In attempting to define the history and modern identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee calls to attention the many paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by its colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create the ambiguity in India’s national identity. This is also the central argument in Ganesh N. Devy’s Of Many Heroes where, in tracing the Literary Historiography of India, he cements the fact that all literary, traditional and historical movements in India have germinated from the togetherness of its cultural, social and lingual multiplicity. Both seem to adhere to U. R. Anantha Murthy’s understanding of Indian culture as a mosaic pattern of tradition and modernity. He writes of a heterodox reality where the intellectual self is in conflict with the emotional, the rational individual experiences the sad nostalgia of the exile from his traditional roots and in fluctuating between belief and non-belief he works out his dilemmas. This paper attempts a reading of the transgression of “Love Laws” in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as not only the representation of this heterodox modernity in the personal domain as a reflection of the larger national conflict but also a postcolonial writer’s dilemmas in search for an identity and their troubles in expressing it.
Roy’s The God of Small Things illustrates history as “a dominating, oppressive force that saturates virtually all social and cultural spaces, including the familial, intimate, and affective relationships.” (Needham 372). Roy herself writes that the book “connects the very smallest things to the very biggest…...
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...mprobable. Civilization is based on repression of expressions of love but the desire to transgress is one of its basic urges. Roy seems to draw upon this and says, “To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God’s a big thing and God’s in control. The god of small things…is not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries.” (Gutheinz 3)
In the depiction of history as a powerful force of order and classification, the novel tends to celebrate its opposite in images of mixedness and hybridity. "Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits" (Roy 3) are constantly blurred in the text. There are no fixed boundaries that separate the world of those who make the laws and the world of the transgressors, as Roy writes “They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory” (Roy 31). All members of the Ipe family ‘transgress’ in different ways.
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a novel about how people’s pursuit of their own interests, influenced by the cultural and social contexts in which they live, ultimately determines their behavior. Through utilizing subthemes of self-preservation, the maintenance of social status/the status quo, and power, she portrays Velutha as the only wholly moral character in the story, who, because of his goodness, becomes the target of frequent deception. Roy argues that human nature is such that human beings will do whatever they feel is necessary to serve their own self-interests.
Critic, Anna Clarke, suggests that “Roy’s novel can be read as a radical literary strategy that evades and challenges society’s mono-logic tendency to control narrative meaning, and structure our perception through forms of linguistic order”. The multi-perspectival style of the novel is important in order to fully understand the complexities of the characters,
Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret” is an essay in which she carefully constructs and describes history, particularly World War II, through the lives of several different people. Taken from her book A Chorus of Stones, her concepts may at first be difficult to grasp; however David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky say that, “Griffin writes about the past - how we can know it, what its relation to the present, why we should care. In the way she writes, she is also making an argument about how we can know and understand the past…”
n President Andrew Jackson “ He’s made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it”
One statement in the beginning of the book was especially poignant to any one who studies Indian culture, It is easy for us to feel a vicarious rage, a misery on behalf of these people, but Indians, dead and alive would only receive such feelings with pity or contempt; it is too easy to feel sympathy for a people who culture was wrecked..
Only a boat remains, an eye painted on it. The novelist says that this eye can weep. Hence, even after the cathartic disaster, “maya remained”. Partha Chatterjee, referring to this novel, argues that our colonial modernity embodies this maya, this obstinate infatuation with our pre-modern pasts which embodied both the loathsome and the beautiful. Like the storm suffered by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, the flood faced by the chandal in Antarjali Jatra is an apocalyptic vision of the advent of modernity, a violent rupture that is necessary yet painful. On the other hand, the map of the “sacredsecular” modernity that Madhu Khanna, Brother William and Mani seek to draw begins from little things - a dewdrop or a flower - and is grounded in an ecology of love that is captured in this remark of Irigaray: “Love is not an explosion or implosion but an
One of the main themes in Arundhati Roy's A God Of Small Things is discrimination in the caste system. Roy tells the story of the hardships faced by the Untouchables, the lowest caste in the caste system. Technically, the Untouchables are not even in the caste system because to put them in the same system as the other four castes would be offensive to the rest of them. Another theme in this novel is forbidden love. These two themes, discrimination in the caste system and forbidden love, come together when Mammachi sneaks across the river "to love by night the man her children love by day", to meet Velutha. Mammachi is the mother of the two main characters, Estha and Rahel. She is a Touchable Christian woman and Velutha is an Untouchable Paravan. Mammachi tells her children about how Paravans were treated when she was young:
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
India and the west, is a very common theme in Indian literature. This struggle is evident
Unique Cultures in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Uprooting from one's own culture and land and the agonies of re-routing in an alien land are depicted in many postcolonial works. This paper is an attempt to discuss the postcolonial dilemmas faced by the characters in Kiran Desai's novel The Inheritance of Loss. They often face the problem of identity and alienation and become frustrated at the end. Even when they come back to their own country, like the Judge in the novel, they develop a sense of distrust and anger. They are in a state of confusion from which they will find it difficult to come out. The paper will mainly focus on the postcolonial experiences of Jemubhai Patel, the Judge and Biju, the son of the Judge's cook who eventually supposed to have found out happiness in the reunion with his father, though he has lost all that he earned from his brief time in
The author of The God of Small Things is, at the very outset it is clear, very keen on not being held up by the question of time. The novel is set in a timeless and, one dares suggest, spaceless dimension. The subtle irony in the introduction of the time element should not be missed. It all began with the arrival of Sophie Mol at Aymenen- that is, `for all practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world'. Why should a writer who is basically pre-occupied with things other than purely practical make such a clear-cut beginning for the human drama she is about to unfold?. The reason soon becomes clear when she mentions another way of looking at the time factor. It is as old as when the Love Laws were written. That is, who should love and how. And how much.
India’s Golden Age The Gupta Empire existed from circa 320–535 C.E. and was located on the Indian Subcontinent, with the Ganges as the core area. The time period of the Gupta Empire is often referred to as India’s Golden Age, and a classical age, because during this time there were considerable inventions and discoveries in the elements that shaped the Hindu culture. This essay will analyse the different aspects that caused this Golden Age in India and the impacts these causes had on the neighbouring societies of the Gupta Empire. This analysis will be supported by three academic sources, and the middle part of this essay will be divided in three different subjects: Expansion and Politics, Economic Expansion, and Religion.
Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, sailing via the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. This marked the beginning of
This total idea of challenging and creating a new identity may seem quite a utopian concept, but it is not so impossible. The present paper will illustrate the writings of Mridula Garg and Arundhati Roy. The characters in their work are not extraordinary and utopian, but ordinary people like us whom we can come across in our day to day life. Here for the purpose of analysis, Garg’s three short stories have been chosen. They are: Hari Bindi, Sath Saal, Ki Aurat and Wo Dusri.