Response Paper on "the God of Small Things"

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how Indian people were trying to assimilate with the British and mirror the western life style, by distancing themselves from their own Indian culture.

In “The God of Small Things” the main reason for interpersonal as well as intrapersonal conflicts of the characters is the feeling of inferiority of their own Indian culture compared to the British. Roy’s clear depiction of the cultural cringe is traced in the second chapter of the novel, when Chacko while reminiscing his years in Oxford, tells the twins that “though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles”. He explained to them that they were “pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away” (51). According to Chacko, Indian people were constrainedly involved “in a very worst sort of war” that they “have won and lost” (52). Chacko was explaining that their “minds have been invaded by a war”, by a war that “captured their dreams and re-dreamed them” (52). He was talking about a “war that has made them adore their conquerors and despise themselves (52). Through the war that Chacko was talking about Roy was trying to convey a clear portrayal of the resistance of the colonized Indian to the British colonizers, as well as opposition of the Indian people to their own culture, for the name of the progress and assimilation with the western way of thinking, culture and lifestyle. The text of the novel implies that colonized people became “Prisoners of the War of Dreams”: people who “belong nowhere”, people who “sail unanchored on troubled seas”, people who “will may never be allowed ashore”, the oppressed colonized people with altered identities and nationalities who will forever stay in their transitional state (52).

Works Cited

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Penguin Books India, 2002.