Ponderings on the Butterfly Effect Through A Mythic Tale of Postcolonial India in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Communism, the caste system, and the oppression of women. A rare species of moth, lemon-flavored soda, and a pair of red-tinted sunglasses. At the heart of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is the idea that the “big things” and the “small things” are inextricably and inexorably related. With lush, mystical imagery and hauntingly beautiful figurative language, Roy extends this idea to her writing style: every aspect of the setting, character and plot development is rendered with painstaking detail and a vivid intensity. At once timeless yet defined by its times, The God of Small Things melds mythical storytelling and allegory with frank analyses of sociopolitical events. From postcolonialism to the Naxalite movement to the Green Revolution, Roy traces an arc of India’s history through the microcosm of a small village in Kerala in the second half of the twentieth century. What emerges is a tale uniquely specific, yet in many ways universal. Shapeshifting between genres, Roy leaves the reader constantly wondering what to expect from the novel—historical fiction or murder mystery? Political discourse in narrative form or a tragedy of star-crossed lovers? The answer she intended, perhaps, is all of the above. 

Set in the village of Ayemenem, The God of Small Things alternates between two main time periods—the 1960s and the 1990s, following the lives of a Syrian-Christian landlord family over the course of three generations. The plot centers around events over a few days in 1969 which lead to the deaths of two characters, and the remaining characters’ struggles to cope with the aftermath of those traumatic events twenty-four years after. Time itself, and its stretching and compressing, becomes crucial to the novel’s framing. Like a mosaic pieced together out of order, the story is told non-sequentially, with character backstories meandering into distant memories and historical tangents. It is a rhetorical choice that, if initially disorienting, ultimately succeeds with Roy’s distinctive writing style: with shades of magical realism, Roy weaves a tapestry of figurative language and symbols, making characters identifiable only with simple descriptors. Following the subtle repetition of language becomes like a scavenger hunt, revealing the interconnection between events. Classic archetypes are present: the turbulent waters of the river literally represent the dangers of crossing societal divisions; a character’s unrequited love leads to her bitterness and cruelty. Roy’s depiction of the twins’ perspective captures the world of childhood in all its fragility, innocence and whimsical fantasy. Strange yet beautiful metaphors add depth: a character’s muteness is compared to an octopus with “stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull…dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the top of his tongue”. 

The characters’ multilayered lives and worldviews are shaped by their respective eras. In the period set in 1960s Kerala, Roy confronts the appeal of communism and its violent strains in the wake of rampant centuries-long classism, racial and religious prejudice. In the 1990s, Roy subtly addresses the Digital and Green Revolutions: the remaining family members at the Ayemenem house sit glued to their TV screens and the river at the heart of the story becomes a swamp, polluted with toxic sewage. Roy also recognizes the reverberations of the larger historical currents which preceded the novel’s time, from the inferiority complex instilled by British colonialism which shapes Pappachi and Chacko’s anglophile attitudes to the way Christianity “seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag”. But at the root of Roy’s critique is the deeply entrenched and archaic caste system. There is the juxtaposition of the ushering in of a new era of modernity (the silhouette of Pappachi’s skyblue Plymouth against a clamor of labor rights organizing) and the simultaneous persistence of archaic societal norms delineating the separation of the untouchable caste and the social rejection of divorced women. The inhumane ideology which justifies the caste subjugation, transcending religion, forms the backbone of social hierarchy in the novel; the breaking of these boundaries is what ultimately leads to the second tragic death in the novel. Indeed, at times the characters’ devastation is so harrowing that the reader is entirely swept up in the melodramatic plotline, the incisive social commentary on race and class underlying it momentarily fading from consciousness. But the ultimate power of the novel is its sheer attention to detail—the unforgettable human descriptions and images which breathe the characters to life. 

 In ways, these resurfacing details—the “small things”—are also an anomaly. In The God of Small Things, Roy wields a tale with melodrama and tragedy so visceral, it borders on mythic;  yet she refuses to play into suspense, instead employing heavy foreshadowing to largely reveal the basic plot within the first thirty pages before circling back to recount what initially seems to be minutiae within every moment. In doing so, the “small things” become more than elegant flourishes adding imaginative depth; they become intrinsic to the philosophical inquiry underlying the book. Pappachi’s insecurity and lifelong sense of failure for not being recognized for his discovery of a moth species fuels his abusive relationship with Mammachi and steers him to deny Ammu freedom to marry as she wishes. Ammu’s despair after her divorce and the impossibility of her love for Velutha provokes her to lash out at the twins, which causes them to fatefully cross the river in an attempt to run away, leading to Sophie Mol’s drowning. Baby Kochamma’s unrequited love for a Catholic missionary and humiliation after being forced to hold the Communist flag by protestors, inflames her contempt and hatred for both Velutha and Ammu, leading her to frame Velutha for murder. Roy seems to question: Is it the “small things” which make the “big things” inevitable, inadvertently setting off a ripple effect of unforeseen consequences and redirecting life trajectories? Or are the “big things” uncontrollable, tethering the characters to their immutable rules and mercurial outcomes? By tracing these common threads of trauma rooted in “small things”, Roy presents a “butterfly effect” of sorts. Does she take this interpretation too far, exaggerating outsized impacts of small events in ways beyond what could be believable in reality? Perhaps, or perhaps not. But in this fictional work, it is Roy’s insistence that, in her own words, “little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted…become the bleached bones of a story,” which makes it truly unforgettable.