Dr. Abha Shukla Kaushik

Resistance to and Rejection of Western Influences in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

 

The socio-cultural significance of a literary work cannot be undermined. Literature, in fact, is a kind of critique, an overt or covert indictment of social beliefs and value systems. Arundhati Roy who catapulted to fame with her maiden novel The God of Small Things, winning the prestigious Booker Award in 1997, has depicted the socio-cultural realities of the Indian system in the book in a very powerful and gripping manner. The novel deals with a current postcolonial society, reflecting on, among other things, its search for post-independence patterns of collective identity, the exorcism of traumatic memories from a colonial past, and the self-assertive remembering or recreation of local cultural references. All of these issues are articulated within the frame of local, material circumstances. They are solidly connected to their postcolonial geography and time, and are presented within the references to everyday life.

The God of Small Things can be termed as a postcolonial novel because the point of view of the writer is self-consciously involved with history and the local redefinition of collective identities. Roy very assertively shows that apart from internal problems, self-consolidation process has international implications. It involves a dignifying negotiation between self-assertion, self-preservation and the pressure of globalisation as a form of neo-colonialism. For better or for worse, history is relevant, and one cannot ignore that involvement in a centuries long process of colonial history makes the relatively recent process of independence an important reference to understand the transitional and provisional contradictions of a society that is living through fundamental changes, consolidating and self-defining itself between what has been and what it may become.

In an interview after winning the award, Arundhati Roy said “For me, fiction has always been a means of making sense of the world, to connect the smallest things to the biggest things”. These wider histories are, for instance, Indian traditions, concerning the caste system, untouchability and patriarchies, the British colonisation of India, massive emigration to America and current industrial pollution. The “small things” Arundhati Roy is concerned about are feelings, memories, private desire and affection, a set of invisible internal processes, considered too private and individual to matter. These Seemingly small things are shaped by the big things and one has to conform to the established norms willingly or unwillingly. In the novel, the “big”, important matters are caste identity, respectability, the assertion of caste differences and the preservation of the status quo. These are the priority references for the majority of the characters, obsessed by claiming membership in a powerful group, be it the British culture, the Syrian Christian community or the Communist party.

Colonialism can be seen as the civilising mission of a superior culture committed to the improvement and development of a backward one. Hence, the drive to imitate British ways is given free hand, so as to claim one’s integration in the most powerful, dominant culture. One of the strategies of cultural colonisation by the British Raj was to promote British culture as the standard of civilisation to be emulated by other cultures. To reject the proposed mimicry of British ways implies a self-aware postcolonial stand that can already see beyond the manipulative power of hegemonic colonial discourses.

From a postcolonial angle, the novel The God of Small Things is relevant for its resistance to and its rejection of Western influences as a “solution” for the problems of India and its caustic analysis of Indian patterns of collective identity, totally embedded in caste segregation and sexism. Although The God of Small Things is a very rich text, dealing with several political and social issues, the anti-colonial critique of Anglophilia is, the love of English, is a very clear and quite extensive. In her own way, Arundhati Roy is taking part in postcolonial revisionist practices, creating room for another parallel process, which is the self-discovery of India as a modernising society, regardless of Western models

In the plot, the representation of Western Influences starts during the colonial period, in the last decades of the Raj, although the high status of British culture remains a current social reference in the 60s/70s, when the main events of the plot take place. The whole time frame of the plot encompasses the life of four generations of the same family, in their Ayemenem house by the river, in the state of Kerala, south India. Only the adult life of the fourth generation - the twins Estha and Rahel escapes an Anglophile environment. In fact, in the nineties, when the twins are thirty-one, America has replaced Britain as the most current foreign influence, although America never becomes a stylish, upper class reference. America means “money”.

The Anglophile mania that runs in the family is a legacy of the deceased grandfather Pappachi and his converted wife, Mammachi. They are the Grandparents who believed that “British is better” and, logically, they wanted to imitate British ways. They did so because of their belief in the culture of the coloniser as the grounds to develop their own sense of collective identity, because it was among the British community that they wanted to claim membership and receive recognition. Yet, Pappachi belonged to the colonised race. This contradiction between his race and what he considers to be the superior culture leaves Pappachi with a self-lacerating problem, of being Indian and desiring to be British. He wears impeccable woollen suits, “looking outwardly elegant but sweating freely inside”(185), self-punishing himself in the heat of Kerala to fit British fashion.

A turning point in the life of Estha and Rahel, the twins starts with the arrival of their uncle Chacko’s ex-wife Margaret and their daughter Sophie Mol, during Christmas holidays. These new comers are British, and the way their Indian relatives receive them is important to frame one of the dimensions of Anglophilia in the text. Margaret and Sophie are expected to embody a superior civilisation, and thus, receiving them, is regarded as a motive of pride and joy for most of the members of the Ipe clan and there is a strong desire to claim membership in a “superior” and  “progressive” community. Sophie Mol, to them not only means the continuity of the family, but also  its promotion to a more sophisticated class

It is because of all the dreams of social mobility that die with Sophie that Ammu and the twins have to be “punished’ for the accident in such a wild way -their separation, the indifference concerning Rahel’s education, the refusal to help Ammu, even when she was terminally ill. The drowning of Sophie Mol means the end of all the future projects of the Ipe family, such as Chacko and Mammachi were dreaming them at that stage. Ammu and the twins are mere “guests” who never counted as subjects for the future of the family, and even less as possibilities to claim respectability and improvement.  This is a case of true assimilation of colonial propaganda, and the behaviour of the characters expresses their agreement with colonial views of India.

