THE ELEMENTS OF FEMINISM IN "GOD OF SMALL THINGS"

Any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of “Third World Feminisms” must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic “Western” feminisms and the formulation of autonomous feminist concerns and strategies that are geographically, historically and culturally grounded. The first project is one of deconstructing and dismantling; the second is one of building and constructing. While these projects appear toe be contradictory, the one working negatively and the other positively, unless these two tasks are addressed simultaneously, third world feminisms run the risk of marginalization or ghettoization from both mainstream (right and left) and Western Feminist discourses.The woman writer hemmed in by the patriarchal structure of language and culture finds herself compelled to get along with it and give into it sufficiently in order to make it give into her at least some of the time. The sense of a woman’s peripheral yet invested position within a male-dominated culture leads her to thematic and stylistic experimentations and innovations, so as to make herself heard. Yet women writers, in general, do not exploit the potential of humour which can act as a vehicle of protest and assertion, since it is perceived as a masculine prerogative and as an aggressive, unfeminine mode.In Indian women’s writing in English, the attempt to explore the possibilities of humour is rarity which often ends up with the use of typical feminine tools of expression such as self-deprecation, lady-like language, and female stereotypes. Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God Of Small Things’, hence becomes significant in this context. In a novel which eliminates sentimentality and remains realistic in all its essential features, there exists the essential prerequisites of the flowering of humour. Arundhati Roy twins to this mode with the case of an experienced practitioner and exploits its malleability to register the protest against patriarchal systems of oppression and exploitation. The novel strikes a balance between feminist and female humour, and resorts to many of the conventional devices such as irony, exaggeration, sarcasm and wit.The focus in Arundhati Roy’s novel is on the irrationalities and injustices of domestic and social life. She attacks the double standard that one sex is to be sheltered, and judged and kept from power-while the other, regardless of its behaviour, runs the world Arundhati’s assaults, on the lopsided values of a male dominated society, are characterised by their humour seasoned with irony and sarcasm which tend to avoid extremities of aggression and hospitality. Most of the male characters in this family chronicle exhibit chauvinistic tendencies which vary in degrees. Male aggression obviously gets suggested in a laugher evoking scene which depicts the loyalty of Aleyooty Ammachi, Rahel’s great-grandmother: (In the photograph) “She looked in the direction that her husband looked (while) with her heart she looked away (30)”. Instances such as these become rare as the narrative moves further and records the sadistic traits of Pappachy and Chacko, the grandfather and uncle of Rahel. Cast in the mould of the typical Western feminist stereotype of 1970s, these characters project male chauvinism prevalent in our part of the world in its extreme form. Pappachy, the “Imperial Entomologiat”, is “Charming and urban with visitors…. donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics……. worked hard on his public profile as a sophisticated, generous, moral man. But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning”. In “the photograph that lent an underlying chill to the warm room in which it hung”. “He was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on the centre of his upper lip that dropped down over his lower lip in a sort of effeminate pout… He wore Khaki Jodhpurs though he had never ridden a horse in his life” (51). This description blends the chilling aspects of Pappachi’s personality with carefully chosen incongruities and absurdities so as to create a caricature of remarkable subtlety and impact.Aurndhati Roy uses a slightly different register to draw the caricature of the absurd and priggish Chacko, ‘the Rhodes Scholar’ with “his Oxford Moods”. Petted by a doting mother, this “prime ministerial material” comes to Ayemenem “with his Balliol Oar and his Pickle Baron Dreams”. His managerial ‘skills’ destroy a profitable business enterprise and reduce the family’s resources to shambles. Chacko’s intellectual superiority and masculine vanity care cast with great measure of exaggeration. “Chacko’s room was stacked from floor to ceiling with books. He had read them all and quoted long passages from them for no apparent reason. Or at least none that anyone else could fathom”. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the ludicrousness of Chacko’s idealism. In a scene which reminds one of an absurd play, Chacko speaks at length about “The War Of Dreams” to the confused twins and attempts to give them “a scene of historical perspective” which he himself lacks. His self-proclaimed Marxist learnings in addition to being another extention of his impractical idealism, are also ruses to flirt with and exploit the pretty women who worked in the factory. The narrative which guides the reader through the absurdity, ludicrousness and exaggerated idealism of Chacko now swings on to fix him sarcastically on the pedestal of a male aggressor: “An Oxford avatar of the old- Zamindar mentality- a landlord forcing his attention on women who depended on him for their livelihood”. Ultimately it is this image of a “Male Chauvinist Pig” which gets concretized when Chacko proudly informs his divorced, defenseless sister: “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine”. Deftly delivered strokes of irony such as these, along with the incongruity – rich build-up, help Arundhati Roy to expose some of the hypocrisies and irrationalities of patriarchy.