i

Postmodern Readings into Arundhati Roy’s

The God of Small Things, Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman and

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Thesis

Submitted by

A. Hariharasudan
[Reg. No. 201110204]
In partial fulfillment for the award of the degree

of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

KALASALINGAM ACADEMY OF RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

(Deemed to be University)
ANAND NAGAR
KRISHNANKOIL – 626 126
Tamil Nadu, India
October-2017
 ii

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that all corrections and suggestions pointed out by the Indian and
Foreign Examiners are incorporated in the Thesis titled “Postmodern Readings into
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman and
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger” submitted by Mr. A. Hariharasudan.

SUPERVISOR

Date: 05.03.2018

Place: Krishnankoil
iii
 iv

KALASALINGAM ACADEMY OF RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

(Deemed to be University)
ANAND NAGAR
KRISHNANKOIL – 626 126

DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the thesis entitled “Postmodern Readings into Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things, Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman and Aravind Adiga’s The White
Tiger” submitted by me for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
English is the result of my original and independent research work carried out under the
Guidance of Dr. S. Robert Gnanamony, Professor, Department of English, Kalasalingam
University, Anand Nagar, Krishnankoil and it has not been submitted for the award of
any Degree, Diploma, Associateship, and Fellowship of any University or Institution.

A.Hariharasudan
 v

KALASALINGAM ACADEMY OF RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

(Deemed to be University)
ANAND NAGAR
KRISHNANKOIL – 626 126

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this Thesis titled “Postmodern Readings into Arundhati Roy’s The God of
Small Things, Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger”
is the bonafide work of Mr. A. Hariharasudan who carried out the research under my
supervision. Certified further, that to the best of my knowledge the work reported herein
does not form part of any other thesis or dissertation on the basis of which a degree or
award was conferred on an earlier occasion on this or any other scholar.

Dr. S. Robert Gnanamoy

SUPERVISOR
Professor of English
Department of English
Kalasalingam University
 vi

ABSTRACT
The thesis addresses the multifarious issues of Postmodernism that have emerged in the
last 50 years and highlights how these issues knowingly or unknowingly impacted the
contemporary litterateurs, who unmistakably coloured their characters and the events
they portray in their oeuvre. Arundhati Roy in her debut fiction The God of Small Things
shows that the present god, who presides over man’s affairs is a powerless small god,
because he is not able to stop meaningless wars, unnecessary deaths, communal
upheavals, political corruption, gender-bias, discord in man-woman relationship, caste-
bias, familial incest, abuse of children, police brutality, existential alienation, unmitigated
despair, self-annihilation, and meaningless human existence to list a few Manju Kapur in
her text A Married Woman shows in unmitigated terms how a middle-aged married
woman goes awry from her routine track and becomes a lesbian despite her able-bodied
and apparently loving husband is very much around her. She is also blessed with a caring
mother and a mother-in-law; Astha, the married woman begets children too. Still due to
her husband’s apathy to her normal longings of standing on her own legs and also to
make a mark in the world as an artist and do a bit of community service to the suffering
minority community, she looks for sympathy and support outside her married partner;
when she gets this from the widowed Pipeelika, whose husband is brutally murdered on
communal issues, she falls headlong into this un-trodden and unapproved and
patriarchally denounced same-sex secret relationship. Aravind Adiga in his Postmodern
text The White Tiger, makes a subaltern speak; speak in a louder voice. Munna alias
Balram Halwai, a destitute village boy evolves himself into a white tiger and grows to be
an entrepreneur in the high-tech city Bangalore catering to the needs of the employees of
multinational corporations especially to their transport needs. He will sell this start-up
and enter into the real estate business, because it is a golden goose at the present moment.
He will marry and settle down and even beget children. All these are possible to him with
a single murder; when committed, he displays no compunction; he is not a practising
Christian to kneel down and pray and ask for god’s compassion, and remission of his
 vii

heinous crime. The much vaunted biblical Ten Commandments have no sway over him.
All he wants is a chance to live like a man and come out of his miry clay.
 viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wholeheartedly express my joy and appreciation and gratitude to our benevolent

Management of Kalasalingam University for providing me a golden opportunity to serve
in this great Institution and also enabling me to take up research so that it will
qualitatively impact my teaching career.

It is my also my privilege to offer my profuse thanks to the Vice Chancellor of the

University Dr. S. Saravanasankar and the Registrar Dr. V. Vasudevan and the former
Dean Research and Development Dr. S. Arumugam and the present Dean Dr. S.
Balamurali for enabling me to undertake and complete this project.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my Supervisor Dr. S. Robert

Gnanamony for his encouragement, inspiring words, and continuous support of my
research work. He has been so patient with me and offered plenty of pieces of
information regarding studious research, global literature and effective composition. His
guidance over the past six years has helped me so much and I have no words to express
his help. I could not have imagined a better advisor and mentor for my PhD study.

Besides my Supervisor, I would like to thank my Head of the Department of

English Dr. C. Jothi, DRC Chairman Dr. S. Mohan and my entire colleagues in the
Department of English and also my friends in the other Departments of the University for
their Insightful Comments and encouragement

I would like to thank my father, mother-in-law and brother for supporting me to

carry out this serious Project. My special thanks go to my loving, supportive,
encouraging, and patient wife Mrs. K. Jansi Rani whose unwavering support during the
final stages of this PhD work has been so much appreciated. My thanks go to my
daughter Krishikha Shree. I also thank my dearest friend Mr. K. G. Gunalan who has
given notable encouragements throughout my research.

A. HARIHARASUDAN
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapters Pages

I. Introduction: Modernism vs. Postmodernism 1-31

II. Issues of Postmodernism in Arundhati Roy’s

The God of Small Things 32-78

III. Snapshots of Postmodernism in Manju Kapur’s

A Married Woman 79-129

IV. Subaltern can also Speak: Analysis of Aravind Adiga’s

The White Tiger 130-180

V. Narratology 181- 202

VI. Summing Up: A Balanced Depiction 203-218

Notes 219- 221

Works Cited 222- 236

List of Publication 237

Curriculum Vitae 238

 x

LIST OF SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS

CALERI - Campaign for Lesbian Rights

CFS - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

CR - Consciousness Raising

etc. - Et cetera

e-mail - Electronic Mail

ICA - Imperatively Coordinated Associations

IT - Information Technology

NBA - The National Basket Ball Association

NGO - Non-Governmental Organization

NSSO - National Sample Survey Organization

Prof. - Professor

qtd. - Quoted

T.B. - Tuberculosis

TV - Television

UP - Uttar Pradesh

US/USA - United States of America

vs. - Versus

VTR - Virtual Tax Room

 1

CHAPTER I

Introduction: Modernism vs. Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a symptomatic reaction to Modernism, Art and Literature; this is

especially visible in fiction. Fiction produced in the Postmodern age is unfailingly

Postmodern in content. This is the theme statement of my thesis. The present thesis will

spin around this theme statement.

Postmodernism is a labyrinthine term which is tough to define. Embracing the

entire gamut of life, it comes out in a broad range of disciplines including Literature,

Architechture, Fashion, Sociology, Art etc. Postmodernism is best observed as an

extension of Modernism. Literature tends to be non-traditional, non-conformist and

against significance and authority. Renowned Sociologist Stanley Aronowitz identifies it

as a denial of cause as “a foundation of human affair” (Aronowitz 56) and Neil Larsen

labels it in his article as “a form of irrationalism” (Larsen 19). It is an extension of the

testing championed by writers of the modernist epoch and a response against the

illumination ideas implied in Modern literature.

Just as Post-structuralism and Post-humanism are pitted against each other,

Postmodernism is pitted against Modernism. It is impossible rather to specify when

exactly Postmodernism begins. The scholar wishes to add here that though there is a

bookmark, namely, the assassination of the US President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Though the present age is Postmodernism, tendencies of Modernism are also there in all

walks of life, though at a smaller scale.

 2

At the present moment of preparing this thesis (2017), Modernism largely covers

the broad artistic movement of the 20th century beginning from 1900. Modernism begins

by about 1900. The world is then a bustling place of transformation due to discoveries,

inventions and scientific attainments that are being drive on society. So Modernism is

largely identified with the emerging new technologies of the 20th century.

Modernism stands for certain established notions. These include, as has been

observed by Robert Gnanamony, “It is a world governed by reason, and the true will

always be the same as the good and the right and the beautiful. Science stands as the

paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge” (Gnanamony 1).

Modernism supports the belief that there is a rationale for life and that it should be

observed objectively. Modernist has a positive outlook of the world and believes that

there are ethics and values that need to be maintained. The period of Modernism is an era

of literary and artistic development.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, is a school of movement or a thought that takes

place after the World War II, but it gains fame in the 1960s. It is a messy era tough to

explain and understand. It advocates that the universal truth does no longer exist. It uses

an irrational approach to life and believes that all are unreasonable. Postmodernists

believe in transience and possibility. They question the wisdom of Modernism, its

thoughts and doctrines. They believe that there is no link between the present and the past

and the past actions are unrelated in the present.

The Postmodernist period is portrayed by the progression of scientific things and

its use in literature, art and music. Very few unique works of artists can be identified
 3

during this time, and earlier works are copied. Postmodernist performers get their

motivation and root from the unique works of Modernist performers.

In one sense, Postmodernism is simply ‘what came after modernism’.

Postmodernism is mainly associated with its idealistic expressions, trying to puzzle out

the natural world of ‘meaning’ and finding out that in numerous ways meaning is

arbitrary than has earlier been thought.

Modernism generally refers to Neo-Classical and Enlightenment hypothesis

relating to rationality, or reason, or scientific reasoning that plays in directing our

understanding of the human situation. Postmodernism mostly disobeys these fundamental

conjectures.

Modernism is another label for Enlightenment humanism. In Modernism, Science

and Reason give objective, exact and reliable base of ‘Knowledge’. On the other hand, in

Postmodernism, Science and Reason are beliefs in the Marxist sense or Nietzschean.

These are myths produced by man. In Modernism Reason exists and goes beyond

independently of our historical, existential, cultural frameworks; it is common and ‘true’.

Postmodernism is not universal and there is no objective means of judging any set

concepts as ‘true’; all findings of truth stay alive inside a cultural framework. In

Postmodernism the application of pure reason disapproves the universal nature of human

freedom. In Modernism, Science is the prototype of all factual understanding. In

Postmodernism, there is no such thing. In Modernism, Language is visible; a one to one

connection between signifier and signified. But in Postmodernism, language is arbitrary

and fluid and/or deep-rooted in knowledge/power relations; significance is arbitrary and

 4

fluid; significance is ‘messy’. In Modernism, Reason will direct to the truths of universe

and all traditions will hold them. Postmodernism does not have the universal human

experience, eternal truths and universal human rights. It only has the overruling

description of human advancement. In Modernism, Truth stays alive sovereign of human

consciousness and can be recognized through the appliance of Reason. All Enlightenment

ends direct from this assumption. In Postmodernism, Truth may stay alive sovereign of

human consciousness but it doesn’t have the objective means of nailing it down. All

Postmodern ends direct from this hypothesis. In Modernism, the Enlightenment is

dogmatic: a means of constructing an improved society. But, the Postmodern theory is

vivid of the human situation; it portrays an standoff in social relation and philosophy. In

Modernism, women are subjugated by male society and can employ reason to attain both

recover and freedom their ‘true selves’. In Postmodernism, the genders female/male,

feminine/masculine is culturally built. Genders are culturally relation in all contexts and

cultures. In Modernism, ‘self’ is independent of culture and society and is stable and

coherent. In Postmodernism, the ‘self’ is a myth and mostly a complex of one’s cultural

contexts and societal experience.

Modernism, derived from the notion of European enlightenment started in the mid

of 18th Century. Modernism encourages individual understanding as the important

potency and discovers this potency as the foundation of a technical attitude. In literature,

Modernism is an artistic progress that became popular between 1910 and 1930. The

notable writers of Modernism comprise James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S.

Eliot, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein.

 5

Postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson have created their own jargons to

satisfactorily describe the Postmodern tendencies that they witness in the contemporary

world. Fredrick Jameson, for instance, in one of his articles argues, “Pastiche rather than

parody is the appropriate mode of Postmodernist culture” (qtd. in Eagleton 131). Pastiche

is a collage of words, entire passages or sentences from different writers or one writer. It

is consequently, a sort of replication and may be a type of parody. According to

Cuddon.J.A and Habib, “An elaborate form of pastiche is a sustained work (say, a novel)

written mostly or entirely in the style and manner of another writer” (Cuddon and Habib

517). Talking about parody, Terry Eagleton wishes to point out that parody is not

completely strange to the culture of Postmodernism. To quote his words “What is

parodied by Postmodernist culture, which its dissolution of art into the prevailing forms

of commodity production, is nothing less than the revolutionary art of the twentieth-

century avant-garde” (Eagleton 131).

Postmodernism is gone ahead and is now referred to in the literary, cultural, and

academic circles as Post-Postmodernism. The prefix ‘Post’ refers to a historical

sequencing where in the events passed by is superseded. Many scholars consider that

Postmodernism is a periodizing term. As Kellner observes, “The discourse of the past is

sometimes connected with an apocalyptic sense of rupture, of the passing of the old and

the advent of the new” (Kellner 3). In the global industrial sector Postmodernism

signifies visible superseding of mass production and mass consumption with products

manufactured in every pocket of the world and assembled in countries where cheap

labour is available. It has lead to the collapse of the established older companies and
 6

industries and communities. It concomitantly follows by a collapse of trade unions and

creating large scale unemployment.

The impact of Postmodernism witnessed in the 1960s was immediately impacted

in diverse areas like Philosophy, Arts, Literature, Architecture and Literary Criticism. It

is an attitude of skepticism, and distress toward grand narratives and ideologies, which

include morality, absolute truth, military power and reason. Grand narratives or master

narratives stand for scholarly system or any theory which tries to give a widespread

enlightenment of human knowledge and experience. To quote from the Dictionary of

Literary Terms and Literary Theory, “Religion, science, Freudian psychology and

political ideologies such as Marxism, nationalism, neo-liberalism all produce competing

grand narratives (also referred to as master narratives and meta-narratives). Grand

narratives are particularly associated with Enlightenment” (Cuddon and Habib 312). In

this connection it is worthy to remember the words of a very prominent Postmodern

theorist, Jean-Francois Lyotard. He points out that

Blind faith placed in the singular explanations provided by the grand

narratives of modernity has led to an intolerance of difference. This

intolerance led directly to the horrors of the 20th century. […] we should

embrace a multiplicity of theoretical viewpoints in order to appreciate the

heterogeneity of human experience, and employ petits recits, ‘little

narratives’, to enable a better comprehension of and ability to respond to,

local, contingent and temporary circumstances (Cuddon and Habib 312-

313).
 7

Lyotard believes that “little narratives” are the most inventive way of creating

knowledge and that they help to break down “modernity’s grand narratives” (qtd. in Ruth

1).

