Reclaiming Voices on the Margins in Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy is one of the gifted Indian novelists in the art of writing and her novel The God of Small Things bears testimony to her God‟s gift. This is the only novel to her credit as on date and yet it is considered to be one of the most accomplished novels technically in recent years in Indian Writing in English. It is a beautiful amalgamation of fact and fiction. The aim of this paper is to critically consider Arundhati Roy‟s novel The God of Small Things from a postcolonial feminist perspective, taking as a background the discussions within postcolonial feminism about subaltern and the representations of women from the so-called Third World in theory and literature. The term subaltern, although somewhat disputed, is commonly used in a general sense to represent “subordinated classes and peoples” in short marginalized groups and the lower classes, especially in formerly colonized, Third World countries (Young 6). Postmodern in its handling of time, the plot circles between the „present‟ and the past, digging deeper and deeper into the tragic secrets of Rahel‟s life with an effect similar to that of a detective story, keeping the reader anxious and curious about how things really happened to the very end. The novel itself has given the fictional Ammu and Velutha, as representations of thousands of cross-caste relationships in the real India, a voice that resonates all over the world.