Post-Colonial Resistance in the form of Decolonized English Language in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

This paper explores the linguistic situation of the once-colonized country. In the post- colonial and post-independent condition, the language of colonizer, the English language, has been seized and the centrality occupied by the English language has been subverted. It is no more than a dialect as that of the periphery. The linguistic position of the English language is associated with native context where the interlinguistic situation is created in the post-colonial condition. In such act, the rules and the norms of the „Standard English‟ are rather subverted as an act of decolonization, adapting the very language so as to strike the colonizer back. This is what this paper seeks to observe in The God of Small Things. This paper examines the linguistic situation of the once colonized country, India, how Arundhati Roy breaks the „Standard‟ notion of the English language in the post- colonial condition as the form of resistance, along with the emphasis on nativism for the provocation of native cultural and linguistic practices in their own context. This becomes a strategy to subvert the colonial centrality in the post-colonial condition. Along with this, it also seeks how Roy breaks the rules and norms of the English language asserting her own way of the linguistic usage that is what becomes her linguistic inventiveness.