The God of Small Things: Intimacy, Memory, and the Politics of Transgression in Arundhati Roy's Narrative World

Abstract Arundhati Roy is a prominent post modern and post colonial writer of Indian English literature and one of the most significant authors of the Indian novel in English. The God of Small Things focuses on issues related to caste, gender, sexuality, and the nation, and it is a major example of the dislocation of Indian English Literature. This paper examines the novel’s politics of intimacy, especially how emotional ties, intimate recollections, and routine connections transcend individual experience and enter the realm of a more complex and stratified societal order and deals with societal issues. This paper examines the absence and presence of oppression in the small, the intimate, and the seemingly unimportant places and objects in Roy’s writing, primarily through the use of trauma studies, post-colonial studies, and feminist criticism. This literature review on Roy, which includes Roy’s scholarship and criticism, is concerned with the issues of untouchability and caste, the fragmentation of Roy’s discourse, silence and the subaltern, and the presence of the political. The author focuses her attention on specific fragments and concentrates on elements such as water, time, mobility, the use of particular languages, and silence to examine the domain of social transgression and social violence. Finally, it is posited in this article that a focus on small things is a major shift in political thinking as it embraces the intimate, the fragment, and the sensory. Roy illustrates how systemic violence is insidiously operated through affection and memory. The conclusion places the novel within the debates concerning Indian democracy, the ethics of witnessing the injustice, and the literature of witnessing injustice without inflicting further harm.