50 pages • 1 hour read
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Beauty of Small Things
The world of the coastal town of Ayemenem is squalid and fetid, suggested by the heavy stink from the Meenachal that hangs over the town. Its residents live blighted lives of frustration and emptiness. In a narrative driven by the oppressive weight of Big Things such as hate, discrimination, violence, death, greed, and history, the narrative nevertheless pauses the drama at regular moments to detail, with poetic lyricism, evidence of small, fragile beauty in and around the lives of the Ipe family that are often ignored or missed.
Thus, even as the runaway children head down to river to their doom, Ammu steals out with her lover, or the police squad approaches the History House to arrest Velutha, the narrator pauses to take note of the jangly scurry of insects, the fragile scattering of butterflies, the careless touches of color in the trees from squawking birds, or the slimy feel of the river weeds. In short, the narrator insists on an unapologetic and unironic delight in the shapes, colors, and textures of the random collision of small things all around the family’s emerging tragedy. The narrator likewise refuses to ignore what might seem to be negative elements, the ugliness, all around the characters: the stench of feces from the river, the slant and lean of the neglected house, the crazy run of cockroaches in the Ipe kitchen, the vivid white lines of Ammu’s stretch marks, the green-rotting fish floating in the river, the grey shade of Estha’s vomit, or the golden stream of urine when the family visits the theater restroom. In the novel, the five senses, alert and open, provide connection in a world otherwise riven by division and enforced separation.
In the end, the novel argues these simple, unexpected moments—these small things—may be all we have. When the narrator describes Velutha at the moment of his arrest—that is, the moment when his life collides with Big Ideas—the narrator calls him the God of Small Things. The lazy afternoon when Velutha plays with the kids, even allowing them to paint his fingernails a bright red, does not forward the plot at all. It is a moment apart, a respite that defines the small pleasures that in the end offer the quiet, redemptive power of delight. Amid the doomed tragedy around Velutha and Ammu’s assignations, the couple focuses on the simple delight of their fingertips touching, the smolder in their eyes, the sweat along their arms. The tender and loving attention to the unexpected and enthralling beauty of small things is the only joy in the world of this novel, with its bleak and stubborn pessimism.
The Corrosive Effect of the Family
The trigger event in the narrative present is the return home of 31-year-old Estha. That event, traditionally associated with the welcoming joys of a family coming back together, here is negative. Estha, his life an emotional wreckage, has nowhere else to go. Other characters—Ammu, Chacko, Baby Kochamma—leave home only to return years later, beaten and defeated, home being less a welcoming place and more a last-resort shelter from failure and disappointment.
Although the novel is a scathing critique of India’s lingering caste system, with its institutionalization of racism and bigotry, the novel also works as a probing psychological study of the corrosive effects of the family. The Ipe family destroys itself. The irony of a happy family is suggested in the painfully elaborate charade the family puts on for Margaret and Sophie when they arrive from England for the holiday visit. The insincerity of the family’s little show as they pretend to be a loving and supportive unit inevitably collapses of its own irony.
The downfall of the Ipe family begins long before the drowning death of Sophie and the illicit affair between Ammu and Velutha. That downfall is grounded in the family’s perception of family itself as a dynamic defined not by love and respect but rather by power and the threat of violence. The family here thrives on sustaining decades-long grudges, hanging on to slights, magnifying them until they justify division and shut down communication. Marriages themselves are toxic. Going back to Ammu’s grandparents, generation after generation, no marriage is defined by emotional honesty and respect for the integrity of one other. Husbands regard their wives as little more than servants and routinely and with impunity take out their disappointments and frustrations on them in violent, usually drunken outbursts. Parents judge their children, bully them, and hold them accountable to arbitrary codes of behavior. It is the family’s unwillingness to tolerate young Estha’s joyful singing in the movie theater that precipitates his molestation by the snack counter vendor, and when the children, now grown adults, falter, as adults inevitably will, the family refuses to accept them without caustic and unforgiving judgment. Ammu, after she leaves a husband who tried to negotiate her into a sexual liaison with his boss, is shunned by her parents as a disgraced single mother. Chacko is regarded as a failure when he returns divorced from Margaret. The family poisons its own members. Love is ironic, marriage a farce, pregnancy a burden, and children a curse.
The toxic nature of family is embodied in the character of Baby Kochamma. Her own life twisted by her futile obsession with an Irish monk, she dominates the events in 1969, callously using her own family to satisfy her unjustified sense of being humiliated by wannabe communists happily rallying during their parade. She uses the notion of this vendetta to justify her role in the death of an innocent Velutha and later the heartless exile of both Ammu and Estha. Caught up by her own lies, she destroys her family to preserve it.
