Historicising Subalternity: Recuperation of Subaltern History and Identity in Arundhoti Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

In Antonio Gramsci’s parlance ‘subaltern’ refers to “those groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes...groups (peasants, workers and other) denied access to hegemonic power.” Hence, subalternity denotes subordination or marginalisation in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language, culture and the resultant centrality of the dominant- dominated relationship in history. So the subaltern emerges not as a positive identity but as a product of a network of differential, potentially contradictory identities. The subversive centrality of the ‘subalterns’ in the postcolonial narratives is nothing but displaying of a growing critical distance to see through colonial propaganda on part of the colonised subjects and refutation of the ideological manipulation involved in such hegemonic practices. Arundhoti Roy’s postcolonial novel The God of Small Things hence historicises subalternity in terms of situating ‘untouchable’ Velutha and ‘gendered subaltern’Ammuat the centre of the novel and thereby records the existential predicament  of the peripheral subalterns through the characters like Velutha and Ammu, both representing subalternity on the social and gendered planes respectively. The paper therefore studies the ways Arundhoti Roy historicises subalternity and the subalterns’ desire to construe their selves and identity  in The God Of Small Things under the aegis of Ranajit Guha’s reflection on ‘subaltern’ as peripheral others and Gayatriy Spivak’s tenet on ‘gendered subaltern’ whose voice has been denied any ear in the official history of India. As the historical record has consistently written the peripheral others out of history the paper also attempts to analyse how in the novel Roy attempts to recuperate a space for these invisible mass by critiquing the stereotypes of gender, politics of caste and class exposing hypocrisy of the social hierarchy and the irrational tortuous limits they impose upon the “small things”-the subalterns, both social and gendered.