Exploring Trauma in The God of Small Things

The God of small things is the debut novel of Arundathi Roy, about the life and experiences of two fraternal twins, told in a series of flashbacks, set in the idyllic town of Aymenem in Kottayam, Kerala. The book, which won the 1997 Man Booker prize, primarily explores how small things affect people’s behaviours, their choices, and ultimately their own lives. The novel has heavy autobiographical elements with characters sharing experiences similar to Roy, especially with the story crossing her childhood places, namely Assam, Kottayam as well as her Syrian Catholic background, along with her stint with architecture in Delhi. The story which combines moments of ‘magical realism’ with the political, social, and colonial landscape of pre-Independence Kerala can be analyzed through the eyes of trauma in the twins, Rahel and Estha. The critic Charles L Fox has, in fact, described the work as a “textbook portrayal of symptoms of trauma”.

Various kinds of despair competed for primacy… personal despair could never be desperate enough… personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.

Childhood Trauma

The childhood of both the twins are intensely problematic — they don’t have the presence of a fatherly figure in their lives. They are treated as ‘lost’ children with contempt by their aunt Baby Kochamma, and their mother Ammu leaves them to wander around carefree. They were called as half Hindu hybrids (owing to their mother’s inter-religious marriage) by their Mammachi and was taunted that no true Christian will marry them. Three significant incidents would change the course of the life of these twins. At first, it was the ‘Orange Lemonade’ man at Abhilash Talkies who molested Estha and the image of the man who could arrive anytime in Aymenem by talking the Cochin-Kottayam Bus haunted him forever. Then they witness the drowning of their dear cousin Sophie Mol while at the same time Ammu’s love affair is discovered and her lover Velutha (a low caste man) is brutally beaten to death by Police in the presence of the twins. Velutha’s death made them “fragmented” and “disconnected” Soon, Ammu is banished from the household with Estha being decided to be sent to their estranged father in Kolkata. Estha soon becomes almost entirely silent, detached from the world, while Ammu loses her mind and makes it a point to blame her children for her misfortunes and a few years later dies alone. Rahel never had a normal childhood since she kept hopping from one school to another with no friends. Her teachers noted her as a “polite and silent child.” In college, she never made any real connection, and her classmates were afraid of her “lack of ambition,” and later, we see she suffers from a failed marriage. Towards the end of the novel, the twins have an incestuous encounter, which can be seen as a culmination of their shared traumas and hope for a new recovery.

Colonial Trauma

The aftermath of colonial legacy is evident from the novel. The preference for white skin is apparent from the treatment the half-English Sophie Mol received from Kochamma and Mammachi. The children enjoy singing English melodies and specifically, The Sound of Music. Their Uncle Chacko sees his English Wife and daughter as a “pair of Tennis trophies” that he had won. Chacko, who embodies western values, is seen as modern, and the Indian culture of the natives are viewed to be primitive. But one forgets that this is a destructive belief for they see the colonial culture, which is the aftermath of nearly two hundred years of unequal exchanges, as the representation of the real culture. Chacko says that the depleted “History House” beyond the rubber plantations were a grim reminder that they all were essentially anglophiles. He admits to the twins that despite being an erudite scholar, he knew only about British Indian history and said they are “trapped outside their history and unable to retrace the footsteps back.” The depleted house is also locked, and they can “only see shadows,” signifying that their knowledge about their history and culture is partial and incomplete. It is symbolic that it was owned by an Englishman in the past who later become a native, and he was referred to as “Kurtz,” relishing on his own “private Heart of Darkness” which is a direct symbolization of the colonial past.

