Subaltern Identity Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

The novel unveils a gamut of traumatic experiences of the subaltern people aggravated by the socio-politico-cultural orthodoxy that has long persisted in the Keralite society, it also advocates the need of restructuring the value system and institutions (love, sex, marriage, kinship etc) through the disruption and discontinuity of indecent taboos in view of redeeming the identity of the people in the margin. Arundhati Roy textualizes the domestic violence meted out against women, children and dalit within the family and society. The novel raises its voice of protest against the obsolete structural and ideological set-ups and dismantles the historical truths by using taboos and placing women and dalit characters, Ammu and Velutha, in the central narrative of the novel.