The Role Of Social And Cultural Norms In Dividing A Community In The God Of Small Things

The novel has a fragmented temporary structure with different narrative voices that makes the reader to have different thoughts about the text as heshe reads. Waterland 1983 points out that as time goes by new things are being revealed and that the past can shape the future. However from the first chapter the met temporal narrative mode is clearly shown and the flow of the introductory chapter moves back and forth between prolepses, analepses and ellipses which acts as a foundation for the next chapter. Roy uses the arrival of Sophie Moll to Ayemenem to symbolizes the chronical time using what she calls ``LOVE LAWS`` made a thousand years ago. Further Roy chose to use third person narrative form which allows her random shifts of perspectives and levels within the narrator following her pace from the story line to the other. The book is about a wealthy family in Syrian Christian who are landowners with Mammichi as a grandmother, Ammu being the mother of the twins, Rahel and Estha, Baby Kochamma who is unmarried and aunt to the twins, Chacko the uncle to the twins and a brother to Ammu and a father to Sophie Moll and Margaret who is Chacko`s ex-wife. This essay aims to discuss the significance of the History House in Arundhati Roy`s God of small things. In Roy’s novel the idea that state the erotic as the truth, exploring a lot of political possibilities and appears to cover any truth that can protect the validity of the process itself. ``This phallocentric utopia is of course all the more pleasurable if partners in it transgress such as boundaries of those class and cast``, this phase suggest that Roy looked for a viable formula of sexuality for her novel which indicate a capitalist politic. The comments she makes shows that her aim was to put more emphasis on the biological differences ``the talk of a noble working class seemed very silly to me like other women, I would be brutalized so bad by men. It made no difference whether they were proletarian or not, or what their ideology was.

The problem was the biological nature of these men. The real conflict seemed to be between women and men. Women like Ammu, who were controlled by their family`s status and class made them to less say in their lives and their marriages were organized for them and the husband was chosen for them which made Ammu to fall for Velutha the untouchable coming from the lower class who were poor but had skills. So the two used the History House to meet as no one went there due to the belief that the house was haunted by the people who were killed in it. After Baby Kochamma falsely accuse Velutha of kidnaping Ammu and murdering Sophie Moll and manipulating the twins to take her side of the story, the reason for this was because she wanted to protect her family`s image from Ammu and Velutha`s affair as Velutha was an untouchable carpenter who worked for the family and Ammu being their daughter, so he was then arrested and brutally beaten up to death. When Ammu tried to see him after the funeral, instead of the inspectors helping her they were compliment her and touching her breasts with her permission. Even her husband tried to exchange her for being reinstated at work when he lost his job. This shows that men did not have respect for a woman and did not value them. Sara Upstone uses the subject of history as an avenue into the book, the God of small things which leads us to pointing out the post- colonial gesture of identity defining and interconnectional modes working in tension to determine the effect of colonial legacy and current, globalized age, while Susan Comfort points out that Roy focused on environmental feminist by being part of the critique which complicate the paradigm. The critiques are focused on forces within outside India at globalism and configurations of state power, ideology and capitalism. Khair points out that the book, God of small things can be looked from a psychoanalytic angle which suggests that the effect of colonialization from Anglican can be compared with the establishment of `name of the father` by Jacques Lacan which points out the subject`s simultaneous primary love (the mother, Ammu) and be connected to social collective, for example how Ammu became depressed after Velutha`s death and distanced herself from her kids and blamed them for what happened to him which led to the kids feeling unloved and unwanted even after she had died they always felt unloved and isolated. Roy shows an interest in colonial legacy through the exotic depiction of nature using the two subaltern characters in God of small things.

The two characters corresponded to a binary pattern of idealized and demonized pother, Velutha the untouchable carpenter is portrayed as morally superior, generous and giving while Orangedrink Lemondrink Man is portrayed as an evil person rather than a god and brutal. One could say that Roy aimed at showing how socio-economic phenomenon’s and its structure causes alienation of certain people like Velutha and the cultural and psychological alienation causes a thick line between rich and poor, educated and less educated, males and females for example Rahel and Estha were going through a lot of psychological problems but just because their parents divorced leading their family to split as Ammu returned home with the kids, plus she was an Indian woman married to a white man which was against the social norms of Ayemenem which then resulted to the kids to be alienated by the mother`s family. Even when Estha was going through something that can be called depression no one notice nor payed attention to his weird behavior in which he ended up not speaking with anyone and Rahel’s behavior towards her boyfriend showed that she was emotionally disturbed and was suffering from something and her behavior in school where she was blacklisted at the age of 1, expelled for repeated complaints from senior girls accusing her of hiding behind doors and deliberately colliding with her seniors, smoking in school and setting fire to her house mistress`s false hair bun. In conclusion Roy used the life of Ammu, Chacko, Baby Kochamma, the twins and Velutha to show how social and cultural norms can play a huge role in a community in dividing it. However she also put more emphasis on the history house and colonialism of the Indian people by the Anglican people and she also tried to show alienation and psychological alienation and the effect of colonialism.