur. The policemen are faceless and nameless. Because there is very little physical description of the policemen, the reader comes to know them only through their job title and the looming red and blue board in the Kottayam police station from earlier in the novel:

Politeness.

Obedience.

Loyalty.

Intelligence.

Courtesy.

Efficiency. (10)

The larger significance of this section becomes more apparent with the single-sentence-fragment paragraph “History in live performance” (293), which lands on top of the text like a bolded heading in a children’s history textbook. “History” in this context references the same “History” that Guha wrote about in his writings about Chandra and her family, and that Spivak wrote about in her description of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide. It is the deceptively powerful river of History that so efficiently drowns the subaltern. Velutha’s death, by the children’s standards a tragedy and an injustice, was rewritten on the spot as an “inoculation … against an outbreak.” The beating shatters Velutha both physically and intellectually to nothing but broken remains and fragmented memories in the minds of Estha and Rahel.

It is important for the sake of the novel’s subalternist objective, however, that the instruments of the state not be depicted as the sole “erasers” of Velutha’s subjectivity: “Esthappen and Rahel both knew that there were several perpetrators (besides themselves) that day. But only one victim” (182). While subaltern studies begins with the Foucauldian project of examining the official state-sponsored punitive system, subaltern theorists have aimed to show that subalternity cannot be blamed simply on a single person or social group. In The God of Small Things, Velutha is sacrificed at the hands of both Communist party, of which he is a loyal member, and various members of the Kochamma family, with whom his family has had close ties for generations. Communism was intended to be a liberatory movement on behalf of society’s lower classes, but in this novel even Communism is unable to reconcile its own liberatory mission with the more deep-seated social boundaries of the caste system. Velutha’s mysterious involvement in the violent Naxalite (Chinese Communist) rebellion reflects his proactive fervor in rebelling against a certain type of oppressive social structure, but his identity as Untouchable Paravan still foreshadows his demise. He had no control over the kidnapping and murder charges brought against him, and in the aftermath of his death the same members of the Communist party which betrayed him tried to use his death to further the party’s political cause (286-287). Velutha does not disappear from the text in a flurry of activity at the moment of his fatal beating in the History House; he is constantly disappearing into the text’s literal and metaphorical darknesses. “This tendency of all visible traces of Velutha’s presence to disappear can be understood to be a result of his Untouchable Paravan status, a kind of social discrimination that demands the ritualized removal of a person’s traces in order to avoid the defilement of his social superiors; or, alternatively, a deliberate ignoring and overlooking of his footprints and presence by those in a more elevated social position than his” (D’Souza 118). Velutha appears multiple times in Ammu’s dreams as the “God of Small Things,” a mysterious and silent entity which “left no ripples in the water” and “no footprints in the sand” (274). As foreshadowed, it is his father Vellya Paapen who informs Baby Kochamma of Velutha and Ammu’s love affair, in effect sweeping away his own genetic lineage. Following the betrayal by the Communist party and by his father, it is the betrayal by the confused and traumatized Estha in speaking with Inspector Matthews that sealed Velutha’s fate:

The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said yes.

Childhood tiptoed out.

Silence slid in like a bolt.

Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared. (303)

Ammu

It is worth noting that the two central tragedies of the novel, the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, seem to cover up an equally tragic narrative: Ammu’s fading-away into total subalternity. Like Velutha, Ammu is consistently depicted as a subaltern character, from the opening pages when she goes into the Kottayam police station and her breasts are tapped “like melons” by Inspector Mathews’ baton. At a young age she married and bore twin children, Estha and Rahel, with a Hindu man she would later divorce, already stigmatizing her in a society that relegates widows to lower social status. After her affair with Velutha had come to light, her social status dropped even lower due not only to the fact that she was a widow but that she had been “defiled” by a member of the Untouchable caste. Mathews’ later tap on Ammu’s breasts was a “premeditated gesture, calculated to humiliate and terrorize her,” rather than a single isolated instance of sexual harassment (246). Only in passing does the narrator mention that the “real story” of Ammu, Velutha, and the children did eventually come to light, rather than the fabricated and caricatured version perpetuated by Baby Kochamma and the police, it was simply a matter of organizing “paperwork” that allowed Thomas Mathew to congratulate himself on his work in handling the incidents (246). Ammu passed through her final years in isolation and relative silence, her life virtually irrelevant in the eyes of anyone else. Upon her all-but-unnoticed death “in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey” at the age of thirty-one (“a viable, die-able age”), “the church refused to bury Ammu,” thereby further denying Ammu any record of her participation in the Orthodox church (154). In the final years of her life, Ammu barely existed. For a time she clung to the unrealistic hope that she would actually get the UN job she applied for and live in The Hague, a hope which may further emphasize the extent to which she felt she had no say in local affairs; she felt that she needed to be heard on an international scale if she was to be heard at all (152).