In order to claim membership in any of the desired communities one has to behave according to specific ideological and moral patterns, thus gaining public approval among the acknowledged members of the coveted group. The Ipes invest on Western culture and education as their rightful source of collective references: Estha’s hero is Elvis Presley, the children speak English, uncle Chacko was sent to college, in England (Oxford) and the twins are taken to the movies to watch ‘The Sound of Music’ (obviously, they already know its songs by heart). Actually, the way the children react to the film is important to describe the assimilation of colonial stereotypes by colonised people.

Again, In order to be up to the level of civilisation of their half-British cousin, the twins Estha and Rahel are forced to practice their English pronunciation, and they are forbidden to speak Malayalam, their mother tongue, even among themselves. Another case in point with reference to this mentality is the confrontation between the twins and Miss Mitten. She is very upset when they read English aloud backwards, playing with her own mother tongue in a way that Miss Mitten, the native speaker, cannot follow.

When dealing with a postcolonial novel, the representation of the process of living in between languages is always charged with ideological issues. For example, the fact that the twins had to pay a fee, deducted from their pocket money, when they were caught speaking their mother tongue, Malayalam, instead of English, is another small detail that constructs, in the sense of identity of the twins, the idea that they belong to an inferior culture. There are other stereotypes of colonial propaganda, which become concrete and humiliating in the small things: “there would be two flasks of water. Boiled water for Margaret Kochamma and Sophie Mol, tap water for everybody else”. (46)

Arundhati Roy is very ironical towards Anglophilia and she deconstructs it from several angles. One of her strategies is to expose the difference between the civilisation the British claim, and their concrete, less noble, patterns of behaviour. She projects Anglophile allegiance as a case of naivety, a lack of critical insight and a self-imposed inability to see through colonial propaganda. When Ammu told her father why she wanted to divorce her husband, she complained of his alcoholism and of his agreement with Mr. Hollick, the English manager of the tea plantation where her husband worked. Mr Hollick offers to ‘take care’ of the ‘lovely wife’ and the children while the husband is away. Ammu is able to see through his not so noble intensions and her husband’s servile attitude disgusts her, so she leaves, but her father cannot believe that an English man can  do any thing wrong and blames her inability to endure instead.

Anti-colonial subversion starts when the colonised subject displays enough critical distance to see through colonial propaganda, becoming aware of the amount of ideological manipulation involved in such hegemonic practices. Pappachi, Chacko and Ammu represent three levels of colonial/post colonial influences.  The difference between Pappachi and Chacko is precisely a matter of awareness. The first cannot question the superior status of the English culture while the latter is aware of his predicament as a split subject. However, Chacko does not express an active rejection of Anglophilia, nor does he turn to his Indian identity in a self-assertive gesture. The anti-colonial critique of Anglophilia offered in the novel is voiced by Ammu, the daughter of the family, whose particular experience as a woman, trapped by codes, rules and prejudice, has already made her more cynical and critical towards dominant ideologies. She has known, all her life, how it feels to be at the wrong end of power hierarchies and that experience has made her impatient and rebellious.  She is then, because of her awareness of sexism, the better equipped to deconstruct colonial discourses, overlapping anti-colonialism with feminism in her private fight against prejudice.

Ammu’s rebellion against the mentality that diminishes Hindu children by comparison with their British cousin and implicitly, that grants a different status to the two cultures,  makes her question the grounds for such a different treatment. She rightly sees the obsession with a display of “civilised”, “British” references as a symptom of a national inferiority complex, where Indians see themselves as the “native”, keeping British colonisers in the position of “enlightened saviours”. Hence, the importance of Ammu’s comment on the whole performance to receive Sophie Mol: “Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?” (180)

As an embodiment of resistance, Ammu’s behaviour is subversive because she repeatedly parts with strongly established notions: she dares to divorce her husband, she rejects Anglophilia, she has a love affair with an untouchable and she never accepted her second status as compared to sons. It is she who tries to find other ways of thinking and living, outside of fossilised myths that only perpetuate unfair caste, race and sex distinctions. These practices are presented as the “enemies” of human sensitivity; her remarks create a critical space to think outside of colonial discourse, confronting it.