To carry on Lyotard’s argument further, he thinks,

Little narratives refer to micro-political alliances – temporary, loose

coalitions of people over single issues – but the point works equally with

“little narratives” in a literary sense. Poetry, after all, is full of slippery

fragments and marginalized, nomadic voices. It admits no stability of words

and meanings; there is no core identity, no essence, only what is realized in

performance, only what is constructed. Moreover, the act of writing is

always fore-grounded in verse, so we recognize the artifice involved in

expression. After all, all poems are open, readerly texts (qtd. in Ruth 1).

Postmodernism is an off-shoot of poststructuralism. It is known by the new ways

of thinking through structuralism. Some of the prominent Postmodern/ poststructural

thinkers are Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Martin Heidegger, Richard Rorty,

Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson, Edmund Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche, Douglas

Kellner and Jean Baudrillard. All these renowned theoreticians have enriched

Postmodern/ poststructural theories with their research, analysis, lectures and articles. It

may be remembered that all these Postmodernists base their discourses mostly on various

aspects of language.

Martin Heidegger is a German Philosopher and a seminal thinker. He has

contributed quite a lot to Phenomenology and Existentialism. In his insistence on

 8

historicity and cultural construction of concepts, he is a Postmodern theorist as well. He

insists, “Radical Postmodernism has no faith in univocity or representation in experience,

history or language” (qtd. in Oliveira 198). In one sense, “Postmodernism could be

described as the radicalization of Heidegger’s philosophy” (qtd. in Oliveira 198). He

argues that human beings are fundamentally structured by their temporality. Just like

existentialists, he emphasizes the importance of “Authenticity in human existence” (qtd.

in Oliveira 198).

German Philosopher, Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl has set up the School of

Phenomenology. He argues that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all

possible knowledge. To him, “Phenomenology is a transcendental-idealist philosophy”

(Wikipedia).

Jacques Derrida is a French philosopher. He is famous for establishing a structure

of semiotic analysis known as Deconstruction. He is the forerunner of the

Deconstruction theory. He is one of the major theorists associated with poststructuralism

and Postmodernism. He is not a sociologist, but a Postmodern theorist. He has

introduced a large number of Postmodern terms, which include ‘Différance’. To quote

him from his text, Of Grammatology:

Différance invites us to undo the need for balanced equations, to see if each

term in an opposition is not after all an accomplice of the other. ‘At the

point where the concept of differance intervenes [...] all the conceptual

opposition of metaphysics, to the extent that they have for ultimate

reference the present of a present […] (signifier/signified;

 9

sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; speech [parole]/ language [langue];

diachrony/synchrony; space/time; passivity/activity etc.) become non-

pertinent’. (Spivak. Introduction iix)

Postmodernism covers various fields like Philosophy, Linguistics and Humanities.

In a fine tone, Derrida is portrayed as a linguistic theorist. In a way, he is a

poststructuralist as well as a Postmodernist.

Derrida gives some new shape to Postmodernity and Poststructuralism. He has

developed deconstruction by his own poststructuralist merge of linguistics, philosophy

and literary analysis. Features, which have influenced the expansion of Postmodernist

idea, are: “We use language to organize – and even construct reality. Language enables

us to give meaning to the world. No single thing gives off a meaning of its own accord.

Meaning is through its relationship to other things. Verbal and written language provides

the clearest demonstration of these structural or relational properties of meaning” (qtd. in

Mondal 1).

According to Derrida, deconstruction discloses the concealed hypothesis of a work

of art and there is no fact outside of society, language or culture. The central point of his

point is that, “the things do not have a single meaning. Instead, the meaning embraces

fragmentation, conflict and discontinuity in matters of history, identity and culture” (qtd.

in Mondal 1). Deconstruction gives meaning of meanings.

Michel Foucault, the French Philosopher, has brought in a new theory to elucidate

the relationship between meaning, power, and social behavior within social structures. He

has introduced the concept discursive regime.

 10

Jean-Francois Lyotard, the prominent French Philosopher uses the term

“exteriorized” to externalize the human hidden malady and to him knowledge is

materialized and made into a commodity between producers and consumers. He uses the

term “meta-narrative” which is undermined by ramped informatization and

commercialization.

Douglas Kellner, the American Linguist and Philosopher, with his notion has

enriched ‘semiotics systems’ with formation like ‘adamancy’; he means that most

cultures have used signs in the place of existence. He also corroborates the end of

Marxism and its impact on his theory.

Postmodern literature is employed to explain bound features of post– World War

II literature and to a response against Enlightenment concepts inherent to Modernist

literature. Postmodern literature, like Postmodernism, is tough to describe and there is

very small agreement on the precise features, value and scope of Postmodern literature.

Though, uniting characteristics typically overlap with Jacques Derrida's conception of

‘play’, Jean-François Lyotard’s conception of the ‘metanarrative’ and ‘little narrative’

and Jean Baudrillard’s ‘simulacra’. For instance, rather than the modernist hunt for

meaning in a very messy world, the Postmodern writer avoids, often playfully, the chance

of meaning, and also the Postmodern novel is commonly a parody of this hunt. This

disbelieve of totalizing methods expands even to the writer and his own self-

consciousness; therefore Postmodern authors usually celebrate possibility over craft and

use metafiction to challenge the writer’s ‘univocation’. The difference between low and

high culture is additionally assaulted with the use of pastiche, the mixture of numerous
 11

cultural components as well as subjects and genres not previously deemed appropriate

literature.

In English, Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristam

Shandy, Gentleman, with its significant stress on narrative testing and parody, is usually

mentioned as an early influence on Postmodernism. It may be remembered that parody is

one of the key elements of Postmodernism. There have been several nineteenth century

samples of assaults on Enlightenment ideas, with parody, and playfulness. Instances are

Alfred Jarry in his Ubu Roi, Thomas Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus, and Lord Byron in

his Don Juan. Other prominent authors who used parody as a literary device include

Strindberg, the Swedish playwright and novelist; the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello and

the German writer and theoretician Bertolt Brecht.

In the 1910s, performers related to Dadaism celebrated parody, chance,

playfulness, and assaulted the central function of the creator. An avant-grade poet Tristan

Tzara claims in ‘How to make a Dadaist Poet’ that to form a Dadaist literary work one

had merely to place arbitrary words in a very cap and drag them out one by one.

Surrealist René Magritte's trials with significance are employed as instances by Michel

Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault additionally employs instances from Jorge Luis

Borges, a very significant influence on lots of Postmodernist novel authors. He is often

recorded as a Postmodernist, though he began writing in the 1920s. The influence of his

experiments with magic realism and metafiction was not absolutely realised in the Anglo-

American surroundings till the Postmodern era.

 12

The twenty years, notably from 1970 to 1980 was the growth of Postmodern types

in architecture, poetry, literature and painting. A powerful response to high fashionable

variety of purity and formalism is perceived within the area of genre design. Roger

Webster in his book Studying Literary Theory: An Introduction states,

The term Postmodernism does not come into general usage though in

Britain and America until the postwar period, and it is in 1980s that the

most intense theorization and debate takes place -- the ‘moment’ of

Postmodernism in the sense of the intersection of cultural, political and

historical forces together with a heightened awareness of the movement”

(Webster 124).

In the field of social science and literature the problem of Postmodernism is not

fresh any longer. Sociologist Alex Preda designates Postmodernism in his article

“Postmodernism in Sociology” as “‘an extension of sociological inquiry’, ‘new forms of

sociological expression’, ‘a form of social analysis’ and ‘a kind of sociological

sensibility’”(Preda 11865). This concept began in the social science notions as a result of

several sociologists began to consider that we have started to maneuver towards a

replacement and unusual type of culture wherever the ideas of Modernism are getting

puzzling and dishonorable. Postmodernism additionally engages a fixation that there is

not anything complete or cohesive after realism. Postmodernists embrace the outlook that

symbol of realism is not attainable in any respect. The British sociologist Gerard Delanty

and Professor of Sociology from the University of Sussex identifies Postmodernism as a

replacement drift and says it “it is not a phase beyond modernity but represents the most
 13

advanced, and possibly final, stage of modernity” (Delanty 131). American born social

theorist and sociologist Charles Lemert has written extensively on social theory,

globalization and culture. From his perception, Postmodernism is, “something to do with

what is allegedly happening to Modernism. So, if Modernism is a culture of modern age

(or, simply, of modernity), then Postmodernism has something to do with the breaking

apart of modernism” (Lemert 21).

Stephan Fuchs is a renowned sociologist. He defines Postmodernism in his “The

Poverty of Postmodernism” as “the ideology of a ‘new class’ of symbolic workers who

specialize in self-referential techniques for manipulating signs, images, and multiple

layers of representation” (Fuchs 58). To Lemert, Postmodernism highlights that, “there is

a better world than the modern one” (Lemert 22).

Talking about Modernism from literary perspectives, Mary Klages shows a

numerous features: a haziness of the dissimilarities of genres, refusing the partition from

high to low culture, rational tendency and creativity toward self-consciousness or

reflexivity. She as well comments that modern literature is portrayed by disintegration,

broken narratives and arbitrary seeming patchworks of diverse resources. Stream of

consciousness method has been trendy amongst the modernist authors.

In spite of the radical alteration that Modernism brings about, it cannot keep away

from criticism by the philosophers and theorists of the period. The shocking outcomes of

the World War-II force them to raise question the existing view or the world.

Postmodernists reject the traditional sights of truth that the modernists apprehended. They

emphasize the down fall of Modernism and suggest that objective depiction of truth is not
 14

feasible. Postmodernists believe the thoughts of illumination and reason to be

unacceptable to get resolution to the questions of complex culture. The dominance of

science and the conventional notions of government are questioned. Big bombs and

advanced scientific practices are exercised in the World Wars-II causing incalculable

devastation to human beings. This thing turns the Modernism problematic. Consequently,

the views of Literature, Political Science, Science, Sociology, Philosophy and other

conventional viewpoints of people on the established modern beliefs are got in to

question. Many scholars have gone in to these issues deeply. Prof. David Lyon, for

instance, highlights the following negative impact of Modernism, “Traditional ties of

family, kin and neighborhood, torn by new mobility and lack of conventional regulation,

were replaced only by a sense of uncertainty, loss of direction, and a feeling that the

individuals were somehow on their own” (Lyon 36).

Being frustrated by the misery caused by Modernism’s offshoots like

industrialization, capitalism, cultural delineations, commoditization, bureaucratization

and urbanization, many thinkers look for fresh theories of life in literature and culture.

Not like the protectors of modernity, “Postmodern theorists, however, claim that in

contemporary high tech media society, […] are producing a new Postmodern society and

its advocates claim that the era of postmodernity constitutes a novel stage of history and

novel socio-cultural formation which requires new concepts and theories” ( Best and

Kellner 3).

Postmodernists condemn modernist ideas and the modernist culture for sighting

many disadvantages. Postmodernists consider that all is about option. According to them,
 15

every fixity of ethical system is rejected; to a certain extent there builds up a principle of

several and individual ethical systems. There are numerous methods to do fixations and

not a single. According to Preda,

This debate raised a series of questions about the validity claims of

scientific theories, the nature of scientific truth, and the status of the

knowing subject, arguing that: (a) all knowledge is contextual and local; (b)

the validity claims of any scientific theory are not to be found in some

abstract, universal criteria, but rather the results of either negotiated

consensus or power struggles; and (c) as a consequence, the knowing

subject does not dispose of universal criteria to ascertain the validity and

truth of his or her knowledge. (Preda 11866)

Nietzsche’s influential works instigate numerous theorists to pose various

questions linked to textual language and understanding which pave the way to

Postmodernism.

One of the hallmarks of Postmodern literature is Ambiguity. The promoters of

Postmodernism are of the belief that all fixations may have couple of senses at the same

point in time and these senses are not paradoxical; moderately they are connected

components of truth.

Professor Tim Delaney talks much about Postmodernism. According to him,

majority of the Postmodern ideas have mostly been derived from the ‘non-sociologists’

like Lyotard, Jameson, Derrida and others.

 16

Jacques Derrida is an Algerian born French theorist who catapults a deconstructive

theory, and criticizes ‘logocentrism’. Likewise, Peter Kivisto is a renowned Sociology

Professor from Finland. He clarifies logo-centrism as: “[…] Our knowledge of the social

world is grounded in a belief that we can make sense of our ever-changing and highly

complex societies by referring to certain unchanging principles or foundations” (Kivisto

139). Derrida highlights on the hermeneutical technique and makes use of this technique

in scrutinizing the text of Foucault. Adding more light into it, Delaney remarks, “The

German tradition of hermeneutics was a special approach to the understanding and

interpretation of published writings. The goal was not limited to merely understanding

the basic structure of the text, but the talking of the authors as well” (Delaney 137).

Dwelling at length on fashionable consumer society, French scholar Jean

Baudrillard concludes that our individuality or subject-hood is built by the signifiers we

employ. Consequently a person’s societal stage is formulated by the products he employs

for his car or daily consumer things. The ‘signified’ no additional stands for the truth of

‘signifier’; moderately it is truth itself. Founded on the connection from signifier to

signified, he has organized his idea of Simulacrum representing a disconnection of

signifier from the signified. Baudrillard Postmodern thought is influenced by the thought

that at the present we are in the area of ‘hyper reality’ somewhere the figure of something

is added factual than truth. Bran Nicol is Professor in Modern and Contemporary

Literature in United Kingdom. By stating Baudrillard in his book, he says that “Virtual

reality is already here, and we all live in it almost every moment of our lives” (Nicol 4).

Science and Media are making an accurate facsimile of the unreal world and
 17

consequently, “the difference between the original and the copy is eliminated” (Nicol 5).

Aside from focus on truth, Postmodernists scrutinize the usefulness of facts.

According to the French theorist Michel Foucault, reality is a relative term and one

can realize reality only though a societal method entitled discourse. Rekha Mirchandani

comments that Foucault “rejects the idea of knowledge and truth and language as neutral,

and instead argues that knowledge is always connected to power: modern discourses that

formalize knowledge, discourses on sexuality, insanity, criminality, and so on, regulate

and control our experiences” (qtd. in Mirchandani 91).

