In the novel The God of Small Things by (insert name here) Rahel and Estha were twins who were linked psychologically linked to one another. Throughout the novel the twins were blamed for a lot of the calamity that occured to their families because of Papachi’s Moth’s curse. Throughout the novel the twins continueusly caught all sense of their family’s consequences from their actions. With the burden that they had to carry from their family it altered their thought processes into a state of rebellion towards everything in life.
*Intra-racial racism is a result of internalized racism while internalized racism is a result of Anglophilia. The God of Small Things depicts this concept clearly through its woven story of creatures and culture. “They were a family of Anglophiles.” (Roy 51) Through manipulating a character list of mixed races, Roy creates a dynamic between the white race and brown race. Internalized racism reigns as the characters believe in white superiority. When posing for a portrait, Pappachi’s choice of attire resembles that of an English horseback rider even “though he had never ridden a horse in his life.” (Roy 50). Beyond attire, Pappachi firmly believed in the Englishman’s nobility. Ammu attempted to explain her husband’s infidelity through his willingness to give Ammu to Mr. Hollick to be “looked after” to Pappachi (Roy 41). He “would not believe her story – not because he thought well of her husband, but because he didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife.” (Roy 42). Pappachi would believe an Indian being adulterous but he regards the English so highly, an Englishman would be incapable of such a travesty – hence the Englishman is more honorable, decent, and virtuous than an Indian man. Roy also places emphasis on the characters that are of the white race. The household waits in anticipation for the arrival of the English child, Sophie Mol, and her mother Margaret – an English woman that Chacko married. She left Chacko for a more appealing Englishman named Joe. Baby Kochamma’s love of a white Irishman, Father Mulligan, is another character introduced that is idealized through her infatuation. Rahel as well marries an American and relocated to Boston, only to return to Ayemenem after their divorce. The Indian relationship that is depicted in the book is between Pappachi and Mammachi, Babba and Ammu – both relationships suffer from horrible conditions: abuse of alcohol, bad tempers, and/or beatings. This displays the lack of honor or virtue by the Indian males and a stronger argument that the Englishman is superior. This internalized racism grows becoming more than a feeling of inferiority to the English. It transforms into intra-racial racism – a discrimination within the Indian community. Darker Indians are looked down upon while paler Indians, such as Sophie Mol, who is in fact half English half Indian, reign with superiority. She even states, “You're both whole wogs and I'm a half one.”(Roy 17). A wog is an insulting British term for inferiors, displaying Sophie Mol’s belief that she is better because she is English and paler than the twins, Estha and Rahel.
* The author’s referral to the levels of the Hindu Caste System by name without explanation also alienates the reader. The caste System included five levels and was called “The Varnas”: the priests (Brahmins); the ruling class such as landowners and warriors (Kshatriyas); the merchants (Vaishyas); the artisans and agriculturalists (Shudras); and the untouchables (Harijah). To be in the last of these, the Untouchable, is to be below society, sub-human and therefore ostracized. Yet if an untouchable became baptized as a Christian they were then deemed invisible. “It didn’t take them long to realize that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.” (71)
Hindu Caste system of social stratification, while estranging the reader who is unfamiliar with it, also presents the issue of classification amongst the characters, allowing the reader to be reminded that not everything in the world fits into a static category. In the world there are people and things that are of “an ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency” just as the banana jam that the family produced in their factory, Paradise Pickles & Preserves, is ambiguous and unclassifiable (31). The novel allows the reader to understand that in some cultures what is unclassifiable is deemed bad, illegal.
From the observed caste system in the novel, the reader is then introduced to the hardwired, universally accepted concept of Love Laws – as Roy coins it. “That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much” is the first time the reader comes in contact with this idea; it sets the tone for the rest of the novel (33). The relationship between Ammu and Velutha is a revolt against the boundaries made through the caste system. On the other hand, the relationship that develops between the twins, Rahel and Estha, in their adult lives is a revolt against the way in which you love another human being based on blood relation. The reader is assumed to be liberal minded and accepting in both cases.
* The caste system in India played a great role in the story within the family.
With the Touchables, Papachi and his family, and the Untouchables, Velutha and other Paravans. The state of ‘Untouchability’ is evident throughout the novel, especially in the
second chapter, ‘Papachi’s Moth’, when Roy describes Papachi’s actions
towards Paravans. “Papachi would not allow Paravans into the house. Nobody would. They were not allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched” (Roy, 1997, p. 73). This emphasises the fact that ‘Untouchability’ is forever carried by Paravans and dictates their actions within a society (Lane, 2006), thus causing Touchables to construct their fictive selves around this image of the Untouchables, identifying themselves as being of higher status and higher importance compared to Untouchables such as Velutha. Papachi effectively conveys the older, more conservative values held in Indian society with regards to the Caste system, whereas Ammu, Rahel and Estha are more lenient with the state of ‘Untouchability’ in their interactions with Velutha; with the twins often visiting Velutha and playing games with him, unaware of the societal views of Paravans. This creates much stigma within the family, unsure of whether they should accept the new ways or continue treating Untouchables the way society does.