The Harsh Reality of Mutability
The novel argues that life is in constant flux at the whim of luck and chance and that every person must therefore live paradoxically expecting the unexpected. As a young man in his early thirties, Estha, a manic depressive and amateur existentialist willing to ponder the big questions about life, lives by a mantra he learned as a child and now shares with Rahel: Everything can change in a single day. He has learned that change, unexpected and unscripted, impacts life.
Every person must live, moment to moment, on the anxious cusp of unanticipated tectonic change. No amount of planning or preparation, no amount of intellectual debate and reasoning through of alternatives, can alter this simple, terrifying theme. The three great tragedies that destroy the Ipe family—Estha’s molestation in the movie theater, the taboo affair between Ammu and Velutha, and the drowning of Sophie Mol—each are triggered by a casual and entirely unpredictable moment that, in turn, brings unexpected, dire consequences. Estha, his throat parched from singing along to the tunes in the movie, decides to visit the lobby to buy a lemonade. Ammu happens to see Velutha, as he happens to be picking up Rahel, at a moment he happens to be revealing his muscled and sweaty torso. A wayward log happens to ram into the children’s flimsy vallom, upending it and sending the children into the fetid river. These moments are decidedly random, purposeless, and without design.
The world defined by the novel is forbidding, even terrifying. Characters, whatever their gender, education, or socio-economic status, can be only reactive, helpless, and ultimately passive. The Communists who struggle to take a foothold in the family’s pickle factory espouse a brave and idealistic doctrine that suggests that humanity can in fact control, contain, and direct the crazy energy of chance, the unpredictable crossed plots that define history. When given a chance to run the factory, the union predictably drives it into bankruptcy.
Each character has a different strategy for handling mutability. They drink, they turn violent, they seek the calming consolations of religion, they restrict interactions with the world, they turn melancholic, they settle into the easy escape of television with its carefully designed plots, they struggle with suicide ideations. They settle into a life of quiet desperation. Despite a rage for order, with its implicit suggestion that somehow a person can control their immediate environment (witness Estha, upon first arriving at his family’s cluttered home, cleaning and then organizing his old room), the novel itself, in its complex and free-wheeling design, suggests that order is an illusion, a creation imposed on events only after the fact. A person can only live step to step, day to day, both fearing and anticipating what might happen next.
The Legacy of Discrimination
Although the caste system of social stratification that defined India for more than five centuries was actually outlawed more than 40 years before the sequence of events that make inevitable the drowning of Sophie and the brutal beating of Velutha, the entrenched cultural acceptance of discrimination is very much responsible for that chain of events. At the center of Roy’s uncompromising critique of her modern India is the willingness of its people to define, judge, and in turn limit the role a person can play in society based entirely on their being part of a group.
Ammu and Velutha are the most obvious victims of the lingering curse of discrimination. The so-called Love Laws, a holdover from the caste system itself, proscribe the allowable interactions between classes, in effect defining who can love whom and, in turn, who is worthy of love. Surely the most obvious example of discrimination in the novel is the Ipe family’s reaction to the revelation that Ammu is involved with an old-school untouchable, a Paravan. As Ammu’s mother explains to her daughter, “Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their foot print so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s foot prints” (122).
Disregarding any interest in Ammu’s welfare, her happiness, or even her motivation, the family immediately defines the relationship with Velutha as a sin, an abomination, an affront: a forbidding combination of “Grief and Terror” (75). The night Velutha’s own father, in a gesture of misguided allegiance to the family, reveals his own son’s culpability, the family’s disgust is palpable. Ammu’s mother, enraged, regards her daughter with cool contempt: “She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breasts. His mouth on hers. His breathing. His particular Paravan smell. Like animals [she] thought and nearly vomited” (244). Baby Kochamma’s elaborate lies to the police reveal the hate, paranoia, and desperation that are the legacy of discrimination.
Additionally, the novel explores the discrimination against women in contemporary India. Although the novel takes place in the latter decades of the 20th century, Ayemenem society conforms to a distinctly medieval perception of women and their limited place in society, their subservient role in marriage, and their prescribed duties to a family. Education is wasted on women. Self-expression, emotional evolution, and psychological development are deemed unnecessary, even dangerous, for women. Wives are treated as property, expected to follow exactly the boundaries and rules set by the husband. Failure to follow those expectations, whether that failure is real or imagined, permits wives to be abused, beaten, and punished. Women are dismissed to the margins, relegated to secondary status entirely because of gender. It is Ammu’s rejection of that limited role that drives her, ironically, into the arms of the abusive Baba. Her decision to free herself from that toxic relationship, however, leaves her stigmatized by her own family, a single mother, a failed wife. The novel chronicles three generations of the Ipe family, and in each generation the women suffer. They are in the end isolated, bitter, and frustrated. They receive no respect, struggle to define any sense of a coherent identity, and are denied any opportunity to express themselves.