This is not an overstatement to utter that the common man’s life in the Postmodern

era is increasingly motivated by the media, both print and electronic. American theorist

Riesman, in his text entitled The Lonely Crowd, also highlights the supremacy of media

in men exists. In relation to his view, from being ‘inner-directed’, natives in the culture

are turning into ‘other-directed’. Natives are no more led by their ‘adult powers’ or

‘seniors’, moderately they are led by their mass media and peer groups.

French theorist, the well-known Postmodernist James Francois Lyotard studies

mutidisciplinary discourses covering up a mixture of subjects. He criticizes modern

epistemologies and attempts to build up a Postmodern epistemology. He emphasizes the

current situations of the culture like cybernetics, information storage, computer age, data

banks, informatics, and the troubles of conversion from one computer to other.

Mirchandani emphasizes that like Lyotard, Foucault as well assesses “totalizing and

universalizing discourse” and supports “difference and plurality” (Mirchandani 91).

Lyotard sees errors in grand-narratives -- an idea that gives out the foundation of
 18

‘universal truth’, which the modernists seem for defendin any form of facts.

Postmodernists suggest ‘little-narratives’ as an alternative that has ‘use value’ for

particular circumstances. These ‘little-narratives’ can be several in numbers and nothing

can assert to establish or make clear anything.

Modernists recognize universal truth like that of a tree but Postmodernists hold

that truth is like a fungus. Throwing away the tree model Postmodernists suggest a

rhizome model. The rhizome is not having any starting, nor will it have any ending.

These models give to Postmodern thought of “deterritorialization” (Klages166).

Although Postmodern beliefs can be considered as the command of the point in

time, these are not away from criticism. Researchers are also perplexed with the truth,

which whether we have actually gone into a fresh world which can be named as this is

just an extension of the modern era or Postmodern. Some general criticisms of it are

argued at this point.

Critics recognize Postmodernism as a “notoriously slippery and indefinable term”

(Nicol 1). Nicol asserts that “the term became overloaded with meaning, chiefly because

it was being used to describe characteristics of the social and political landscape as well

as a whole range of different examples of cultural production” (Nicol 1).

A good number of readers discover Postmodern literature complex to comprehend.

Apply of colloquial language, methods and complex terminologies and expressions and

vague form of rationalization formulates Postmodern literature more or less complex to a

lot of readers. Postmodernism is not including the essence of anything clear but mostly, it

declines any simplicity or set-up. The fields may be different like literature or
 19

sociological theory, music, art, architecture; inadequate system has developed into the

uniqueness of Postmodernity. However, the complicated characteristics of Postmodernity

construct it weird. In Postmodern era, the arguments and investigations thereby have

turned into further complexes. Now and then, this complication is measured as needless –

“weird for the sake of weird” (Nicol 1).

In many occasions, the Postmodernists emphasize the difficulty without spotting

out any explanation. Most of the people observe that Postmodernism is an assumption

and not a reality. Melford Elliot Spiro is a Cultural Athropologist from America. He says

that the Postmodernist rejection of scientific technique is not persuasive at all. He

opposes with the Postmodernist point saying that the areas correlated to humankind

cannot be named as “scientific” (Spiro 759). Subjectivity functions as a barrier in finding

reality.

Pauline Marie Rosenau has written a comprehensible, objective description of the

diverse, frequently perverse and unclear Postmodernism. Rosenau finds some opposition

in Postmodernism. For instance, the anti-theoretical state of the Postmodernist is nothing

but a theoretical position. Although the Postmodernists concentrate on craziness, they

employ reason in extending their viewpoints. Postmodernists emphasize the changeability

of Modernists thoughts but they themselves rely on changeability by rejecting the codes

of reliability. According to Rosenau, “It cannot be said straightway that if modern criteria

are invalid, there cannot be any other valid criteria of judgment” (Rosenau 15).
 20

Salman Ahmed Shaikh affirms that, “Post Modernity is a period of pessimism

contrasting with modernity's optimism. Post Modernism is a counter enlightenment

philosophy whereas modernism is a pro-enlightenment philosophy” (Shaikh 5).

Even after the vast criticisms and perplexity, the tendency of Postmodernism stays

alive in many fields. That is why the truth that Postmodernism presents a diverse method

to realize societal truth. Although numerous researchers convey distrust on whether we

have actually come in a world that can be named as it is just an extension of the

modernity or Postmodern, the world has changed a lot over the last half a century in

media and technology. People are extremely manipulated by the actions of the media and

thus in their unintentional, a practical world is being fashioned and in many cases they

come across both in the virtual world and the real concurrently. Furthermore, as a result

of this astonishing development of science and technology, technical development is not

having any border. Consequently, mixture many different cultures are becoming a very

common matter. Societal issues and its progress are also getting new shapes.

Unconventional issues are becoming the most common one to the people. This multi-

cultured society is making multi-cultured individuals. Each person is deconstructing

herself/himself in an individual self, according to one’s own pick. Such a multi-cultured

society that belongs to multi-cultured people with diversities in their own selections is

complex to examine. For that reason, the Postmodernists refuse the conventional style of

writing a work.

Postmodernism tries to illustrate the invalidity of any initial, fundamental, type of

reality by disclosing that it is as the product of several other issue Willam Grassie, author
 21

of numerous essays and books states that, the aim of Postmodernism is to illustrate that

the centre is not the centre at all but just another part of the self-referential structure built

by our language. Gene Edward Veith marks this in his book that reminds Derrida’s

statements about the series of centers: “In the past, when one framework for knowledge

was thought to be inadequate, it was replaced by another framework. The goal of

Postmodernism is to do without frameworks for knowledge altogether” (Veith 49).

Postmodernism is known for juxtaposing multiplicity of styles and methods in art.

The desirability to diversity and dissimilarity is division of the Postmodern philosophy; it

is the wish to attack all order-imposing attempts and all totalizing theories claiming

transcendence, as used by diverse institutions and assertive traditions. For this basis, one

of the notions Postmodernism thematizes and attempts to subvert the conventional idea of

the author as a single, original, originating and unique artist. Challenging of the combined

and rational subject is the expression of challenging homogenizing or totalizing

tendencies.

Jonathan Culler is a renowned Professor of English at Cornell University. He is a

renowned figure in Structuralism. According to him, the observation of the ‘self’ as a

conscious subject being the cause of meaning is no longer valid. It is ‘dissolved’ because

“its functions are taken over by a variety of interpersonal systems that operate through it”

(Culler 28). The ‘self’ is observed more as a design, constructed by a variety of systems

and tradition, and thus restricted by the cultural and social contexts in which it appears. If

the ‘self’ is a design, it can merely no longer be measured a basis of meaning. As

 22

Foucault claims, the author is constantly an ideological product composed by particular

operations, reading processes, and a group of discourses.

In the Postmodern premise, the idea of the author as an individual source behind

the literary work is defied. The fact that he or she writes it and creates it is not doubted.

However, it is stated that the work can be written and created only within a particular

method of traditions. Patricia Waugh is a leading theorist of Postmodernism. Waugh

states in her book, “‘Authors do not simply ‘invent’ novels. ‘Authors’ work through

linguistic, artistic and cultural conventions. They are themselves ‘invented’ by readers

who are ‘authors’ working through linguistic, artistic and cultural conventions” (Waugh

134).

In Postmodern conditions, subjectivity can be portrayed through two mingled

thoughts, the structure of the individual by outer contexts, and the individual’s influence

and control upon itself. The structure of, and influences on, the individual are noted

concisely in this course by emeritus Professor Carol Grbich,

In the Postmodern era, individuals are seen as social beings constructed by

the systems or networks they inhabit, but these comprise many socialising

contexts with different meanings and practices and through interaction in

these, individuals become situated, symbolic beings. For example, a person

becomes situated geographically, culturally, sexually, educationally and

with regard to work position as well as in terms of sport and other interests.

But in each of these contexts another facet of personality is called on to be

creatively structured in situ and added to as other contexts impinge. The

 23

individual has creative reflexive capacities and can control the impact of the

ideology of each social context, incorporating aspects that he/she is most

comfortable with in an ongoing and changing manner (Grbich 21).

This passage makes it obvious that the traditionally, socially and culturally

constructed individual is not only a multi-situated representative being, but also has the

reflexive ability to control a variety of influences. Additionally, the individual is not

multi-situated in any predetermined sense, rather changeable as she/he shifts from state to

condition and from moment to moment, picking up, resisting and discarding influences.

In Postmodernism, subjectivity then is neither predetermined nor singular, but is

observed as fluid, changing, alterable, various selves in a constant state of instability and

transform according to the various influences, situations, moments, and choices.

Postmodernism successfully downgrades the author as the all significant authority

figure and as such, the importance of the readers’ own understanding of the text becomes

heightened. Therefore, there is a transfer of power from the modernist vision of the

author having privileged knowledge, to a more equitable balance of power where the

Postmodern author distinguishes that their offering is taken up by readers and through

multiple readings. Stuart Sim is a literary, social and critical theorist. He is known for his

researches on Postmodernism and Poststructuralism. He states that the decline in

authority of the author has been coined by Roland Barthes as the “death of the author”

(Sim 187) in his book The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. The author forgoes

the privileged entry to the meaning of the text, and the reader then turns into the creator

of the meaning. As Nealon, Jeffrey T. and Giroux, Susan Searls explain,

 24

The question we ask of the text is no longer, ‘what did the author really

mean?’ but rather ‘how does this text produce meanings?’ Certainly one of

the ways a text can produce meanings is by reading it through a lens of its

autobiographical, historical, and cultural contexts; and obviously authorship

and the author’s inventions are helpful with such an inquiry. But theory

(and its use-value, its necessity) begins in the freeing up of meaning from

the iron grasp of the author. Meaning is always more slippery and multiple

than any given author’s intention (Nealon and Giroux 18).

The objective of the author in Postmodern terms is to facilitate the development of

an open text that keeps away from one interpretation and favors several interpretations. In

terms of Postmodern research, Carol Grbich explains,

The author is now seen as writing from a shifting network of places, and

the various texts […] that […] she has access to as data link to these places.

The researcher can be viewed either as a juggler playing with many balls --

theories, contexts, concepts, events and signs which are drawn together as

one temporary entity in an attempt to illuminate various aspects of a

research question -- or as an interpreter who presents the opinions and is

involved in the debate regarding these (Grbich 68).

According to Mats Alvesson and Kaj Sköldberg, Postmodern research opposes

endeavors that form a decisive point, a neat conclusion, or any final outcome. To quote

their words, “the idea is to strive for multiplicity, variation, the demonstration of

inconsistencies and fragmentations, and the possibility of multiple interpretations”

 25

(Alvesson and Sköldberg 152). Postmodern research finds to deconstruct and challenge

modernist rules. The Postmodernists will claim that puzzles and to be playful is part of a

theoretical critique. Nealon and Giroux have clarified their threads of similarity, “There

seems to be a certain sense of style shared by many of the things labeled “Postmodern”, a

sense of disjunction, or deliberate confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a kind of

cool detachment, a deliberate foregrounding of constructedness, a suspicion concerning

neat or easy conclusions” (Nealon and Giroux 126).

The resistance to conclude Postmodern research allows for multiple readings and a

highlight more on progression than results. This open-endedness is also observed as the

decentring of the author who has ‘handed over’ the production of meaning to the reader.

Postmodern study recognizes ambiguity and possibility as changing certainty and

inevitability. Grbich classifies that, “Objectivity, certainty, legitimation and predictability

are not sought. In place of these, doubt, chaotic possibilities, complex, interconnected

systems, multiple selves and multiple critiques of findings in the transformative process,

replace linearity, rationalism, closure and simple hierarchies” (Grbich 52).

It would not be out of place to quote, Peter Barry here, wherein he ascertains the

roles of the Postmodern critics,

• They discover postmodernist themes, tendencies, and attitudes within

literary works of the twentieth century and explore their implications.

• They foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify the notion of the

'disappearance of the real', in which shifting postmodern identities are seen,

 26

for example, in the mixing of literary genres (the thriller, the detective

story, the myth saga, and the realist psychological novel, etc.).

• They foreground what might be called ‘intertextual elements’ in literature,

such as parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all of which there is a major

degree of reference between one text and another, rather than between the

text and a safely external reality.

• They foreground irony, in the sense described by Umberto Eco, that

whereas the modernist tries to destroy the past, the postmodernist realises

that the past must be revisited, but 'with irony' (Modernism/

Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker, p. 227).

• They foreground the element of ‘narcissism’ in narrative technique, that is,

where novels focus on and debate their own ends and processes, and

thereby 'de-naturalise' their content.

• They challenge the distinction between high and low culture, and highlight

texts which work as hybrid blends of the two (Barry 87-88).

The researcher would like to highlight some of the popular tenets of

Postmodernism:

• Postmodernism rejects objective knowledge.

• Postmodernism grants licenses to choose one’s own sexual identity.

• Postmodernism views that scientific growths lead to industrial advancement

causing harms to humanity in the form of environmental disaster.

 27

• Postmodernism emphasize that “[…] there is no totalizing explanatory model and

no universally valid verification procedure” (Preda 11867).

• Postmoderism attacks the thought of objectivity in societal study, “an autonomous

rational mind, and grand narratives (grand theorizing)” (Delaney 263).

• In Postmodernism, there is no absolute truth.

• Postmodernism considers truth is a mere illusion.

• Postmodernism ignores binary oppositions.

• Postmodernism encourages multiculturalism.

• Postmodern civilization is getting styled by media. As a result, our beliefs have

developed into ‘hyper real’.

• Postmodern writers tend to employ sarcasm and black humour in their works.

They produce subject matters, even the serious ones, with playfulness and

fragmentation. Intertexuality in a work of art is a common one in this period.

Temporal distortion Pastiche, minimalism, metafiction etc. are the salient

characters of Postmodern literary works. Furthermore, deconstructing of order is

an ordinary style in their texts.

• Postmodernists attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local

contexts as well as the diversity of human experience.

• In Postmodernism, moral relativism is based on feelings. And it gives space to

create one’s own values.

• Postmodernism sanctions humans to select their own identity and sexuality.

 28

• In Postmodernism, there is no correct or incorrect, good and bad lifestyle

excluding those established upon.

• Postmodernism celebrates a diversity of Postmodern spirituality.

• Postmodernism agrees rejects biblical truth.

• Postmodernists assert that the concept of truth is a contrived illusion, misused by

people and special interest groups to gain power over others.