Trauma is Temporal

The novel says, “a few dozen hours can influence whole lifetimes,” showing trauma has the absence of time as an entity and the events goes back and comes in quick successions and would have no logical connection with the order, just like how the plot progresses in the novel. Hence one can analyze the book through the post-colonial trauma theory advocated by Homie Bhaba and Dipesh Chakravarthy. Trauma theorists say memory is erased after trauma, and then they return as flashbacks — the reader can easily see that the episodes in the novel do not easily blend. One can see how that Roy describes Sophie Mol being “always there,” and it followed Rahel from childhood to womanhood. Similarly, another temporal object is Rahel’s toy watch, which always has the same time — ten to two. Ammu too, tries to freeze time since Roy mentions that she gifts a eleven-year-old Rahel gifts suited for a seven-year-old thereby refusing to acknowledge the passage of time. Estha, who has been the most traumatized by the events seems to have complete amnesia for he falls into a completely silent world, always lost in his thoughts.

Elements of Neo-colonialism

In the later part of the novel, when Rahel returns, it’s seen that the ‘History House’ has become a tourist guest house. One can clearly see how heritage has been commercialized and sold as bits of ‘authentic’ culture and hence has lost the specific aesthetic, cultural, and historical implications. In fact, Rahel observes that ‘Kathakali’ she used to watch as a kid and acted as a cultural signifier in the novel has been trimmed to “twenty-minute cameos” for the guests. The TV antennas now touch the whole blue sky, and while earlier the loudest voice in Aymenam was the “musical bus horn”, it has been replaced by “whole wars, famines …Bill Clinton”. The entire landscape of the quiet village has changed since it is now filled with “new, freshly backed, iced Gulf money homes”. The advent of the Green Revolution made sure that the adjunct river, Meenachal, which was once “gray-green with fish” has transformed into “slow, sledging green ribbon lawn that ferried garbage to sea”. The smell of fresh dew is now replaced with that of pesticides “bought with World Bank loans”.

Social Trauma

The novel blatantly portrays the caste and gender inequalities that existed in Kerala. Chacko tells about the assumed sorority of Syrian Catholics owing to the belief that they were early converts form Brahmins. He says the later lower caste converts were kept away and had a ‘pariah’ priest and a ‘pariah’ church for worship. Mammachi reminds the workers near her house that a generation ago, they used to carry a broom to wipe the ground while walking. Velutha is given death as a punishment for breaking the “love laws”. He is an almost invisible character in the story showing his similar status in society, for he made “no ripples in water, no image in the mirror”. He is the ‘God of loss ‘- the missing title character in the novel. Roy warns that the tragic consequences of his relationship with Ammu “would lurk forever in ordinary things,” like “coat hangers,” “the tar on roads,” and “the absence of words.” Ammu too, being a woman, sees her life as effectively over after divorcing her abusive husband. The family banishes her for her love affair, and the policeman who was investigating the drowning of Sophie Mol calls her veshya (whore) and tapped her breast with his baton gently as though he was choosing mangoes from a basket

The final sexual encounter of the twins, after twenty-three years of separation, offers them a sense of return — a replay of moments that cannot be left behind or escaped. This is in no way a therapeutic recovery for they did not share happiness but ‘hideous grief’. Hence it shows the permanent damage caused by trauma and insists on the recovery of memory and not healing. The twin’s sexual encounter is not the last scene of the novel, but it concludes by moving back in time to the encounter between Ammu and Velutha, a moment set before the central tragedy of the book. Both these encounters mirror each other and can be seen as escape as well as a recurrence of the trauma- beautiful, fragile and dangerous. The novel ends with the word ‘ Nalley’ (tomorrow), which Ammu tells to Velutha, indicating a promise to return, which leaves the impression of a circular return.

Notes

Fox, L. C. (2002). A martyrology of the abject: witnessing and trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. ARIEL, 33(3–4)

Herrick, M. (2017). New Ways of Thinking Recovery from Trauma in Arundhati Roys the God of Small Things and Two other South Indian Narratives of Caste-based Atrocity. Interventions, 19(4), 583–598.

Outka, E. (2011). Trauma and Temporal Hybridity in Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”. Contemporary Literature, 52(1), 21–53. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41261824

Svarck, K. (2013). The trauma of neo-colonialism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Aravind Agiga’s The White Tiger. Heory and Practice in English Studies, 6(2), 105–118. Retrieved from https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/handle/11222.digilib/129826