The fact that America has replaced Britain as mythological land of wealth and power suggests that to emigrate to America  is the current equivalent to “family connections in London”. Being an emigrant, Rahel represents someone with better possibilities and wider roads to travel. She is like the “Foreign Returnees”, Only Rahel is not “Americanised”, while the masses of emigrants arriving for holidays in India cannot think further than the ever increasing gap between those who wait for the returning relatives and those who arrive- “a lick of shame”: “Look at the way they dressed! Why did Malayalees have such awful teeth? “Going to the dogs India is.” (140). These comments indicate that Americanisation has the same effect as Anglophilia, making Indian citizens turn their backs on their history and culture, erasing a part of their memories and identity. Arundhati Roy makes three points on this new fascination. Emigration is not, necessarily, worth trying-Rahel’s story is her narrative translation of this argument; “progress” is not necessarily development; and Americanisation is not an improvement on the split identity of the colonised subject.

The line of thought which makes Arundhati Roy represent emigration in a less positive light is an extension of the argument against Anglophilia. The future of India depends on the Indian people and the ideas and values they choose to hold on to. Similarly, Western money does not mean internal “progress” for India. In fact, economic growth and modernisation are treated in the novel as ambiguous advantages which, by themselves, do not solve any of the problems: five star hotels and their speedboats bring tourists, but leave a gasoline film over the water; open air sewers are left to exhale an awful smell in hot days, but hotels have got air conditioning; the view over the river is beautiful, but the water is polluted and toxic, so, no baths are allowed. Roy is not indifferent to the poverty of the Indian people around her, and refuses to accept the lack of governmental solutions in spite of the amount of capital invested in India. To her government seems to think “progress” is the exchange of environmental pollution for profitable private business. For Roy, industrialisation, with poisoned fishes rotting in the sun, and the same poverty as ever, is not worth the effort. If World Bank loans only mean pesticides, then these loans are not helping India in the right way, and Roy, as a committed and intervening writer, denounces tourism as a new form of colonialism, an industry that corrupts Indian culture, selling it as a picturesque folklore.

In the novel strategies to enhance India’s self-definition and self-promotion are more entwined with the reformulation of postcolonial notions of identity, discussing the current postcolonial situation, its past genealogy and its prospects. Self-assertion no longer is so dependent on the parading of cultural differences as it happened during the initial stage of the independence struggle, when local cultures and their corresponding traditions were deified, as a strategic frame of identity to oppose to Western culture and its myths of white superiority.

Roy asserts that there is no strategic necessity of answering back to racist colonial stereotypes that diminished Indian culture and Indian identity, at least not with the same vehemence. On the contrary, the self-assertion of India as a postcolonial state has to work through the fragmenting impact of distinctive cultural identities in the subcontinent, where caste references and communal rivalry are frequently closer to one’s heart than Indian citizenship.

Roy, prefers to stick to clear dichotomies, analysing colonial relations between Indian citizens and British colonisers, dislocating this same dichotomy for the present through her resistance to current forms of globalisation. Yet, the extent of Roy’s defence of “India’s rights” a self-assertive argument,  does not necessarily promote “nationalist” ideas. The sense of “home colonialism” i.e. exploitation of the people by high caste aristocracies or political elites, becomes a really bitter and spiteful topic in Roy. From the point of view expressed in her novel, the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, or the party, should be treated with distance and suspicion, rather as foes to be feared than as representatives to be trusted.

Roy deals with colonialism as a “psychic experience” that lives on after formal colonialism is over, through memories and dominant mentalities. It does not mean that Roy is defending a return to Indian traditions or any other form of fundamental nativism. Hers is a  stern defence of a set of human rights that have been equally ignored by colonialism, democracy and communism. It is individual sensitivity, critical awareness, and one’s bonds to other people, across caste distinctions and outside of patriarchal rules, which can bring about an effective change and improvement in Indian society.

Roy expresses a postcolonial awareness materialised in a commitment to think through history and the after effects of a long period of colonialism. To think through colonial history implies the revision of old colonial judgements. Nevertheless, this relevant agenda keeps old binaries functional and necessary, which may not amount to the best basis to answer current challenges like sustainability and the preservation of peace, issues that demand serious international co-operation. While thinking of new forms to represent different communities and new revised colonial views of India, confronting the West with a self-assertive account that answers back to previous colonial projections,  Arundhati Roy problematises the caste system and the definition of untouchability, two systems of exclusion that are the backbone of India’s social structure. In her view, a functional Indian society has to start by dropping prejudice and intolerance as the most important elements to determine social relations. Her argument is insightful and logical: institutionalised elites will never question the basis of their power, preferring to sacrifice individual feelings, sensitivity and good intentions to the cold necessity of perpetuating privilege. Arundhati Roy represents the way history and socio-political forces invade and damage the most private dimensions of subjectivity, in the name of the preservation of certain power structures. Inversely, subversive reactions at the private, individual level are deemed powerful political acts that can implode the capillary bases of power of the systems of collective identity, creating a less oppressive, less traumatising society.

She has proved that the revisionist drive of postcolonial literature is quite alive and active by writing her novel as a form of social critique, both intra­national and international, and, has had the desired effect of making the reader more aware of the challenges, hopes and problems of current India, deconstructing the hold of Western-centric ideas. That is Roy’s project - to resist both home colonialism and neo-colonial threats.

 

 

References

Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, New Delhi, India Ink, 1997
"Arundhati Roy interviewed by David Barsamian". The South Asian (September 2001).