• Postmodernists speak out against the constraints of religious morals and secular

authority. According to them, traditional authority is false and corrupt.

• Postmodernists speak internationalism instead of speaking nationalism. They

assert that nationalism lead to wars.

• Postmodernists are open-minded for framing their ethics.

• Postmodernists protect the reason of feminists, homosexuals and transgender.

• Postmodernists worship “Mother Earth”.

• Postmodernists are pro-environmentalists.

These kinds of tendencies have stimulated the researcher to read the contemporary

select Postmodern Indian texts in Postmodern perspectives. The researcher has taken up

three novels from three contemporary Indian Postmodern novelists for his thesis. The

three novels are i) Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) ii) Manju Kapur’s A

Married Woman (2002) and iii) Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). Some of the

Postmodern issues listed down in the first section of the thesis find their place in all these
 29

works. The researcher has made an earnest attempt to explore these novels using some of

the ideas propounded by Postmodernists.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) is without doubt a Postmodern

feminist text. An avowed feminist has written it. The novelist deconstructs a good

number of established notions, communal, cultural and political constructs in the novel.

Ammu, the higher caste pretty damsel violently breaks away from her husband and seeks

a paramour from a local Dalit community very much to the chagrin of her kith and kin.

She violates the communal code of conduct and becomes a rebel. Her daughter Rahel is

also evolving into a rebel like her mother. There are also gory details of pedophilia

involving the Orange Drink and Lemon Drink Uncle and Estha in the local theatre. The

novel also hints at forbidden love in the family of Ammu.

In Postmodern times, Feminism and Postmodernism are blood-cousins. Feminists

have shown how enlightenment discourses generalize western, white, middle male

understanding and have thus exposed the buried strategies of domination implicit in the

ideal of the objective knowledge. Feminism has proved that sexual category is not a

consequence of anatomy and that societal establishments do not mirror universal truths

about human nature.

In her novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy dismantles conventional

structure about women and reveals that women can act an equivalent role with men, only

if they get a distinct tone of their own and learn to go beyond the conventional obstacles

of their silent space. Indian society is all turned upon to abuse a woman as morally wrong

when there is even a small variation from the conventional ways of behavior.
 30

Manju Kapur’s second novel, A Married Woman (2002), is portrayed in the

backdrop of Babri Masjid demolition and the resulting communal violence in India in

1992. It reveals the issues of a middle-class woman from Delhi caught in a dejected

marriage. The central focus of Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is marital discord,

rejection and the resulting lesbian sex, which is a Postmodern issue

The White Tiger is a first novel by the Indian writer Aravind Adiga. It was first

published in 2008 and received the Man Booker Prize in that year itself. The novel

focuses the contrast between India’s growth as a modern economy and the protagonist,

Balram Halwai comes from a rural part of India and dreams to live like a man by

violently altering his situation and settles in the tech-savvy city Bangalore. Aravind

Adiga’s text The White Tiger is a typical Postmodern text as it deals with the murky

journey of a chauffeur from his low origin to a popular entrepreneur living under a

luxurious chandelier. Only Postmodernism gives sanction to such a sinister event. The

novel gives the reader a glimpse of the possibilities of contemporary fiction as much as it

rattles the reader and pushes him to an uncomfortable place where unusual events stare at

him stark naked.

Postmodernist thinkers invariably describe themselves as anti-essentialists. This

means that they reject out-rightly of the notion that there is an essence to phenomena

such as truth, meaning, self or identity. Time-tested values and ideas are derided at in the

novel on Postmodern lines.

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Objectives of the Thesis:

The objectives of the thesis are to make an earnest attempt to find out how these

Postmodern writers have captured the very essence of Postmodern tendencies prevalent

in the contemporary world and how effectively they use them in their fiction with their

keen observation. The time-tested definition of literature that literature is the reflection of

life holds good even in Postmodern times.

The researcher intends to read the select texts in Postmodern perspective. The

major Postmodern perception of the texts varies from one to another. Accordingly, the

objectives of the thesis stand as follow,

• To figure out the select texts are Postmodern in its content

• To state Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a Postmodern Feminist

Work

• To identify the Postmodern issues in The God of Small Things

• To state Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is a Postmodern Feminist Work

• To state lesbianism is a part of transgression from the heteronormative life and

stating that going away from heteronormativeness itself is a Postmodern

• To identify the ethical and moral breaks up of Balram, the protagonist of Aravind

Adiga’s The White Tiger in Postmodern perspective

• To anchor that subaltern can also speak in The White Tiger

• To identify the Postmodern narratives of the select texts.

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CHAPTER II

Issues of Postmodernism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Literature Review:

Studying previous literature is very much important for any type of research.

Hereby the researcher has listed down some of the works related to this text as follows,

Jonathan Collins in his article “Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things As

Postmodern Novel” sums up that, Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things as a

postmodern, postcolonial novel works on many levels and can be read in different ways.

He points out intertextual elements of the text but no detail study has been done on it.

Sheeba in her article on “Feminism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”

states that the text is in feministic perspective. She argues that Ammu “is like a free bird

that wants to fly freely in the open skies. But all of a sudden, her wings are cut down by

the callous society and thus she is pulled down to this earth where she has to ‘grovel in

the lowly dust’” (Sheeba 24). That is how; she portrays the sufferings of the protagonist

Ammu.

Chan Wing Yi Monica’s thesis deals with the Stylistic Approach of Arundhati

Roy’s The God of Small Thing. This thesis focuses “a creative-analytical hybrid

production in relation to the stylistic distinctiveness in The God of Small Things”

(Monica 4). Therefore, it finds out a deeper understanding of the relationship between

style and literary aesthetics in The God of Small Things by studying the stylistic patterns

behind Roy’s resonating poetic prose.

 33

Kunjo Singh’s article “Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Study in the

Modernist Perspective” focuses on the use of metaphors, similes, puns, synecdoche,

personification, oxymoron, paradox, irony, alliteration, end-focus, antithesis, parallelism,

anaphora etc. These are all the narrative devices mostly used by postmodernists. The

author concludes that, “Roy has used a highly individualized style to make a universe

where small is beautiful in this world” (Singh 273)

Debaditya Chakraborty and Ishita Ghosh’s article deals with the intertextual

elements in the text. Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality is a popular narrative device in

Postmodernism. Their article states that Roy has “interplayed with other texts, to exhibit

attitudes of acceptance, resistance and transportation to the other texts, and to make the

readers take cognizance of many irreconciliations with the other texts” (Chakraborty and

Ghosh 84).

Problem Statement:

There are numerous scholarly articles published in Arundhati Roy’s The God of

Small Things but only a few articles are related to Postmodern issues. However, those

articles are not covering all the Postmodern issues. The articles are very specific by

focusing particular Postmodern issue instead covering the all dimensions of

Postmodernsim. In some cases, it does not narrow down to the Postmodern contexts.

Thus, it leads to the research gap in this area. Based on the above literature review it

proves that, each study focuses particular issue as stated. Therefore, the research gap is

very clear in this study. The problem statement and the significance of this study are to

figure out the possible number of Postmodern issues in this text.

 34

Research Questions:

Research Questions or Hypothesis of this part of the thesis goes as follow,

Is there a significant impact of Feminism in the text?

Is there Historiography, a Postmodern term, in the text?

Is there Deconstruction, a Postmodern term, by dismantling age old customs of Syrian

Christian family in the text?

Is there Metafiction, a Postmodern term, to identify in the text?

Is there Intertextuality, a Postmodern term, to identify in the text?

Is there Pro-environmentalism, a Postmodern term, to identify in the text?

Is there breaking from Grand narrative to Little narrative?

Research Methodology:

Research methodology of this part of the thesis can be carried out by the

application of Postmodern theories which are propounded by the postmodernists. It is

also bridging the gap between the previous researches and research questions raised in

this part of the thesis. A careful and systematic analysis backed with the suitable evidence

of the text in Postmodern perspective will be carried out.

Analysis and Interpretation:

Arundhathi Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) is without doubt a Postmodern

feminist text. A known feminist has written it. Just as a Postmodern text truly reflects,

Roy’s text does not bring before the audience a master narrative, but “little events,

ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they

became the bleached bones of a story” (Roy 32-33). There are hundreds of small things in
 35

the novel. One of the events that the novel talks about is the little plan that Ammu hatches

to runs away from Ayemenem and the clutches of her bad-tempered father and the harsh

long-suffering mother is to let her Pappachi agree “to let her spend the summer with a

distant aunt who lived in Calcutta” (Roy 39). In Calcutta, she meets her future husband at

a marriage reception. Another small thing is the wedding of Ammu. She realizes after a

few days of her marriage that the “slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom’s eyes had

not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight

large pegs of whisky. Straight. Neat” (Roy 39). Another small thing is Ammu’s smoking

cigarettes. She smokes, after her marriage, “long cigarettes in a silver cigarette holder and

learned to blow perfect smoke rings” (Roy 40). Another small thing that she learns to her

chagrin is that her husband turns out to be “not just a heavy drinker but a full-blown

alcoholic with all of an alcoholic’s deviousness and tragic charm” (Roy 40). Other small

things that put her into a worrying person are the series of lies that he tells her time in and

time out. There is no need to tell blatant lies so outrageously; yet he revels in them. In his

conversation with his friends, he would say that he loves smoked salmon; but in reality,

Ammu knows that he hates it. Soon after his return from the club, he would tell Ammu

that he saw Meet Me in St. Louis; but they would have screened The Bronze Buckaroo.

Whenever the exasperated Ammu would bring such lapses to his knowledge, he would

just giggle.

Arundhati Roy’s award winning novel The God of Small Things portrays a present-

day India that could be covered adequately by Postmodern theoretical inputs. The text in
 36

reference is not a master narrative. It does not preach any power-packed messages like

Socialism, Communism, Capitalism or any ism. It is a little narrative, where some

communal practices and belief systems are displayed with fictional interest. The belief

that the Malayalee Syrian Christian male is always right and could give a good leadership

to the family takes a back seat.

Postmodern writing cancels history only to write it differently. It undoes the

linearity of time and places itself at an ‘after’ modern place in the history of writing. It

would be interesting to see ‘the East India Company’ in reverse in The God of Small

Things. The novelist presents her story, the story of Ammu as history and to quote her

words, “History in live performance” (Roy 309). The novel does not so much present a

correct regional history, because to the novelist, history is always tricky; rather, it is the

history of small things, the marginalized people like women, children and untouchables.

The characters of this history are “trapped outside their own history” (Roy 52). They

develop, nevertheless, “a sense of historical perspective” (Roy 53).In her Postmodernistic

treatment of history, Roy regards it as an awful burden which has its own cruel ways of

dealing with those who refuse to be “caught off guard” (Roy 176) and sloughing off like

“an old snake-skin” (Roy 176).

The God of Small Things is an exercise in making a couple of histories, one

official and the other interpretive, ensuing from the writer’s sensitization to the truths of

day by day life. So for an agreed politics there is yet one more parallel politics, and for

one particular narrative there exists a counter narrative.

 37

The novel opens with a sentence that is paradoxical: “May in Ayemenem is a hot,

brooding month” (Roy 01). Ayemenem is an imaginary town like R. K. Narayan’s

Malgudi. Most of the action of the story takes place here. Roy uses the term “brooding”

because inmates of Ayemenem may not find sleep as May is very warm and produces a

lot of sweat. People may lie on the cot but they may not find sleep, and so ‘brooding’,

mostly on emptiness. The first character who appears on the scene is Rahel; she has come

to her grandma’s house for a purpose. But there is no joy, no fellowship and no reception

waiting for her. It is a Postmodern dry place and in the author’s words, “The house itself

looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare.

Unfurnished. But the skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and

inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive” (Roy 02). Rahel hasn’t come to look her, though.

Neither niece nor baby grandaunt laboured under any illusion on that account. Rahel has

come to see her brother, Estha. As the text says, “They were two-egg twins. ‘Dizygotic’

doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha—

Esthappen was the older by eighteen minutes” (Roy 02).

In the modern era, until 1960’s, grand children are welcome in the households of

grandmas. But in Postmodern times, this is not to be. The text says, “She has no right

here” (Roy 02).

Roy never minces words, as she is a Postmodernist, in describing the birthing of

the twins in a crowded public transport bus; she is brutal in her expression just as any

Postmodern Feminist:
 38

They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba,

their father, was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have

them, broke down on the winding tea-estate road in Assam. They

abandoned the car and flagged down a crowded State Transport bus. With

the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off, or

perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated

passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha

and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them in it) to

prevent it from wobbling (Roy 03).

Roy’s text brings out a flood of memories of the characters across their minds and

they relive them. One of them is the funeral service of Sophie Mol, daughter of Margaret

Kochamma, Sophie Mol’s English mother and Chacko, Sophie mol’s biological father.

Both of them stand alienated. They wouldn’t touch each other. There is no love in their

relationship, just a convenient companionship, and as Heidegger shows, a mere

‘Temporality’, a Postmodern tendency. There is no scope for any authenticity in their

kinship. Both drift apart, which is just a Postmodern tendency. Roy describes the funeral

service with an absurd incident:

During the funeral service, Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby

Kochamma’s expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws.

When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of

sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with
 39

her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a “Whatisit? Whathappened?” and

for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping (Roy 06).

Just as the present researcher, Archana Bhattacharjee too considers Roy’s text as a

Postmodern text. In her article, “Indian Societal Values: A Study of Arundhati Roy’s

‘The God of Small Things’ from Post Modernism Perspective”, Bhattacharjee says,

The novel is a critique of the “grand values” big things governing the

Indian society and mentality. What Jean Francois Lyotard, the French

philosopher and literary theorist considered to be a mark of Postmodernism

was that all values become debate topics and the ones who are likely to win

and legitimate their viewpoints are likely to be those detaining power, be it

financial or State-granted. The significant feature about Roy’s novel is that

although characters like twins Estha and Rahel or Velutha and Ammu do

seem to possess a Postmodern perspective on issues that are generally

considered of high value by the Indian society and the caste system, since

their actions fall into the realm of sin, proving their affinity for “small

things” rather than the generally accepted grand ones. Those who are in

power can have the final word -- like in the case of Velutha’s condemnation

to death ultimately for nothing but having an affair with Ammu

(Bhattacharjee 2).

