Revisiting Colonial Legacy in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

This article is a survey of Arundhati Roy’s (1997) historiographic approach in The God of Small Things. The writers shed light on Roy’s complex treatment of the question of postcoloniality. The focus is the analysis of Roy’s subtle presentation of the myriad interconnections of class, race, gender and culture in post-independence India and the possibility of a negotiation among them. The novel, it is argued, hinges on a seminal question: If the answer to the pressing problems of the postcolonial condition ? one in which the colonial power relations seem to be still very much in place, albeit in new guises – seems to be hybridity, what is the modality of this hybridity and how possible is it? The writers suggest that Roy finds the house of history still too clamorously haunted with the colonial legacy in India to house hybridity.