Arundhati Roy is both inspired and challenged by what she perceives as European
values, such as human rights, democracy and a nondiscriminatory society. The
narrative of her 1997 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things, is set in a non-Eurocentric India, that is, in the Southern Indian State of Kerala. Roy subtly allegorizes a Europe which is present as a subtext in this novel. Imperialism, communism, Cold War and Germany prevail as a leitmotif, especially, through multiple references to the 1965 American musical film, “The Sound of Music,” in different variations throughout the text. Born into a Syrian Christian background, highly educated, exposed to a decadent communism, a society rife with discrimination and abuse, Roy communicates the human experience she observed and incorporates it into the body of her narrative. This paper posits that the politics of the novel is encoded in the subtext of the narrative, where Roy uses her imagination of Europe, in and after the Cold War, as a vehicle of postcolonial resistance. The challenges faced by the protagonists of The God of Small Things, Rahel and Estha, dizygotic twins and their subsequent compromise with life is
representative of what Roy imagines to be the predicament of the denizens of the East and West European States, especially Germany, in and after the Cold War. The image of the European barbarian finds expression in Velutha, the untouchable, in the novel. The focus of this paper is to unravel the dialectics of Roy’s perception in imagining a Europe in the postcolonial Indian scenario. Europe and its conflicting values of imperialism and socialism have been made universal as Roy exposes the mockery of social systems and human values. |