One of the prominent issues of Postmodernism is painting human emotions with a

raw and blunt brush. The novelist faithfully does it in her text. Monks, especially

Christian Jesuits do not normally give in to carnal desires. In Modernism, there are
 40

barriers that distinctly say that Catholic monks and priests have to keep themselves away

from bodily pleasures, especially sex. They are taught that sex is a sin and should be

avoided at all counts. In Postmodern texts, such forbidden issues are resurrected and

shown in bright colours. In Roy’s text, a teen-aged Baby Kochamma falls in love with a

handsome and youthful Irish monk, Father Mulligan. He is in Kerala at that time on

deputation. Roy sarcastically says, “He was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able

to denounce them intelligently” (Roy 22).

The usual practice of every human being is to live his or her life forward. But

Baby Kochamma in the novel is living her life backwards. It is not only Rahel’s

observation, but the reader’s observation as well. The novel says, “As a young woman

she had renounced the material world, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it.

She hugged it and it hugged her back” (Roy 22).

In Postmodern times, the woman buries her feminine modesty and takes the lead

rather than the male in instigating sex instincts in to the other. Baby Kochamma as a teen-

aged girl does it quite promptly. She hovers around the dining table, where Father

Mulligan eats and she serves him with many delicacy items and waits there patiently to

exchange glances with the Father under the pretext of clearing the table. By her fixed

looks and tempting smiles, she infuses sexual excitement in the ordained Jesuit priest.

The priest is expected to keep himself away from any carnal desires. The Creation myth

in the Garden of Eden is reenacted here. It may be remembered here that it is Satan who

puts in sexual passion into the early humans. Roy puts it rather bluntly, “[…] Baby

Kochamma tried to seduce Father Mulligan with weekly exhibitions of staged charity”
 41

(Roy 23). She would sometimes force-bathe a little street urchin to show off her

community service propensities to the Father. Sometimes, she would ask a doubt in the

Bible. Father Mulligan would be pleased by the emotion he arouses in “the attractive

young girl who stood before him with a trembling, kissable mouth and blazing, coal-

black eyes” (Roy 23). Both of them have been under the strong pull of sexual passion and

they bear the vagaries of nature with equanimity. The novelist captures their passion in

her poignant style: “Every Thursday, undaunted by the merciless midday sun, they would

stand there by the well. The young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with

unchristian passion. Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other” (Roy 24).

In Postmodern times, Roy’s text shows that the unthinkable would become

thinkable and the impossible would become possible. Even though there are community

injunctions established thousands of years ago as to “Who should be loved, and how, and

how much” (Roy 33), the novelist shows how the characters break free all the invisible

chains that invisibly wield a sway over them.

‘Transgression of boundaries’ is another significant feature of Postmodernism. The

God of Small Things is preeminently an influential protest novel. It is, as the novelist

herself says, a novel about transgressions. All kinds of limitations are transgressed upon.

The children, as we have seen, do not accept what we think as adult boundaries. Ammu

and Velutha are broken because they try to break away from taboos and convention

established by the domineering society thousands of years ago. As Roy says, “[…] long

before Christianity came in a boat and seeped in Kerala like tea from a tea bag […] in the

days when the ‘Love Laws’ were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved and
 42

how. And how much” (Roy 33). The world they weave around themselves is, according

to Aijaz Ahmed, “a close fatalistic world at the heart of individual choice, deaths foretold

on the laws of public ecstasy” (Ahmed 79). The younger generation transgresses the laws

regarding incest and all that is “like a normal family” (Roy 79). They liberally tamper

laws that make “grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins

cousins, jam jam and jelly jelly” (Roy 31). In an interview with Alex Wilbur, Arundhati

Roy states that the novel “is not about history but about biology and transgression”

(Wilbur 47).

The novel portrays the story of transgression of boundaries. Rahel remarks

“Perhaps, Ammu, Esatha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. It

was the other too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They

all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much”

(Roy 31). Chacko, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford falls in love with Margarat and marries her

and is betrayed when she chooses to leave him and marry another Englishman. Baby

Kochamma falls in love with father Mulligan and disobeys her father’s desires and

becomes a Roman Catholic. By means of special permission from the Vatican she takes

her swears and enters a convent in Madras as a beginner hoping this will give her with

genuine time to be with the father. She feels betrayed when she uncovers that the senior

sisters monopolizes the priests and Bishops with biblical doubts more complicated than

hers and has to return home disappointed.

Roy’s text brings to the suface the absurd practices of the Orthodox Syrian

Christian families in Kerala. Since Ammu’s father does not have sufficient money to give
 43

a suitable dowry, Ammu does not get any marriage proposal. To runs away from the

authority of her bad-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother, Ammu chooses to

marry an Assistant Manager of a tea estate in Assam against the wishes of her parents.

She is traumatized when she discovers him to be “not just a heavy drinker but a full–

blown alcoholic with all of an alcoholic’s deviousness and tragic charm” (Roy 40). When

he complies with his English Manager’s suggestion of having Ammu sent to his

Bangalow to be “looked after” (Roy42), Ammu comes out from her husband and returns,

unwelcomed by her parents in Ayemenem .With her children she has to return to all that

she has fled from couple of years ago. Ammu as a daughter has no share over the assets

and Chacko makes it a point to remind the twins that their mother has “no locusts stand I”

(Roy 57).

Freed from wedlock, Ammu feels like a free bird. She moves to an “Unsafe Edge”

(Roy 44). She does an uncommon thing. Ammu’s transgression has severe consequences:

her love for Velutha leads to Sophie Mol’s death and later to the death of Velutha at the

hands of the cruel police custody. The mother at night and the twins in the day go to see

Velutha, whom they are not permitted to love. As irony will have it, Estha and Rahel

betray the man, the only man who has genuine love for them. They innocently become

responsible for the brutal murder of Velutha, the god of small things. They learn as the

text shows, “how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break

its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.

History’s smell, like old roses on a breeze” (Roy 55). Estha has gazed into that much-

loved face and says “yes, it was him” (Roy 32) and this betrayal has left an immortal
 44

wound in his mind Estha “Carried inside him the memory of a young man with an old

man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a smashed, upside, down smile” (Roy

32). The cruel treatment is meted out to Velutha as a punishment for his transgression.

The Trade Union marches, Communist slogans, frightful Naxalite activities, the

cruel suppression enforced by the establishment and the brutal police force – all point to

the political milieu. Comrade KVM. Pillai is a usual Marxist leader flourishing with his

corrupted political moves and the most touching expression of the communal divide is

shown in two actions, Pillai betraying Velutha initially and later exploiting his death to

kindle the workers to strike work leading to the eventual closure of the factory.

The Ayemenem house performs as a microcosm of the unhealthy society of the

day with its power hungry and self-centered leaders exploiting the helpless and the poor

pitilessly. The twins and their mother demonstrate to be easy victims to the manipulations

of the arrogant and merciless elders like Baby Kochamma, on the pretext of protecting

the family name, they act tactlessly and the horrible consequences are the woes inflicted

on the weak twins and their mother. The ethical code is twisted according to convenience

and the elaborate falsehood continue by the elders are nothing but domination and

hypocrisy in a cultured and polished form. The false charge of attempted seduction and

kidnapping of the children reported by baby Kochamma against Velutha has resulted in

the death of the Dalit carpenter in police custody.In order to save her skin Baby

Kochamma contrives the disjointing of the mother and the twins, driving out Ammu from

home and arranging for Estha’s homecoming to his father in Calcutta. The disjointing of

the twins from the mother and from each other has left Rahel empty and Estha quiet. The
 45

emptiness revealed in the eyes of Rahel is only an account of the quietness is Estha.

When they come together at the age of 31 the sorrow they have endured is so agonizing

that they transgress the usual limits and they once again smash the ‘love-laws’; the ‘love-

laws’ that lay down who should be loved, how and how much. Estha discovers the long

lost mother in Rahel. He sees in Rahel “their beautiful mother’s mouth” (Roy 300). The

scene conveys to their mind the memory of the days of their guiltless love and pleasure.

There is no vivid portrayal of sexuality in the pages describing their emotional union.

The unsure approach of the hybrid race is brought out vividly when Chacko, the

Rhodes Scholar makes clear to the twins how they, being anglophiles, cannot go inside

the History House,

Because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the

windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear

is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering because our

minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The

very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A

war that has made us adores our conquerors and despises ourselves (Roy

53).

Besides the History House, the Pickle Factory gives out as a metaphor illuminating the

hanging condition of the hybrid class belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. The food

products organization bans the banana jam, as it is neither jam nor jelly according to their

specifications. They find it “too thin for jelly and too thick for jam, an ambiguous,

unclassifiable consistency” (Roy 30). Rahel at 31, looking back and understands that
 46

“this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the Jam-

jelly question” (Roy 30-31).

Soon Ammu becomes a victim of paranoia. It is one of the Postmodern Issues.

Paranoia is a thinking process assumed to be deeply influenced by worry or anxiety,

frequently to the point of ‘illusion’ and ‘illogicality’. Paranoid thoughts usually

comprises persecutory, or attitude of conspiracy about a alleged threat towards oneself.

She begets her twins—Astha and Rahel. Her Husband’s alcoholism goes unabated. Her

boss Hollick calls him one day and reprimands him but he also suggests a means by

which he can continue his job. The proposal is a strange one. Hollick wants him to go on

leave for a few days leaving his attractive wife in Hollick’s bungalow. In other word

Ammu has to sleep with Hollick. When Ammu comes to know from his own husband’s

mouth, she thinks that the whole world is conspiring against her. Her husband threatens

her with dire consequences and he even beats her all over her body. Feeling paranoiac,

she pulls out the heaviest book from shelf and beats him blue and black. Ammu’s

husband falls unconscious. She takes her two babies and leaves Calcutta for Ayemenem.

She is unwelcome there. Some of her relatives are not ready to believe her story. To them

it is incomprehensible that an English man will ever commit any such heinous crime.

That Arundhati Roy has used emplotment is amply evident in many places of the

text. Emplotment is a term first used by Hayden White in his 1973 text Metahistory to

explain the way in which historians inevitably style their sources into narrative.

Historiography, White argues, encodes historical information, “which themselves do not

constitute a story, into one of four possible intelligible plot types: tragic, comic, romantic
 47

or ironic. A single historical event –the French Revolution for instance—will be

emplotted in different ways to produce different interpretation” (qtd. in Cuddon and

Habib 233). Intruding into the story, Arundhati Roy not only makes a dig at the Marxist

leaders of Kerala, but the grand narrative Marxism itself. Dwelling at length on the

popularity of Marxism in Kerala, she observes, “Marxism was a simple substitute for

Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie and Heaven with a

classless society the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey

remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end” (Roy 66). Dismissing a

couple of theories regarding the popularity of Marxism in the state, she shares her view,

The real secret was that Communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a

reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a

caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from

within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not

to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism

and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy (Roy 66-67).

Roy does not spare the Communist party leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “the

flamboyant Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala” (Roy 67). The evils that spread in

the state took place under his very nose; the split of the Communist Party into

Communist Party and Communist (Marxism) and the violent offshoot of the party, the

Naxalite Movement supported by China have been attributed to the Namboodiripad

government. A good number of Keralite elites too supported the Marxist party. In the

novel, the western educated Chacko too supported E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s regime.

 48

The peaceful transition of power from the rich to the poor so that everyone will be poor

in the state took a violent turn when the Naxalite infiltrators took the violent course.

Chapter 5 in Roy’s text, ‘God’s Own Country’, has possibilities for content

analyses. Let the researcher first try to examine a few illustrations taken from some

random lines and try to interpret their signified meanings:

Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built; in exchange for votes from

the influential paddy-farmer lobby […] Comrade E.M.S. Namboodiripad,

‘Kerala’s Mao –Tse-tung,’ […] History and literature enlisted by

commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests […]

smash the windscreen of a car that dated to venture out on the day of an

opposition bandh […] comrade K.N.M. Pillai’s son, Lenin […] in order to

allay any fears his [Lenins’s] clients might have about his political leanings,

he had altered his name slightly […] ‘Oower, oower, oower. In America

now, isn’t it’. It wasn’t a question. It was sheer admiration […] It occurred

to Comrade Pillai that this generation was perhaps paying for its

forefather’s bourgeois decadence […] perhaps this was the real revolution.

The Christian bourgeoisie had begun to self destruct […] It was curious

how politics lurked in what children chose to stuff up their noses (Roy124-

132).

As in opposition to such a fascinating background, let us go back to the

‘mainstream’ literature to discover what do these have in store for our research. Tarimela

Nagi Reddy, himself a Communist, has written about a “custody death” (Roy 314) during
 49

the “benign rule of Achuta Menon, the Chief of Kerala Communist Party(Revisionist)

[…] the revisionist-led government, as all other governments of other states, condoned

this savagery” (Reddy 357).

Thomas Johnson Nossiter is a Professor. He has written the book Communism in

Kerala A Study in Political Adaptation. He has portrayed Kerala as ‘India’s problem

state’; nonetheless, he argues,

Probably the most lasting contribution made by the Communist movement

in Kerala is its politicization and mobilization of the property less and

underprivileged. The 1987-89 government in particular did much to liberate

the poor and free the society from the tyranny of caste and Communalism

[…] At the same time it must be conceded that the beneficiaries of

Communist rule have been the peasants (in part by the design) not the

labourers and (unintentionally) the government employees not the workers

in the traditional cottage industry sector such as coir, whose condition has

changed little since 1945 (Nossiter 371-372).

Partha Chatterjee is an honorary Professor of Political Science. He has written a

lot about the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Howsoever a government

claim that it is a people-friendly government, there is invariably a pretty good distance

between the administrators and the people. As Roy shows in her text that the

Namboodiripad administration is not friendly to the women, the working class and the

Dalit, Partha Chatterjee observes,

 50

Indeed, it is precisely this perceptual distance which, when favourable

structural conditions prevail in the organized world of struggle between

sections of the ruling classes, creates room for the manipulative operations

of populist politics and charismatic politicians […] But whatever the

variations in the specific social constitution of a peasant community, and

hence of the specific set of cultural symbols and beliefs surrounding the

relation of the community with feudal or bureaucratic state authority, when

a community acts collectively the fundamental political characteristics are

the same everywhere […] It is the nature of the linkage of peasant –

communal politics of this kind the structure of organized politics which

designates one movement as ‘Gandhian’, the other ‘terrorist’ and still

another ‘communalist’ (Chatterjee 9-38).