“The God Of Small Things” has a narrative sprinkled with flashes of caustic humour which artfully throws male aggression into relief. Arundhati Roy’s erasure of sentimentality from the narrative perhaps enables her to look objectively at situations which arouse extreme indignation. In a scene which is disgusting and comical at the same time, Ammu’s father-in-law drives off, in the new Fiat which he himself had gifted to the young couple, carrying “all the jewellery and most of the other presents that they had been given”. At another point, after their nocturnal trip into the sanctified world of puranas and epics which ought to purge them off baser instincts, “The Kathakali man took off their make-up and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts”. The novelist seems to suggest that tyrannizing over women is so common a phenomenon that it is uniformly seen among the rich as well as the poor.The subaltern male and the subordinated female in ‘The God Of Small Things’, become comrades-in-arms in a losing battle against the forces of oppression. Several passages tinged with scathing irony and humour highlight the political, social and religious conspiracies against the subaltern. The novel portrays the seemingly exaggerated yet real predicament of the untouchables who had to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints during the pre-colonial days, in order to prevent the upper castes from defiling themselves by accidentally stepping into their footprints. Arundhati Roy gives a graphic picture of the humiliating experiences of the under privileged men branded by the elite as ‘Rice Christians’:“They had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate priests. As a special favour they were even given their separate Pariah Bishop. After Independence they found they were not entitled to any Government benefits…. Because officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all”. (74)The social ostracism verbalized in this passage is characterised by a significant dose of irony, bitterness and silent protest. This perhaps supplies the rationale for the subsequent coming together of Velutha and Ammu, the subaltern male and the subordinated female, who are victims of the same dominant power structure. This what is easily spelt out as a clandestine relationship between a sex hungry female and a virile male goes beyond the constructs of eroticism owing to the subtle operative dynamics of humour.“The God Of small Things”, despite its preoccupation with personal trauma, horror and impending tragedy, allows natural and spontaneous wit to supersede sentimentality. Such a supersession of wit appears to take after Nancy Walker’s conclusion. According to her: “……. Sentimentality in literature is a result of powerlessness, wit may be seen as its opposite: an expression of confidence and power”. Arundhati Roy’s wit is characterised by a direct and open expression of perceptions, taking for granted a position of strength and insight. She shocks and delights her audience by confounding traditional expectations, especially the ones which are related to the myths of patriarchy. The masculine complacency, which stems from the overestimation of feminine expectations, gets shattered in the novel when marriage and its offer of anchorage become deromanticised. Ammu’s marriage with a Bengali, after a period of courtship which lasted for five days, best exemplifies this. As the narrator points out:“Ammu didn’t pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds and accepted. She thought that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem.” (39)Arundhati Roy achieves the same effect again, with remarkable verbal economy and sharpness, while describing Rahel’s marriage: “Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge with a sitting down sense. She returned with him to Boston.”Among the male-imposed taboos broken by Arundhati Roy, the significant one is the mocking of the male anatomy, particularly the genitals. In a hilariously comical scene, she punctures the male vanity by lampooning comrade K.N.M.Pillai for his indecorous dress habit which makes him prefer “a graying Aertex Vest, his balts silhouetted against his soft white murder”. What ultimately gets mocked here is not male anatomy – as men have mocked the female body. Rather Arundhati Roy mock the norm: the belief that viewing the genitals of the opposite sex is an instant turn-on for the woman as it is for the man.In “The God Of Small Things” the stinging edge of Arundhati Roy’s humour unmasks masculine insensitivity. It becomes atrociously farcical when Ammu on recalling the day of her wedding “realized that the slightly ferverish glitter in her bedroom’s eye had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whisky. Straight. Neat”. In a subsequent scene when the husband accepts Mr.Hollick’s proposal to send Ammu to his bunglow to be ‘looked after’, the same effect gets created by shifting the focus to Ammu’s using of ‘The Reader’s Digest World Atlas’ to hit her husband “as hard as she could. On his head. His legs. His back and shoulders”.Arndhati Roy’s occasional employment of what could be termed as situational female humour is also equally effective. While the non-acceptance of oppression characterises feminist humour, female humour may ridicule a person or a system from a point of view of acceptance. Mammachi, the uncomplaining wife of Pappachi, accepts bad marriage as a norm. She is a typical entrapped female who regards her husband as the inevitable oppressor. She is powerless to change things, and she cannot express her resentment. The authorial voice, frilled with irony dwells on the wife’s maintenance of decorum after Pappachi’s death:“Mammachi pasted in the family photograph album, the clipping from the ‘Indian Express’ that reported Pappachi’s death…. At Pappachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses sled around in her eyes…. Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him”. (50)This passage exposes obliquely the discrepancies between the realities of women’s lives and the images of women promoted by culture.Women’s humour down the ages has been dictated by variance in cognitive construction of experience and constraints of cultural and social reception. In a context when the culturally dominant in group (the mainstream / male humour) monopolises the traditionally held constituents of empowered humour such as aggressiveness, dominance and assertiveness, the marginal outgroup (women’s humour) remains on the defensive, regarding themselves weak or vulnerable to attack with impunity, the forces that oppress them. Arundhati Roy’s “The God Of Small Things” with its sharply functional and vibrant band of humour, cast in the feminist mould, falsifies and shakes the foundations of the culturally dominant ingroup’s complacent domain. Her achievement becomes creditable since she initiates, empowers and solidifies a tradition which is capable of articulating and confronting social and political issues from vantage point which is exclusively female in orientation.There was a lot of contradiction concerning feminism. There is sufficient evidence supporting the theme, however there is always a contradicting twist present. For example, Chacko views Margaret Kochamma as his “trophy wife”. Here, it is possible that Margaret Kochamma is nothing but an object, in return creating the idea that women are inferior to men. On the other hand, Margaret Kochamma can be seen as un amazing woman that Chacko is proud to have been married to. Margaret corrects him when she said, “ex-wife Chacko”.Ammu for instance, acts against the feminist views. She tells Rabel and Estha that they do not need a Baba because she acts as both a mother and a father. Here Ammu is equal to that of men.Although Mammachi is the true factory owner or operator, Chacko, the male, gets credit for her work. Again feminism is present: the male figure is credited for Ammu’s actions.Ammu, the tragic heroine of the novel, is the most conspicuous representative of the fourth generation who died at a young age of thirty-one which is described as “not old, not young” and “viable die-able age”. Her suffering started at a very young age. Her father Pappachi insisted that college education was unnecessary for a girl, so she had to leave Delhi after schooling, she had nothing to do at Ayemenem other than waiting for marriage proposals. But no proposals came her way because her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry. She dreamed of escaping from Ayemenem, from her ill-tempered father and bitter, long suffering mother. Finally, she was let to spend the summer with a distant aunt who lived in Calcutta. There she met her future husband at someone else’s wedding reception there.She had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. But very soon things began to take a very bad shape. Her husband was really a misfit to her. He was an alcoholic and he made her smoke. Twins were born to her and by the time they were two years old, drinking had driven him into an alcoholic stupor. Meanwhile, Mr.Hollick, the bungalow to tell him that he should resign. He referred Ammu as “An extremely attractive wife” (P.41) clearly the manager had an eye on her. He suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be ‘looked after’. The only choice left before her was to return, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem and she did so.Greater misery awaited her at Ayemenem on her arrival with her children there. Her world, there, was confined to the front and back verandah of Ayemenem. Somehow the well-built Velutha, the paravan carpenter created ripples in her. Ammu was drawn to Velutha and this was, in fact, the beginning of the end. Very soon this developed into physical relations between them. Vellya Paapen, Velutha’s father, was a mute witness to whatever went on near his house and he rushed to Ayemenem house to give a full factual report. Ammu was locked in a room and meanwhile as a coincidence Sophie Mol got drowned. Then we hear about her death in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview. Ammu went away without anyone there even to bid goodbye to her.The church refused to bury Ammu. So Chacko had to take the body to the electric crematorium. He had her wrapped in a dirty bed sheet and laid out on a stretcher. Finally she became a number; Receipt No. Q 498673. That was the number of the pink receipt the crematorium ‘In-Charge’ gave them. That entitled Chacko and Rahel to collect Ammu’s remains.Ammu’s story is more than a tragedy. She is made to suffer even from a very young age and continues to suffer throughout her life. She would have liked to study in a college if she had got a chance. She did have the dreams of a young girl about marriage and married life. But the hope was believed when she came to know that nobody was there to provide her dowry to get her married off. Her escape to Calcutta invited fresh troubles. What she achieved if at all it was an achievement, was only a married life which lasted for less than a couple of years. Hopes were once again shattered when she returned to Ayemenem to discover that nobody was interested in her. Later as fate would have it, she was drawn to Velutha and that marked the beginning of the ultimate tragedy. She was humiliated at the hands of the police, her near and dear ones and also the public at large. In short Ammu, without her knowledge becomes an instrument in the hands of the patriarchal society.Women who constitute half of the human population but paradoxically not treated on par with man in all spheres of human activity. They are oppressed, suppressed and marginalized in the matter of sharing the available opportunity for fulfillment of their lives, despite the fact that every woman slaves for the development of her family, her husband and children. This is predicament of women all over the world. Simone de Beauvoir says that :A free and autonomous being like all creatures, a woman finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of other”. In Arundhati Roy’s novel we can see the compulsion faced by women in the male dominant society. From a theoretical point of view, the complicity between feminist commitment and post colonial theory is obvious. During colonial regimes women were doubly colonized: as the object of racist, abusive behaviour carried out by colonizers, and at the same time, by traditional sexist role models that tended to assign to women subaltern positions inside their own family and local community. The fact that countries were decolonized does not mean that women’s position as marginal figures in relation to power and hegemony has changed, nor is their position as members of a dependent, impoverished society necessarily altered. In both the colonial and post colonial processes, women have particular histories of oppression and appropriation.