Subaltern Consciousness in Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

The novel, The God of Small Things by Suzanna Arundhati Roy, sharply raises and presents the postcolonial issues like social injustice, love and sexuality, marriage, gender, race and class discrimination. The novel makes the dichotomy between male and female, subalterns and elites and subalternity and sexuality. Here in this novel love and sexuality have been used as the tools of protest and resistance against all forms of discriminations and prejudices against the subaltern groups. The act of intercourse exposes the subalternity of Velutha and sexuality of Ammu that tries to break the age-old caste prejudices and traditional gender role and also the artificial wall created by the so called elite class. Love and physicality thus can be discussed as a medium of liberation from the chain of domination due to the state of subalternity.