The researcher finds this ‘perceptual distance’ (conceptually formulated by Partha

Chatterjee) quite interesting as it leans to increasingly draw us to the predictable end that

the Indians before and at Independence were simply the ‘other’ that was not at all kindly

integrated into the principal set-up of the elite-determined Indian national liberal

movement or even the progression of building up of the Indian state-nation. This

distance is authentic in terms of daily politics and is perceived in the sense of being

dispossessed, even marginalized from the significant process of decision-making the

ultimately formed the future of the Indian polity.

Paul Richard Brass is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International

Relations. He has studied the Indian subcontinent. He has published numerous books on
 51

the politics of India. He also confirms Nossiter’s findings, at least partially, and has

observed that “when they [the landless low castes] attempt to mobilize for political

agitations for higher wages against the landed castes, however, they generally meet

strong resistance and their movements usually fail except in […] Kerala […] at times

when the ruling Communist parties there support their demands” (Brass 308).

Namboodiripad is induced that the ruling left and Democratic Front is an

understanding of the Leftist, democratic secular and federal political forces. In Roy’s

text, state politics and family co-mingle and is difficult to separate. In chapter 14, ‘Work

is Struggle’; for instance, we read,

Struggle is work […] framed photograph of comrade Pillai garlanding

Comrade E.M.S.Namboodiripad […] A jeep with a loudspeaker drove past,

blaring a Marxist Party song whose theme was unemployment […] The

more people that more seen waiting to meet him [Cormrade Pillai], the

busier he would appear, the better the impression he would make […] his

straitened circumstance […] gave him a power over Chacko that in those

revolutionary times no amount of Oxford education could match. He held

his poverty like a gun to Chacko’s […] head Questions signified a vulgar

display of ignorance […] ‘Until then, struggle must continue’ […] trying to

speak in the same idiom […] ‘Party worker’ […] sly, misguided collusion

[…] ‘these caste issues are very deep-rooted’ […] It is a conditioning they

[the Paravans ] have from birth […] for Masses it is something different

[…] ‘it is a shameful matter for them [the workers]not to be unionized and
 52

join the Party struggle’ […] ‘They must launch their own struggle’.

‘Revolution is not a dinner party’ […] he (Comrade Pillai) deftly banished

Chacko from the fighting ranks […] to the treacherous ranks […] Comic

book adversaries in a still-to-come war […] (Caste is Class, comrades’) the

People’s War joined the racks of broken airplanes […] ‘Party was not

constituted to support workers’ indiscipline in their private life’(Roy 268-

287).

Arundhati Roy has continued a certain type of irony all through her text, and this

feature of her craftsmanship characterizes this narrative’s inner identity of thoughts.

Whenever she uses the term Comrade, either to ascribe EMS or Pillai and the like, what

she really aims is mockery that is enclosed in a phrase indicative of the politics of

language. Roy will also like us to sense that Chacko ‘believed’ in politics while Pillai

‘used’ it; only then are we permitted to sketch our own assumptions concerning these

characters, keeping in mind the different ‘days and works ‘of men.

The Keralite politicians’ labeling Kerala as ‘The God’s Own Country’ is torn to

pieces in Arundhati Roy’s hands. The multifarious small incidents she writes about show

every piece of ugliness that besets Kerala. Roy’s version of history and the type of

historiography we get in non-literary sources are not quite reciprocally elite. Possibly

that is everything that can be viewed about the different periodic actions of ‘time’

the researcher is concerned with in this part of thesis to illustrate the reminiscences

of Rahel as an anxious child belonging to a religious marginal in Kerala. A

thought of disillusionment is perceived in chapter 2 of the text, ‘Pappachi’s Moth,’

 53

that sketches the starting and the end of an ecstasy presence “the first ever

democratically elected communist government in the world” (Roy 67).

It can be integrated that the truth of historiography and the truth of textuality are

dissimilar in scope and natural history. Still, the researcher can afford to academically

cohabit and create peace with an idea of intermeshed truths in the subsequent sense:

renditions or truths of a particular reality! The sounds perplexing adequate but the issue

may soon be determined if the narrative devices of Roy’s text is discerned entirely via the

central character of Rahel. As it is, Rahel is connected in a journey return to her origins.

Chapter1, ‘Paradise Pickles & Preserves’ states that “It was raining when Rahel came

back to Ayemenem” (Roy 1). The unclear mixture of history and textual history, all the

adaptations that can and cannot be resigned inside the meta-narratives can lastly be

unobserved when both time and space fall into an unimportant emptiness.

The researcher addresses the problematique of ‘two’ histories here, and tries to

discover the bottomless text of realism from inside these different depictions. It is

complicated to pin down any known account of ‘facts’ as the hegemonic description as

possibly each and every practice in historiography is enlightened by the ‘choice’ of the

writer. To get help from Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak to highlight this issue,

This is indeed the problem of the ‘permission to narrate’ discussed by

Edward Said (1984) […] Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern

subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effected .The question is

not female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual

division of labour, for both of which there is ‘evidence’. It is rather

 54

that both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of

insurgency the ideological construction of gender keeps the male

dominant. If in the context of colonial production the subaltern has no

history and cannot speak the subaltern as female is even more deeply

in shadow (Spivak 24-28).

Postmodernist progress is characterized by ‘relativism’ about the conceptual idea

of reality, meaning thereby ‘what is true for you is not necessarily true for me’.

Postmodernists claim that truth and error are one and the same and truths are too

restraining to decide anything. Shifting unsteadily, what is truth today can be false

tomorrow. The God of Things does not seem to be a one way of seeing things; it is rather

a constantly ‘differing and deferring’ mode of presentation: “Still, to stay that it all began

when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it” (Roy 33). What

appears to be true turns out to be assembled and we hardly know what really occurred till

the very end of the story. There is a firm blurring of fact and fiction from “Zomorin’s

conquest of Calicut” (Roy 33) to the reference to the “Love –Laws” (Roy, 33). We never

know what is real as everything is in a state of change and appears to be legitimate

depending on the perspective. It does not stay a free flowing linear narrative; rather it

turns out to be like a hall of mirrors. The novel constantly appears to be “an absence

rather than a presence” (Roy 291). The will of the reader maneuvers at different levels

and a sense of simultaneity are always there.

Feminism is a movement that has grown out of existing social conditions.

According to Fiona Tolan, “The impact of second wave feminism on literary analysis has
 55

been great that it can be difficult to recall a pre-feminist criticism. From the earliest

inquiries into the ideological function of literature, feminists have used literary discourse

to expose, challenge and radically undermine cultural assumptions about gender” (Tolan

337). No doubt, its doctrines have stretched in all spheres of knowledge, particularly in

literature. It is also a movement against patriarchal ideology. Its rationale is to bring

alterations concerning women. Feminism also points that women should enjoy the same

social, lawful, educational, spiritual and religious rights that a man enjoys in the social

order. Indian women writers in English raise the question of a woman’s liberation in a

male dominant Indian culture. To the Postmodern feminist writers, it is the human life

with its puzzled ambience, which is to be discovered. So they refuse to confine

themselves in portraying the subjugated, traumatized and bothered life of a woman who

has been ill-treated by a man-made society. To them, it is not only the dilemma of women

but of human beings, which gives out as a happy hunting ground. In the text of Arundhati

Roy, the women characters move violently to dissect and decode the firm mysteries of

our existence.

The state of women is pathetic in the patriarchal society. Simone de Beauvoir reveals

her dispute against the condition of women in her classic work The Second Sex as “She –

a free and[an] autonomous being like all creatures -- nevertheless finds herself living in a

world where men coupled her to assume the status of the other” (Beauvoir 13). She says,

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one” (Beauvoir 13). The three major

distributions of Feminist Criticism are Phallocentrism, Prescriptive Criticism and

Gynocriticism. Phallocentrism functions with the picture of women mirrored in literature

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produced by men and Gynocriticism deals with women as the author of literature.

Prescriptive Criticism seeks to place standards for literature that can provide the rationale

of feminism. According to the feminist critic Veena Nobel Dass, “A search for identify

and quest for definition of self have become the prime factor of women in literature under

the sway of feminism” (Dass 11).

Gender bias and feminism are relevant themes explored by Postmodernists.

Historically speaking, Feminism always deals with women’s liberation and rights.

Feminists have shown how enlightenment discourses generalize western, white, middle

male practice and have thus exposed the buried strategies of domination implicit in the

ideal of the objective knowledge. Feminism has proved that sexual category is not an

importance of physical structure and that societal organizations do not mirror universal

truths about human nature. What is more significant is the novelist’s valorization of the

women in Indian society.

In The God of Small Things, Arundhathi Roy dismantles age old customs about

women and exposes that women can perform the same role with men, only if they

achieve a distinctive level of their own and learn to transform the conventional obstacles

of their blackout. Indian culture is all determined to abuse a woman as sinful when there

is even a minor distraction from the traditional ways of manners. Arundhati Roy portrays

the predicament of women through her female characters belonging to three generations

in The God of Small Things. They are all subjugated and subjected to cruelty and

inhuman handling. Pappachi, an imperial entomologist would donate money to

orphanages and leprosy clinics “But alone with his wife and children he turned into a
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monstrous bully, with a streak of vicious cunning. They were beaten, humiliated and then

made to suffer” (Roy 180). The feminist in Arundhati Roy takes stock of the situation by

dwelling on the theme of gender bias. She refers to Mammachi’s discriminatory approach

towards Ammu who has been dishonored and ignored by her father ill-treated and

deceived by her husband, offended by the police and rendered impoverished by her

brother. Every one of them pronounced the male dominant ideology that she should have

no right anyplace as a daughter, sister, wife, or citizen. In addition, recklessness in

Ammu‘s brother is fortified in the sake of “Man’s needs” (Roy 268) whereas an the same

action in Ammu decrees torment of being enslaved in a room. What is made easy and

preferred to a man is recognized and wicked and sinful to a woman is clear from Ammu -

- Velutha’s relationship.

According to the Indian Constitution, untouchability was finally eliminated in

1950, which acknowledged the right to Equality as a basic right. Not that the freedom and

constitution to India have created a major change to the Dalit’s societal life in the

postcolonial era since the age-old chauvinism, severely embedded in the upper caste (like

Syrian Christian) domination, continued to prove more powerful. Freedom to India marks

only political liberty from the British yoke, and not the achievement of societal freedom.

Political leaders are gone but societal tyranny continues and the Dalits are the most awful

sufferers of this societal tyranny, otherwise known as the brutal and harmful societal

activities that single out huge sections of the Indian population for nuisance of different

types on the basis of the castes into which they are born by a biological accident.
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The God of Small Things plays with the havoc of communal system in the down

South Indian state of Kerala. Here Roy visualizes both the struggle of a woman and also

the troubles of untouchables, who are questing for fulfillment in life in a patriarchal

society. Moreover, Roy presents a solid set of guidelines to alter the place of women in

the Indian society and she sets a bundle of vigour in cheering a critical, unruly

perspective to think the present outlines of female personality in India. In contrast to the

conventionally endorsed committed and accommodating figures, Roy deconstructs the

dissenting and rebellious women personalities.

The novel deals the state of daughters in patriarchal families in Kerala. It is a sort

of social forum, which clues at the creation of masculinity as power figures. Roy’s

feminist visualization can also be well understood from her non-fictional works, The

Great Indian Rape Trick I and The Great Indian Rape Trick II. In both the works, she

strongly makes her comment against Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen.

In The God of Small Things, Roy depicts her feminist sight through four women

characters -- Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Ammu and Rahel. These characters are

executives of their own Postmodern culture and through them Roy gives the gradual alter

in the state of women in the society. Repeatedly a woman is shown as ‘the other’ and ‘the

marginalized’. Roy through her novel recollects a young woman’s agonizing journey into

her childhood and it centers on several themes and realities.

Mammachi, the wife of the Imperial Entomologist Pappachi, stands for the first

generation woman character. She productively twists her kitchen talents into a business.

Her pickle business is a grand success and soon it is established into a cottage industry.
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Pappachi, who is green-eyed of his wife’s victory, turns into more violent during night

time and he bangs her pitilessly. Moreover Pappachi is bothered about the age variation

between himself and his wife. As the text shows, “Pappachi, for his part, was having

trouble coping with the ignominy of retirement. He was seventeen years older than

Mammachi, and realized with a shock that he was an old man when his wife was still in

her prime” (Roy 47). When Pappachi knows that his wife is excellent at violin, he

discontinues her classes suddenly. Pappachi’s annoyance turns him to beat his wife

brutally. Worst of all are Pappachi’s outbursts of physical violence have inflicted on

Mammachi from time to time. Ammu’s mother, Soshamma, known to Rahel and Estha as

Mammachi, is a victim of prolonged physical violence. Mammachi has weal and bumps

on her head as evidence of beatings with a brass vase. We are told that the beatings she

has regularly received at the hands of her husband increase directly in proportion to the

degree of success she achieves in her entrepreneurial project, Paradise Pickles and

Preserves. Even though the Syrian Christian Community at Kerala in India is basically a

matriarchal one, Mammachi remains a silent victim for years. When Pappachi dies, she

even mourns. She feels a definite sense of loss. She is a creature of habit, Ammu tells

Rahel. It is her son Chacko who protects her. Chacko finally sets a dot to his father’s

behaviour. One day he twists his father’s hand and advises him not to repeat it. He

comments, “I never want this to happen again’, he told his father. ‘Ever’” (Roy 48). After

this event, Pappachi never talks to his wife. Even at this time it is the son who saves his

mother and not the daughter. Mammachi’s bodily weakness and Pappachi’s primacy are

recognized in the patriarchal construction where man is the ultimate authority of sexual,
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economical, political and physical power. Mammachi agrees all submissively and

obediently. Thus, she admits the female position forced on her by society. She is passive,

ungrudging, submissive and unresisting. The similar thing persists with her son Chacko

also. After his homecoming from England, he turns into the owner of the pickle factory.

But it is Mammachi who puts together all her efforts to run the factory without being

closed. Chacko’s mixed up socialism and capitalist ideas make the factory run in loss.

Furthermore, when trouble emerges, it is informed only to Mammachi and not to Chacko.

Mammachi is brave enough to employ Velutha, a low–caste paravan as the chief

mechanic. Velutha is an untouchable (Paravan), a Dalit. His family has been serving for

Chacko’s for more than a generation. Velutha is tremendously talented with his hands, a

skillful carpenter and mechanic. Unlike other untouchables (other low caste people),

Velutha has unique manners. While his talents with repairing the machinery have created

him vital at the pickle factory, there is a lot of antagonism about the fact that he is an

untouchable working in a factory of touchables who dislike him. Thus she performs a

tightrope walking between her twin roles of a business woman and a submissive

housewife without infringing their prescribed limits. Even though Mammachi has many

unique qualities, she is suppressed in the male subjugated society.