Rahel’s Return to Ayemenem

Almost all of the plotlines in The God of Small Things end in fragments, loss, and tragic silence. The narrative of Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma’s visit to Ayemenem ended in the Loss of Sophie Mol. The narrative of the children’s growing friendship with Velutha ends in Velutha’s disappearance from social space. The narrative of Ammu’s sexual relationship with Velutha ends in Ammu’s complete subalternity. Despite the fact that each of these narratives somewhat empowers its characters by depicting them in rebellion against oppressive systems of bureaucracy, social structure, and language (there is certainly a case to be made, for example, that Ammu and Velutha’s contempt for the social forces keeping them apart is, in part, what drove them to sensuous experience of each other’s bodies), the fact of their resistance failed to survive into the official historical record; Ammu and Velutha’s love affair was remembered only as an unnatural act of sexual defilement, rather than an act of resistance against the social order. Characters in these plotlines suffer the same fate as Bhubaneswari Bhaduri; their individual subjectivities and desires in life become commodified entities in the hands of more powerful individuals and institutions with the ability to radically re-define the social meaning of subaltern characters.

There is, however, one plotline in the novel that resists this trend of loss and fragmentation. It is the narrative of Rahel and Estha, which spans from the earliest temporal moment in the novel to the latest. As previously explicated, from the “amorphous years when memory had only just begun,” perhaps referring to the womb or shortly after birth but described in terms that situate this beginning in an indeterminate and distant past, Estha and Rahel had been strangely united as a single entity. The distinction between the two had been imposed upon them by language and by adults in the world; the narrator makes a point of explaining this in order to implicitly suggest that divisions of male/female, outer/inner, and self/other are conceptual rather than innate. Over the course of the novel, the severance between the twins becomes more and more complete. After “the Terror,” the tragic events around the Meenachal, Ammu accepts the idea that the children would be better off separated and returns Estha to live with his father (286). In time, Rahel pursues an architecture education in New York. The separation finally becomes literal and complete when Estha and Rahel are dispersed to different corners of the world.

However, the narrative does not end in separation, but in reunion. Rahel returns to Ayemenem twenty-three years later after finding out that her brother had been “re-Returned.” She finds out from her aunt that, since the days of the Terror, Estha had gradually become quieter and quieter until eventually he stopped speaking altogether:

It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world. (12)

Meeting in complete silence, Rahel and Estha explore each other’s bodies very sensually and engage in sexual intercourse. This sexual reunion, though illicit and counter to the age-old “Love Laws,” is redemptive. It is a coming together of two beings that had been cruelly and unnaturally separated. While the act of sex between Ammu and Velutha, also situated at the end of the novel, is structured as an act of escape and desperation (although that reading is not meant to strip the act of its rebellious nature), the reunion of the twins is depicted positively, as an act of “Love,” Madness,” “Hope,” and “Infinite Joy,” words which surface multiple times in the text (112).

Aijaz Ahmad’s reading of The God of Small Things notes that the final lovemaking scenes of the novel, particularly between Ammu and Velutha, occur not as a result of thought or decision but of wanton physical desire. Ahmad criticizes Roy’s novel for being content to let its main characters end the novel by succumbing to desire, rather than acting out of thoughtfulness and conscious will:

They become pure embodiments of desire, and significantly, not a word of intelligent conversation passes between them…. What is most striking about the final phallic encounter between Ammu and Velutha is how little it has to do with decision … the difference between decision and fatal attraction is that whereas decision, even the decision to accept suffering and or death, is anchored in praxis, in history, in social relationships chosen and lived in a complex interplay of necessities and freedoms, fatal attractions can never cope with such complexities and must be acted out simply in terms of a libidinal drive. (qtd. in Bahri 228)

Ahmad is correct, even within the avowedly subalternist framework that this essay espouses, to demand that postcolonial novels represent their subaltern characters in ways that gives those characters a respectable sort of agency, one which will allow those characters to be taken as active subjects rather than passive objects. As such, The God of Small Things could perhaps be legitimately critiqued for overindulgence in sensuality, sometimes at the expense of analysis and reason. However, Ahmad’s isolation of the Ammu-Velutha narrative does not give due attention the fact that the Estha-Rahel narrative is of a much different nature. Even though Estha and Rahel’s sexual experience transpires with “a word of intelligent conversation,” the act is not inspired by a sense of impending doom, but by an appropriately silent and somewhat elegiac remembrance of all that has transpired. Ahmad perhaps errs in considering the tragic closeness of Ammu and Velutha the novel’s most central narrative; it seems more appropriate to say that the separation and coming together of the twins Estha and Rahel is the narrative which encompasses all others. Seemingly against the grain of the world, which was at times intent on keeping the twins separate, Estha was re-Returned to Ayemenem and Rahel actively traveled back to India to meet him.

