Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Lucknow, India.
The present paper is an attenpt to explore the reflection of modern Indian reality in Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize awarded debut magnum opus, The God of Small Things. The novel with its flowing omniscient narrative based on a congeries of events structuring a beginning and an end, woven around the region of Kottayam in the highlands of Kerela (Ayemenem to be specified), evokes an atmosphere similar to that experienced by Roy born in a Syrian Christian family of Kerela. The novel can be read as a ‘buildungsroman’ (the growth of young mind into maturity) and much of the story is told through the eyes, the fragile perceptions of the Indian boy and girl twin, Estha and Rahel. The ambience of Ayemenem and socio-political history of Kerela are the backdrop, and the poetic tale of Estha and Rahel, and their Syrian Christian family tragedies. The novel has very strong undercurrents of the dilemma faced by Indians caught between tradition and modernity, and the tension between religion and untouchability. The meandering, fluid, circuitous narrative with extraordinary linguistic inventiveness defying the symbolic order, etches out the brutalities meted out to the women by men. Ayemenem is not only a microcosm of Indian macrocosm, but also of humanity at large, experiencingasilent process of decay and degeneration in a world of lost values.