Ammu stands for the second generation. She is the mouthpiece of the author.

Ammu, the major leading role of the novel is not as subservient as her mother is. Through

the character of Ammu, Roy includes an additional level to her significant examination of

the Indian patriarchy when she speaks to the place of separated women. Everyone in the

family feels that Ammu is not an appreciated daughter in the society because she
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transgresses the tradition of prearranged marriage and it ends in divorce. At the same

time, her brother Chacko enjoys everything in his life. His marriage is also a love

marriage, which also ends in divorce. Even during their young age, Ammu is not

permitted to pursue her higher studies. But Chacko, the male person of the Ayemenem

House is sent to pursue his higher studies in Britain. According to Pappachi, the college

education corrupts a woman. Being denied a college education, marriage for her also

becomes a difficult proposition, as dowry could not be afforded. So she has to wait at

home and becomes domesticated. To escape from her father’s violence, she gets married

a man of her own wish. The only let off for Ammu, in the muggy atmosphere, is a bridal

tie. While considering a break in proceedings at an Aunt’s place in Calcutta, she

encounters a gentle Hindu Bengali in Assam (India) from the tea-estates, and without

further consideration consents to marry him. As the text shows, “She thought that

anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem” (Roy 39). But she

jumps from a frying pan into the blaze. Finally, she decides to leave her husband, the

charm of marital bliss soon vanishes and Ammu becomes a victim of her husband’s

drunken rages. When they start to affect the two-year-old twins, Ammu thinks it proper to

desert her husband. Mr.Hollick, the employer, has also come up with an unacceptable

proposal for Ammu. Finding herself vulnerable to male debauchery, she returns

reluctantly, to her parents’ home. Here, she is more of a trespassed and less of an inmate

of the house as she has been married. In the same condition, her brother Chacko takes

pleasure in love and respect in the society and family while Ammu and her children are

agonized and abandoned. As there is no other goes, the protagonist Ammu becomes a
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total dependant on others. She is permitted to stay “on sufferance”. As the text shows,

“For herself—she knew that there would be no more chances. Only Ayemenem. A front

verandah and a back verandah. A hot river and pickle factory. And in the background of

constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval” (Roy 43). In the Indian society, a

daughter has no claim to the assets. The novel shows, “Legally this was the case, because

Ammu, as a daughter, had no claim to the property” (Roy 56). Ammu remarks, “Thanks

to our wonderful male chauvinist society” (Roy 56) and Chacko’s comments confirm this

clearly, “What yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine” (Roy 56). Thus the individual

space is ignored to Ammu which she deserves in her own right.

Not only man, women are also against women. Baby Kochamma confirms this.

Ammu is abandoned by her own Aunt, Baby Kochamma becomes Ammu’s sworn enemy

as in her she sees a possible warning to the secure position she has shaped for herself

more than the years. Her fright of being abandoned increases with the increasing number

of persons in the home and she makes no bones about her unhappiness. Ammu walks

roughly devoid of being noticed. The male despotism that is set free on her gets a nasty

turn in her parents’ home -- it is a bettering that does not demonstrate but oxidizes one

from inside. The influx of Sophie Mol seems but to set fire to the so far controlled and

covered up quarrels. The privileged action exposed to Chacko’s widowed ex-wife and

their daughter is frankly demonstrated, throwing Ammu and her twins into complete

seclusion. Baby Kochamma also has the similar opinion as Chacko, “As for a divorced

daughter -- according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as

for divorced daughter from a love marriage, well words could not describe Baby
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Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from an intercommunity love marriage

-- Baby Kochocamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject” (Roy 45).

Baby Kochamma turns into Ammu’s supreme foe as in Ammu she pictures a

possible danger to the protected position she has shaped for herself more than the years.

Ammu is depicted as a tragic figure, a woman struggling against her family, her

motherhood and society. As Ranga Rao puts it, “In Ammu, the novelist has presented,

with compassion, a woman, a feminist locked in a struggle with her family, its ‘hidden

morality’, with society and tragically with herself” (Rao xiii). Her state develops into

worse when her family comes to identify about her banned relationship with a low caste

paravan. Velutha is harassed by the police on charges of rape lodged against him by the

malicious Baby Kochamma, and the police beat black and blue till he bleeds to death. His

one sin appears to have been darker than Chacko’s many sins of the similar nature. The

facts of the scandal are camouflaged and never established even after Ammu’s

declaration of guilt to Inspector Thomas Mathew. As a result, Velutha, the Paravan is

tortured and killed by the police. Ammu attempts her best to save Velutha. She has

enough bravery to visit the police station to rescue Velutha from the police custody. But

she is called as a ‘veshya’ in the police station. Barbarities on women mainly by police

are increasing day by day in India. At times, it turns into very hard to give substantiation

and proofs of barbarity on women committed by police personnel. Soon after Sophie

Mol’s cremation, Ammu is beckoned to the police station with her children for complete

investigation and extra action. While investigating her in this case, Inspector Matthews

beats Ammu’s breast frequently with a stick and goes on downgrading her inside the
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police station. It is nothing short of raping her. He says, “The police didn’t take

statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children” (Roy 8). When a woman is

humiliated and sexually assaulted, she loses all honour before the eyes of the society. The

self-respect of a female charged under police supervision is irritated. Her shaken silence

is obtained as complicity. But the things are totally different with Chacko.

Mothers are proverbially loving and sacrificial when it concerns to their children.

They pass on virtues to their children through stories and anecdotes. But Chacko’s

mother is totally different. Arundhati Roy peters out motherhood in her novel. The very

good things that go about a mother are kicked about by the Postmodern novelist. Chacko

has illegitimate relations with the women working in the pickle factory. Chacko is young

and crucial enough to hope for another possibility of love. Where Chacko is concerned,

his “Men’s Needs” (Roy 238) are well recognized by his generous mother. His sexual

escapades have taken place with his own mother’s approval. A separate door is made in

the rear so that Chacko’s fancy of the moment can come and go unremarkably. No such

‘understanding’ is extended to Ammu. There is no concept of a ‘woman’s needs’. In fact,

Mammachi thinks of Ammu “Like a dog with a bitch on heat” (Roy 257). She is “locked

away like the family lunatic in a medieval household” (Roy 252). The thing is overlooked

by the Ayemenem House women, especially Mammachi as ‘Men’s needs’. But when she

thinks of Ammu’s relation with Velutha she vomits:

She thought of her naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing

but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black

hand on her daughter’s breast. His mouth on hers. His black hips jerking
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between her parted legs. The sound of their breathing. His particular

Paravan smell. Likeanimals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited (Roy

257).

The novelist has depicted the double set of rules for the brother and the sister both

of whom are separated. Roy hints at the discrimination to Ammu from the same mother

who sanctions and facilitates Chacko’s illicit relationship with the poor women of the

factory. This too is offered through description;

Mammachi had a separate entrance built for Chacko’s room, which was at

the eastern end of the house, so that the objects of his “Needs” wouldn’t

have to go traipsing through the house. She secretly slipped them money to

keep them happy. They took it because they needed it. They had young

children and old parents. Or husbands who spent all their earnings in toddy

bars. The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee

clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from Feelings (Roy 169).

The idiosyncratic handling between sons and daughters appears to be extensive to

their children. Roy constructs most of the scenes of her novel upon the difference in

treatment between Ammu (daughter) and Chacko (son). The dissimilarity is vividly

represented from the first chapter itself. At Sophie Mol’s cremation, the whole family

gathers in the church. Although Ammu, Estha and Rahel are permitted to come to the

cremation, they are instructed to place alone, not standing with the members of the

family.
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Ammu least bothers about her community’s injunctions about the love-laws. She

dismantles all kinds of admonitions. She doesn’t worry about her family’s honour and

prestige. She doesn’t attach any weight to those things. In Ammu’s character, Roy

commemorates the supreme selfhood that a woman gets back by fighting against the

centuries-old domination that society has imposed upon her kin. Due to her free spirit,

Ammu believes no shame in pleasing her physical and emotional needs. She carries

tragedy in her life by breaking the eventual taboo, by loving a man below her caste. She

is a woman who outrages Society by her eccentric behaviour and pays the penalty of loss

and suffering but remains to the last unapologetic and unbeatable. By often describing

Ammu’s nature with the metaphors of madness and animality, Roy demonstrates how a

woman with high passion and strong will who creates a threat to the despotic order of

society is quickly branded as dangerous. Growing up in an atmosphere of horror and

brutality, Ammu develops the stubborn, wild streak that would later bring her in quarrel

with the world. Ammu’s wrecked marriage, her unwillingness in her parental family, her

love for her children and her womanly needs, direct her to her commit suicide. The text

shows, “Ammu died in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had

gone for a job interview as someone’s secretary. She died alone. With a noisy ceiling fan

for company and no Estha to lie at the back of her and talk to her. She was thirty-one. Not

old, not young, but a viable, die–able age” (Roy 154).

In the third generation, Rahel stands for the female character. Mammachi or

Ammu is seen as cooperation or as an antagonism to the Male Other. But for Rahel, there

is no differentiation between the female self and the male other. Rahel and Estha are not
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only brother and sister but they are identified as “two-egged dizygotic twins” (Roy 4).

Like her mother Ammu, Rahel moves in and moves out of a rushed marriage. But the

only distinction is there is no trauma of physical abuse. She even breaks the Love Laws

again by committing incest with her brother. But she is not worried by fault or fear. Rahel

neither worries nor accepts man-made laws or establishments. She echoes the author’s

deepest passions about a woman and her position in the patriarchal society. Rahel is the

picture of the Postmodern era, the unconventional woman. Through the character of

Rahel, Roy attempts to break the chains of the age-old customs. A sense of antagonism

and division also infuse the different senses of identity among different generation of

women. It also generates a line of clash between the older and younger generation. The

women of the older age group, Baby Kochamma and Mammachi accept to function by

the rules of the established social custom. But Rahel and Ammu, the younger generation,

become inspirational figures to think about the processes of liberation and social

alteration.

Family and political customs play a key role in disadvantaged women. Social

constrains are so built up as to sanctify the persecution of women. This is because in most

of the civilizations, social structures are basically patriarchal. Arundhati Roy’s novel

challenges this position.

Postmodernist thought can be identified in the ‘breaking of geographical

boundaries and transaction of culture’ also. Arundhati Roy has reinforced her line of

approach by repeated references to hybridization and erosion of culture in her novel. The

Ipe family is a corporation of degenerate people interested to upholding bourgeois values

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at all aspects. Baby Kochamma who earlier fostered a beautiful garden now simply sits in

her drawing room and watching satellite television. Whereas her garden, lifeless and

died, one-day cricket, Baby Kochamma sits glued to American NBA league games and

the Grand Slam Tennis tournaments. Baby Kochamma’s life-style has changed from an

energetic life of gardening to inactive watching of T.V. The text shows, “On weekdays

she watched The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara” (Roy 27). The novelist has

offered the plight of people awkwardly suspended between the cultural values of two

worlds. We are told by the novelist that the revolution in people’s taste,

[…] wasn’t something that happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines,

football, sex, music, coups d’etat -- they all arrived on the same train. They

unpacked together and in Ayemenem where once the loudest sound had

been a musical horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and

Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants (Roy 27).

Postmodernist literature is by and large ‘writing about writing’. ‘Metafiction’ is

the fiction, the theme of which is ‘the nature of fiction’. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut uses

it efficiently in his works and the foremost part of his novel Slaughter House Fine deals

with the method of writing the text. Similarly, Tim O’Brien’s novel The Thing They

Carried question the fictionality of the characters and events all over envy whereby the

whole novel becomes self referential stirring up the reader to a become a writer, thus

pleasing the notions of a ‘writerly’ text. Ranga Rao observes, “Despite its veneer of

simplicity, it is a complex Postmodernist ‘writerly’ works and invites evaluation from

various angles” (Rao xiii).

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Postmodernist literature is admittedly ‘populist’. It avoids elitist, literary language

prompting the arbitrary and the playful. The vital and perhaps the most fascinating part of

reading the novel is the ‘hermeneutic’ experience as the novelist continuously tries to

withhold something important from the reader, who, in turn waits intently to get the

knowledge of that elusive truth. The novel shows to be a good example of ‘meming’ as

so many things are gleaned through it. ‘Meme’ is a unit of cultural knowledge that

replicates itself in language and a group of information is passed on. The novel stirs up

the image of a big information system through which the writer is able to communicate a

whole range of thoughts about the particular backdrop of Kerala apart from referring in

general to “a male chauvinist society”(Roy 57) where “what’s yours is mine and what’s

mine is also mine”(Roy 57) to “the Walking Backwards days, torn between Loyalty and

Love”(Roy 255) and to the “feeling of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear

[…] civilization’s fear of nature, man’s fear of woman, power’s fear of powerlessness”

(Roy 308) as essence of the ‘whole history’.

Postmodernists focus on intertextual factors in literature. Theorists like Julia

Kristeva and Harold Bloom have further popularized intertextuality and revisionism, this

branch of literary criticism. True, allusiveness has ever been a connected part of literature

breeding genres like parody and pastiche, erudite authors can also deconstruct slight and

strategic use of previous contemporaneous texts in order to broaden the literary horizon

of their works by adding topical traces, critiquing the dominant discourses and resisting

the breed of categorizers. Interrelation of literary texts is derived from the theory, which a
 70

literary text is not a cut off fact or incident but is built up of a variety of quotations, and

that, any text is the ‘incorporation and alteration of another’.

The theories of Julia Kristeva and Harold Bloom can be brought together to give a

comprehensive theory of intertextual practices that accounts for both the practice and

product involved in the work of art and utilization that coeval ‘creates’ and ‘warrants’

‘aesthetic enjoyment’. A means of seizing intertextuality as Sudha Shastri points out, “is

positing that much of our apprehension of reality is shaped through text” (Shastri 330).

