Perspectives In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things

Indian English writers have always been responsive to the changes in material reality and theoretical perspectives that have influenced and governed its study from the very beginning. At the earlier stage the fictional works of Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao were mainly concerned with the down-trodden of the society, the middle class life and the expression of traditional cultural ethos of India. The writings of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kavita Dasvani, M.G. Vassanjee, V.S.Naipaul and Hari Kunjru, to name a few, provide an insight of the problems faced by the dislocated people in their adopted homes in a way that questions the traditional understanding of the concepts like home, nation, native and alien. Contemporary writers hailing from the previously colonized nations, particularly India, explore the forms of life that existed during the British rule and expose the subtle strategies employed to make the colonized

These are the perfect representations of Adiga’s men with Big Bellies and the men with Small Bellies. Both of them have set their novels in the backdrop of the economic boom in India and used these metaphors to portray the confrontation between the two classes i.e. haves and have-nots and the clear edge one has over the other due to social distinction. N.B.Dewnarain in her article “The White Tiger: Marginality and Subalternity in the Indian Novel in English” writes about Adiga’s fiction as: “The author of The White Tiger insists that he saw his role as equal to that of Emile Zola, who acted as the politico-social conscience of a nineteenth century France on the verge of entering capitalism, but which had as yet not resolved the human question of its impoverished peasant and working class”.