*Ammu's status within the family is tenuous because of her marital disgrace, but a certain aura of eccentricity and defeat clings like a smell to all the residents of Ayemenem House, rendering them alternately comic, sympathetic and grotesque. There is the twins' elegant grandmother, Mammachi, with her skull permanently scarred from her dead husband's beatings and her bottle of Dior perfume carefully locked up in the safe. Then there is scheming Baby Kochamma, who once tried to become a nun but — her faith inspired less by God than by a certain Father Mulligan — lasted only a year in the convent. And there is the house servant, Kochu Maria, who thinks that Rahel is ridiculing her when she announces that Neil Armstrong has walked on the moon. Finally, there is the twins' charming uncle, Chacko, the Oxford-educated Marxist who has returned from his failed marriage in England and taken over Mammachi's chutney business — which, with cheerful ineptitude, he is running into the ground. Comrade Chacko means to organize a trade union for his workers, but he never quite gets around to it; instead he philosophizes, flirts with his female employees and assembles tiny balsa airplanes that immediately plummet to the ground. Chacko commends his ex-wife, Margaret, for leaving him, but he pines for her and their little daughter, Sophie Mol, just the same.
It gradually becomes clear to the reader that only Velutha, an Untouchable who serves as the family carpenter, is competent enough to transform life rather than simply endure it — but, of course, as he's an Untouchable, endurance is supposed to be all he's good for. Velutha fixes everything around Ayemenem House, from the factory's canning machine to the cherub fountain in Baby Kochamma's garden. He is both essential and taken for granted in the twins' existence, like breathing. He is ''the God of Small Things.''
Estha and Rahel are accustomed to life under the umbrella of their elders' discontent; it is only after Chacko invites Margaret and Sophie Mol to come to India for Christmas that the twins gain a fresh appreciation for their second-class status. Baby Kochamma makes Estha and Rahel memorize a hymn and fines them whenever they speak in Malayalam instead of English. Kochu Maria bakes a great cake; Mammachi plays the violin and allows Sophie Mol to make off with her thimble. When Chacko angrily refers to the children as millstones around his neck, Rahel understands that her light-skinned cousin, on the other hand, has been ''loved from the beginning.''
* The colour blue is often negatively associated with sadness, fear and depression. On the positive side, it signifies harmony, confidence and cleanliness. Inside the Ayemenem house, Ammu's is a "bedroom with blue curtains" (224). Estha's vision of her, as he watches Ammu sleeping, is smeared with blue (119). However, any possible positive connotations of blue are cancelled out by the attachment of the word "barred" alongside it. The streetlight falling on Ammu's sleeping face is an abstract "barred-blue". So is the window, which instead of an opening to the outside world, is also barred-blue. The choice of this compound adjective is interesting because it informs upon itself instead of the noun following it. It is a subjective reflection of an internal state of fear and sadness. The dolphin imagery and the elemental blue of water in Ammu's dream, is not beautiful. Instead, it is a silent scream, reflecting a fear of drowning in the seas of convention.
* Of all the characters, there is no one bluer than Baby Kochamma. Blue is Baby Kochamma's protection against the world she has renounced. Her only youthful rebellion is her passion for Father Mulligan, whose attention she tries to attract by "force-bath[ing] a poor village child at the well with hard red soap that hurt its protruding ribs" (23). Using the low-quality, hard red soap seems to have been her only experience of rebellion. Inside the house, soaps are an aristocratic blue (93; 227). Following her failure in love, she commits herself to the blue-order forever. She makes a garden at Ayemenem house, where "like a lion-tamer she tamed twisting vines and nurtured bristling cacti" (27), forcing her own instinct into submission in the process. It is not surprising that "in the centre of Baby Kochamma's garden, surrounded by beds of canna and phlox, a marble cherub peeps an endless silver arc into a shallow pool in which a single blue lotus bloomed" (27; emphasis added). So central is the "blue vein[ed]" (95) Baby Kochamma to the blue theme, that the skyblue Plymouth and her character appear unlikely female twins, a constant parallel to the "two-egg twins" (2), Estha and Rahel. Baby Kochamma and the Plymouth often occur together, or as a reflection of each other. The Plymouth is described as a "big lady […] tailfins aflutter" (113), and compared to "a wide lady squeezing down a narrow corridor, like Baby Kochamma in church, on her way to the bread and wine" (65). Long after Sophie Mol dies and all things change, and Baby Kochamma becomes the sole owner of the Ayemenem House which now has an emptied and bare look, "the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive" (2; emphasis added), a defiant outpost holding out till the end.
* Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things enjoys tremendous international success but perhaps more significantly, it touches individual readers deeply; many find it profound beyond its poetics. This essay explores the question of how it is that the novel has such power; it advances the suggestion that its literary power stems from a particular narrative deployment of the abject and the traumatic. The narrative of The God of Small Things exhibits the general characteristics of trauma, which may be defined as "a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event" (Caruth 4). Cathy Caruth also notes the common "delay or incompletion in knowing" that is often present in trauma (5). These characteristics of trauma are found in the content of Roy's novel but gain further force and significance by being repeated in its narrative structure. Events, especially the most traumatic ones, are referred to over and over again. Specific details (such as "the smell of old roses" [14 and passim]) and phrases ("Orangedrink, Lemondrink Man" [98 and passim]) are repeated; related dreams (like Rahel's of Ammu [214]) are recounted; scenes are iterated and reiterated, fragmentally, in various stages of completion, but always "absolutely true to the event" (Caruth 5). The traumatic structure of the narrative forces readers to experience the trauma of the abject as if they are already subject to it.