On obscenity charges in Kerala, her home state and the setting of The God of Small Things. The portrayal of such a relationship was so scandalous, that Roy was brought up The Meenachil River, and their mother, Ammu, has an affair with a Paravan – or Untouchable – Two-week period in 1969 when the twin’s cousin Sophie Mol visits from England and drowns in But the novel’s primary focus is on the lifelong impact of a Twin brother Estha are separated from each other at the age of eight, to the “present” of 1992, The narrative moves back and forth in time, from 1969 when protagonist Rahel and her Prize for literature in 1997 and has remained an important text in postcolonial studies, as itĮngages with the impacts of British colonization as well as the nature of the caste system in Though there are substantial features of discursive success throughout the novel, Roy’s own failure and inability to contextualise India in a universal emancipatory stream is widely evidenced by the symbolic deaths in her ‘imaginary’ (yet empirical) family.Indian author Arundhati Roy’s first novel The God of Small Things won the prestigious Booker Her act is, therefore, an attempt of escapism from the false deadlock of stagnating identity politics that made her life quite miserable and un-liberating. The only rebel in The God of Small Things, Ammu, who ‘radically annihilated her existence’ by loving an untouchable, ends up in a tragic Žižekian misrecognition. The death drive and self-annihilation that run within the family members, which distance them from the rest of the contemporary Kerala society, demand a broad universal analysis of the text. The authors find that the ‘dual identity’ (symbiosis) (Bhabha, 1994), the ‘disconnectivity’ (Jameson, 1991) and ‘death as a pathway to rebirth’ (Holbrook, 1971) experienced by the Kottayam family force the authors’ reading of the novel to go beyond postcolonial discourse and exploit Žižekian psychoanalytic tools. It investigates the self-destructive element hidden within this family that obviously had an impact on Ammu, Chako, Baby Kochamma and others in developing some form of self-annihilation, which cannot be simply attributed to postcolonial identity politics. This study claims that the roots of the symptomatic ‘madness’ found in the Syrian-Christian Kottayam family in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy traverse beyond the general postcolonial identity crisis.

The god of small things novel