LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 17:3 March 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Postcolonial Gothic Hybrid in Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things

Dr. R. Murugan
Dr. V. Peruvalluthi


Abstract

The Gothic novel, postcolonial concerns, certainly shaped racial Gothic imagination into predictable and recognizable forms. In this sense Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a complicated postcolonial novel in which Roy employs the Gothic conventions of dark imagery, the supernatural, the haunted house, the ancestral curse, a threatening atmosphere, doubling, and incest to personalize larger cultural horrors of India as experienced by one family in Kerala. The small things—a special child-sized coffin, a cold moth with dense tufts, a buried toy wristwatch, a disappearing footprint—pervade the novel to show the ghosts of oppression, colonial devastation, political uprisings, and historical tragedies of India. The Gothic elements and ghosts that haunt the narrative, however, are portrayed by Roy in a fascinatingly distinct form. This paper interprets The God of Small Things as a postcolonial Gothic hybrid, asserting that Roy both adopts and challenges Western Gothic conventions to illustrate the haunting of India’s colonial past upon its present as the country struggles with its modern-day identity.

Keywords: Gothic, post colonialism, conventions, dark imagery, supernatural, a threatening atmosphere, dense tufts, oppression, colonial devastation, hybridity.

A Postcolonial Gothic Hybrid

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as a postcolonial Gothic hybrid, asserting that Roy both adopts and challenges Western Gothic conventions to exemplify the lingering of India’s colonial past upon its present as the country struggles with its modern-day identity. Scholars agree that the literature of the postcolonial and the Gothic share similar foundations. Given the inherent similarities between postcolonial and Gothic literature challenges to boundaries of power and ownership, haunting of a repressed past, and embodiment of the frightening writers from colonized countries are increasingly finding the Gothic a fitting literary form to challenge dominant historical narratives and illustrate the anxieties of a country struggling for a postcolonial identity. Roy skillfully employs the Gothic in The God of Small Things to challenge historical narratives of India and express the anxieties of India’s struggle with its colonial past and modern postcolonial identities.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. R. Murugan, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Head & Assistant Professor of English
Aruna Vidhya Arts & Science College
Chengam Taluk
Tiruvannamalai - 606 704
Tamilnadu
India
rlmurugan1976@gmail.com

Dr. V. Peruvalluthi M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Registrar (i/c), Dean (College Development Council)
Professor & Head, Department of English
Thiruvalluvar University
Serkadu
Vellore – 632 115
Tamilnadu
India
valluthi@gmail.com
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