The God of Small Things: A Thesis

With The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy produced a valuable perspective on the complex religious, political, and cultural framework of her native Kerala. However, the novel also has broader implications. Noting the historical evolution of civilizations, Roy focuses the characters' struggle around the human propensity to create hierarchical structures, the implications of the laws those structures create, and the fate faced by those who transgress those self-same laws. In Roy's own words "It's a book about how, over years, human society continues to behave in very similar ways, even though the details may be different" (Frumkes). By definition, 'law,' as it is meant for the purposes of this paper involves the social, economic, and political structures created by human beings to control others' actions.

The novel is a cynical comment on the risks of breaking these laws that goes out of its way to deconstruct humanities' hope for making significant change to its condition over time. Roy supposes that it is human nature to create structures that destroy other human beings, and in fact the novel finds those conclusions inevitable.

It is important to realize when talking about the laws present in the novel, that India, and specifically Kerala, has no one set of overriding ideological structures: Christianity brought by the British colonialists is coupled in an ungainly fashion to ancient Hindu traditions. Not to mention a variety of new ideologies filtering in from Maoist China, such as communism, which serves as an umbrella for completely new concepts like equal pay, equal treatment, and the destruction of the caste system. Roy makes several points in the novel about the conflicting nature of foreign cultural systems present in India. The conflict within those laws provides some of the difficulty for the characters, forcing them to constantly contradict themselves in thought and action.