Rahel’s return journey to Ayemenem to meet her brother after twenty-three years mirrors the subalternist project of returning to history’s fragments, “unimportant” details, minor characters, and silences in attempt to reconfigure history more fairly. The chapter entitled “Wisdom Exercise Notebooks” follows Rahel around as she wanders alone around Ayemenem twenty-three years after the tragedies, and it begins with an image which represents the residue left behind by years of historical writing and research: “In Pappachi’s study, mounted butterflies and moths had disintegrated into small heaps of iridescent dust that powdered the bottom of their glass display cases, leaving the pins that had impaled them naked. Cruel” (148). Pappachi’s study itself is out of use, and has been established by prior narration as the office of an Imperial Entomologist who was written out of history, robbed of the fame that was deservedly his. Rahel continues to rummage through texts and artifacts with detective-like precision, noting the smallest details: “A smooth seashell and a spiky one. A plastic case for contact lenses. An orange pipette. A silver crucifix on a string of beads. Baby Kochamma’s rosary. She held it up against the light. Each greedy bead grabbed its share of sun” (149). Deepika Bahri suggests that “a liberation project that cannot attend to ‘small things’ can never accomplish the ‘big’ task that awaits it” (Bahri 222). She reads a notebook filled with Estha’s and her writings from when they were six years old; at the present moment of her life, these actions read as attempts to recover details about her (and her sibling’s) distant past by devoting attention to the most minor artifacts. It is with the same detective-like precision that she later “reads” the details of Estha’s physical body: “Rahel searched her brother’s nakedness for signs of herself. In the shape of his knees. The arch of his instep. The slope of his shoulders. The angle at which the arm met his elbows. The way his toe-nails tipped upwards at the ends…” (Roy 88). Estha, by this point in the novel, has become the literal embodiment of the speechless subaltern, but Rahel treats his body like a presence in the world, worthy of exploration and observation, rather than an absence.

Even though Rahel’s return to Ayemenem is willed and unprompted by external agents, she approaches the return trip without any clear expectation of what she might find or what might happen. According to the reading that I put forth, this communicates a subtle message that historians should approach their subject with a certain amount of humility, allowing primary sources to speak for themselves instead of forcing them into a pre-determined thesis. Subaltern history does not aim to triumph over all other oppressive forms of history; in many ways, it is an elegiac type of history which mourns the forgotten. Even though there are moments of stilted joy when reading through the dusty old Wisdom Exercise Notebooks, and even though her sexual encounter with her brother has the redemptive aspect of reuniting two bodies that had been long been separated, Estha and Rahel held each other after making love in mournful recognition that their togetherness could only occur by way of another taboo act, another boundary transgression: “what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief … that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much” (311).

In this way, one of the most valiant and important aspects of the burgeoning field of Subaltern Studies is its ability to know its own limitations. The writing of history is, by its very nature, an act which reveals some things and masks others, creating some people that matter more than others, creating villains, creating heroes. Spivak suggests that subalternists must sometimes, for the sake of sheer pragmatism, accept “strategic essentialism” in their academic discourses, insisting that past subaltern voices have been covered up even if the subalternist her/himself is unable to entirely speak for those subaltern subjects (Spivak 2196). On the other hand, perhaps sometimes the best thing Subaltern Studies can do is insist that the past itself exists only in silence (“At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented,” Roy 215), buried beneath competing discourses of the present. Priyamvada Gopal writes, “The grandest, though surprisingly definitive, act of them all is that of ‘refusal’ – not just to write foundationalist histories, it would seem, but to write history at all; for at the end of the day, any act of knowledge production or historiography becomes, by definition, damningly ‘foundational’” (Gopal 160).

Bibliography

Bahri, Deepika. Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

D’Souza, Florence. “Silences and Ellipses in The God of Small Things.” Eds. Carole and Jean-Pierre Durix. Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Dijon, France: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002.

Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993.

Gopal, Priyamvada. “Reading Subaltern History.” Ed. Neil Lazarus. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 139-161.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997.

Singh, Sujala. “Postcolonial Children: Representing the Nation in Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa and Shyam Selvadurai.” Wasafiri: The Transnational Journal of International Writing 41 (Spring 2004): 13-18.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. 2197-2208.

Related Readings

Cabaret, Florence. “Classification in The God of Small Things.” Eds. Carole and Jean-Pierre Durix. Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Dijon, France: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002.

Carey, Cynthia. “The Architecture of Place in The God of Small Things.” Eds. Carole and Jean-Pierre Durix. Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Dijon, France: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002.

Cox, Michael W. “Interpreters of Cultural Difference: The Use of Children in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Fiction.” South Asian Review 24.2 (2003): 120-132.

Kumar, Sanjay. “Theater for Children in India: An Instrument for Social Change.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 36.4 (Winter 1998): 30-32.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Pesso-Miquel, Catherine. “‘Queen Cigars’ and ‘Peppermint Children’: Foreign Arrivals in The God of Small Things.” Eds. Carole and Jean-Pierre Durix. Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Dijon, France: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994.

Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Grove Press, 1956.

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