Therefore, depiction of that ‘reality’ in an intertextual work, as Shastri clarifies ‘has to be

self-conscious’. This ‘self-conscious’-ness of the ‘writer’ at once enthuse ‘referentiality’

(to other works) and ‘difference’ (from other works). The notion of differentiality, as is

well-known, opposes any notion of self-containedness. For, A becomes and remains A by

virtue of being dissimilar from B, C, D and so on, and not by virtue of any natural

‘quidditas’ (‘whatness’ of the thing). So, as John Frow reminds us, “the concept of

intertextuality requires that we understand the concept of text not as a self-contained

structure but s different and historical […] Texts are therefore not structures of presence

but traces and tracings of otherness” (Frow 45). Moreover, on another level, intertextual

action operates in the form of echoic utterances thereby the variety of texts to the

intertext by means of synchronized ‘absorption’ and ‘rejection’. Thus, Sperber and

Wilson bring out our attention to the fact that from a “pragmatic point of view”, “what is

important is that a speaker can use an echoic utterance to convey a whole range of

attitudes and emotions, ranging from outright acceptance and approval to outright

rejection and disapproval, and that the recognition of these attitudes and emotions may be
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crucial to the interpretation process” (Sperber 240). Ammu’s ordeal in the Kottayam

Police Station largely reflects the ordeal of Draupadi in the court of Duryodana. Inspector

Thomas Matthew who disrobes the blouse of Ammu in the police station with his baton

reminds us of the pulling off the dress of Draupadi.

Having lost everything in the game of dice with Duryodhana the Pandavas have

nothing to lose except their Queen the chaste Draupadi. Duryodhana tricks the Pandavas

into staking Draupadi into the game. If the Pandavas lose in the game, the Pandavas and

Draupadi will be slaves to Duryodhana. Predictably the Pandavas lose the game and feel

restless, not for themselves but for Draupadi:

Draupadi questions Yudhishthira's right on her as he has lost himself first

and she is still the queen. She refuses to present herself in court.

Duryodhana, angry with Draupadi's behaviour, commands his younger

brother Dushasana to bring her into the court, forcefully if he must.

Dushasana grabs her by the hair and brings her into the court, dragging her

by the hair.

Dushasana drags Draupadi to the court by the hair. Seeing this, Bhima

pledges to remove Dushasana's hands, as they touch Draupadi's hair. Now

in an emotional appeal to the elders present in the forum, Draupadi

repeatedly questions the legality of the right of Yudhishthira to place her at

stake.

In order to provoke the Pandavas further, Duryodhana bares and pats his

thigh looking into Draupadi's eyes, implying that she should sit on his
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thigh. In rage Bhima vows in front of the entire assembly that he would

break that thigh of Duryodhana, or accept being Duryodhana's slave for

seven lifetimes. At this time Vikarna, a brother of Duryodhana asks the

kings assembled in the court to answer the question of Draupadi. He gives

his opinion that Draupadi is not won rightfully as Yudhishthira lost himself

first before staking her. Besides, no one has right to put a woman on bet

according to shastras; not a husband, father, or even the gods. Hearing these

words, and remembering how Draupadi has insulted him during her

swayamvara, Karna gets angry and says that when Yudhishthira has lost all

his possession he has also lost Draupadi, even specifically staking her. A

monogamist, Karna goes on to call Draupadi, a woman with five husbands,

a whore, adding that dragging her to court is not a surprising act whether

she be attired or naked. Duryodhana orders Dushasana to disrobe Draupadi.

Seeing her husbands’ passivity, Draupadi prays to Krishna to protect her. A

miracle occurs henceforward, which is popularly attributed to Krishna. As

the Pandavas and the court looks away, Dushasana unwraps layers and

layers of her sari. As her sari keeps getting extended, everyone looks upon

in awe, and Dushasana himself is forced to stop due to exhaustion

(Wikipedia).

The tourists that visit the History House earlier owned by Kari Saipu, in Roy’s text

are also treated with the de-robing of the Draupadi’s story on a daily basis with a
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truncated Kathakali performance. History is repeated every day, lest derobing would go

away from people’s memory. Arundhati Roy describes this small ‘thing’ in this way:

The performances were staged by the swimming pool. While the drummers

drummed and the dancers danced, hotel guests frolicked with their children

in the water. While Kunti revealed her secret to Karna on the riverbank,

courting couples rubbed suntan oil on each other. While fathers played

sublimated sexual games with their nubile teenaged daughters, Poothana

suckled young Krishna at her poisoned breast. Bhima disemboweled

Dushasana and bathed Draupadi’s hair in his blood (Roy 127).

Atrocities committed against women goes unabated in every conflict that the

world goes through. At the time of the partition of India into India and Pakistan in the

1940’s too, there was a very big violence unleashed against women of all ages. Saadat

Husan Manto’s partition narratives “Compassion” presents the trauma of a young girl and

her father undergo at the time of the partition madness. Robert Gnanamony quotes a

similar ordeal in his article, “Reign of Terror in the Grand Guignol Days of Partition: A

Select Reading of Alok Bhalla’s Edition of Stories about the Partition of India”. A

helpless father is pleading on bended knees before a group of abductors and the latter

give a callous answer:

Please don’t kill

My young daughter

All right, let’s do as he says …

Strip her
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And drag her away… (Gnanamony 127, 2007)

The subversive use of language and parallelisms in Roy’s novel portrays the

different ways in which the author has surpassed the normal inventive resources of the

English Language. The variety of techniques used by Roy may not find many parallels in

world fiction, at least in the world of Indian fiction. Because of its daring

‘Postmodernistique’ view, The God of Small Things absolutely breaks new ground with

an extremely individualized or eccentric style. It is evident that Postmodernist trends

loom large over the entire texture of the novel.

‘Pro-environmentalism’ is a significant principle of Postmodernism. Pro-

environmentalists protect ‘Mother Earth’ and blame Western society for destroying it.

They promise for looking at Nature from critical, social and cultural perspective rather

than a scientific one. In her text The End of Imagination Arundhati Roy criticizes

America for the production of nuclear arms. She senses that nuclear war will be

catastrophic to our kids and kids’ kids: “If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be

China or Pakistan; our foe will be earth itself. The very elements, the sky , the air, the

land, the wind, and water will all turn against us and their wrath will be terrible” (Roy,

The End of Imagination 62).

Roy is awfully concerned about the miserable fate of people and environment

devastated by big projects like dams. In her 1999 text The Greater Common Good, Roy

expresses her concerns on what she considers to be one of India’s most “ruthlessly

efficient” (Roy, The Greater Common Good 23) devices to achieve post-modernization:

dam building. India, Roy notes, is considered “the world’s third largest dam-builder”
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(Roy, The Greater Common Good 13). The nation has constructed 3,300 Big Dams since

gaining its independence in 1947. India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

satiated the nation’s hunger for dams. In fact, dam building, in the views of the Indian

government, has come “to be equated with nation-building”(Roy, The Greater Common

Good 13), and all negative things of the process can be streamlined and justified as

phenomenon for the sake of the betterment of the nation, for “The Greater Common

Good. That it’s being done in the name of Progress, in the name of the National Interest

(which, of course, is paramount)” (Roy, The Greater Common Good 21). Yet again,

Roy’s essay brings out the powerlessness of the ordinary people just as those who, like

Ammu in The God of Small Things, have no “Locusts Stand I” (Roy 56) or lawful claim

to assets are treated as though they “don’t exist” (Roy, The Greater Common Good 20).

Moreover, just like in Roy’s novel, there are authorized and unauthorized versions of the

story of Postmodern India and the accounts that get ignored or, rather, purposefully

ignored, are those of the natives who have been dislocated by these dams, who have been

driven out from their land and naked of their livelihoods by their country’s hungry

movement for post-modernity. To make sure that readers know these people survive and

that their saga of sufferings are factual and deserving of a place in history, she employs

her nonfiction writing as a medium to tell the stories of who gets unnatural and why.

“Trust me,” she guarantees readers, “there’s a story here” (Roy, The Greater Common

Good 21). In an Interview with David Barsamian, Arundhati Roy reveals that she is not

averse to politics and her desire is to “tell politics like a story” (Barsamian 10). Roy’s

text, The Greater Common Good mimics what Roy achieves in The God of Small Things,
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which is to employ storytelling—particularly historiography—as a narrative of link that

reveals the larger pervasive forces working behind the scenes to sever the civil rights of

the Indian people and the earthly rights of the nation’s environment.

Roy conveys her concern for environment through Velutha who is living in closer

conformity with Nature. As Roy shows, “Some days he walked along the banks of the

river that smelled of shit and pesticides brought with World Bank loans” (Roy 13). She

perceives that the river fails its original flow and is getting waterlogged with dirt and dust

produced by the people: In her words, “Children hung their bottom over the edge and

defected directly onto the squelchy mud of exposed river bed […]. Eventually, by

evening, the river would rouse itself to accept the day’s offering and sludge off to the sea

leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake” (Roy 125).

Postmodernists, addressing the all comprehensive values as meta-narratives or

grand-narratives state that the grand-narratives have lost their authority to persuade and

therefore, encourage little-narratives. Patricia Waugh and ‎Philip Rice in the initial part of

their essay, ‘Postmodernism’ published in their text Modern Literary Theory reveal,

Postmodernism is a ‘mood’ expressed theoretically across a diverse range

of theoretical discourses and involving a focus on the collapse of grand

narratives into local incommensurable language games or ‘little narratives’;

a Foucauldian emphasis on the discontinuity and plurality of history as

discursively produced and formulated, and a tendency to view the

discourses of Enlightenment reason as complicit with the instrumental

rationalization of modern life (Rice and Waugh 325).

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According to Peter Barry, mainly, the “meta-narratives”/ “grand-narratives”

(Barry 86) in other ways are dealt with as “meta-narratives” (Barry 86) that are

conceptual thoughts which are thought to be a widespread clarification of past

“experience or knowledge” (Wikipedia). According to Postmodernists, grand-narratives

have lost their authority to persuade -- they are, factually, tales which are developed in

sequential order to legitimize different descriptions of “the truth” (Wikipedia). While

transferring from Modern to Postmodern, “Lyotard proposed that metanarratives should

give way to petits récits, or more modest and ‘localized’ narratives […] Postmodernists

attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local contexts as well as the

diversity of human experience” (Wikipedia). According to Mary Klages, postmodernists’

motto is to “think globally, act locally and don’t worry about any grand scheme or master

plan” (Klages 10).

Derived from the Postmodernists’ perspective, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small

Things satisfies the Postmodern advocate for ‘little narratives’ that help to disclose the

loss of ‘meta narratives’ in the form of “Love Laws” (Roy 33), Feminism, Christianity,

Marxism and the so called societal structures of the society.

The novel specifically portrays the ruin of the life of Ammu, Velutha, Rahel, and

Estha. The themes that hit mainly in the text might be – Ammu’s separation, Rahel’s

wedding, Rahel’s separation, Ammu and Velutha’s nocturnal escapades, incest-intimacy

between Rahel and Estha. All these issues can be taken as the transgression of social

codes. These sensitive issues find a prominent place in Arundhai Roy’s text due to the
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unrestricted license Postmodernism grants to the author. In other words, it could not be

imaginable in pieces of literature in the days of Modernism

The narrative depicts how all small beautiful wishes of life are just ruined.

Throughout the novel, the researcher finds that a ghetto is fashioned and Rahel, Estha,

Ammu and Velutha are just thrown into it cruelly.

The subject matter of love is an eye-catching problem of the novel The God of

Small Things and a much argued and discussed issue by the critics. All passionate love-

related episodes in the novel relate strongly to politics, history and social conditions. If

the novel is read carefully, one can find out that ‘Love’ is not a simple emotion but a

motivating force which can be clarified in terms of two persons (Ammu and Velutha)

civilizing backgrounds, political identities and other things which eventually become the

quicksand of all existent meta-narratives.

Thus, all the meta-narratives found in the societal structures of ‘Love-Laws’,

Christianity, Feminism, Marxism, and Civilization in the ‘God’s own country’ get a

sound thrashing in the hands of the author. Roy, just as Postmodernists, obviously stands

for the small desires of human existence.

Arundhati Roy’s narrative alternates between scores of small events defying

chronological order and interestingly portrays the life, love and loss of a Christian family

in an Edenic garden like location that she has created for her fictional characters. The

multifarious small events that spin around her story are Postmodern in tone, content and

texture. In the next chapter, the same argument is taken forward by another Postmodern

writer, Manju Kapur.

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CHAPTER III

Snapshots of Postmodernism in Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman

Literature Review:

Summi Gurwara’s study “Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman – An Interrogation of

Marital Relationships” questions the fundamental concept of marital relationships. The

author states that, the protagonist of the text Astha leads chaotic life because of the

ignorance of her husband Hemant. Astha goes away from the traditional marital life; she

involves herself into a full-fledged love relationship with a woman. It is completely odd

one in Indian society.

Shalini, R. Sinha’s article identifies that, the conflict between the roots of

oppressive patriarchal culture and the wings of female imagination and sensibility in the

text. Her article also states that, “this novel takes a bold step in looking at socially taboo

relationships such as lesbian relationship” (Sinha 200).

Sunita Agarwal’s article looks into the text in feminist perspectives. This article

points out the nutshells of the important emergences of the feminism in the text in many

places. The author states that, “the novel, seemingly simplistic, has a polyvalent sub-text

that attests to many propositions being propounded about feminism. The narrative skirts

through the second and third wave feminist essentials” (Agarwal 170).

P.C. Pradhan has also analyzed the text in feminist vision but he chooses four

different writers and their texts. Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is among them. He

substantiates his feminist visions in the texts by the theoretical viewpoints of Simone de

Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter and other feminists. His article
 80

states that, “A Married Woman is a protest against the phallocentric patriarchal culture”

(Pradhan 117).

Anupama Chowdhury’s article “Chutnification of English: Techniques in the

Novels of Manju Kapur” depicts the breaking of Grand narratives to Little narratives in

the usage of language. The author has used the term, Chutnification, in her article and

pointing out the usage of this kind of writings in the texts. According to her, “the

‘english’ used in A Married Woman is a hybrid linguistic formation consisting of a

cocktail of vocabulary from Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit […] the novel is replete with the

Indian coinages […] Mohalla, mali, crore, swami, sari, etc.” (Chowdhury 102-103).

Problem Statement:

Only a limited number of articles have been published in accordance with Manju

Kapur’s A Married Woman, in that a few articles are dealing with Postmodern issues.

Based on the above literature review, it clearly shows that the major chunk of the articles

deal with feminist perspectives. Therefore, there is no such specific and detail study

carried out on the text, related to find out the Postmodernism in in the text. Thus, it leads

to the research gap in this area. The problem statement and the significance of this study

are to figure out the possible number of Postmodern issues in the text.

Research Questions:

Research Questions evolve from the study go as follow:

Is there a significant impact of Feminism in the text?

Is there Lesbianism (refusing heterosexuality), a Postmodern term, carried out in the text?

Are there any traces of egocentricism in the text?

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Are there any traces of Queer theory in the text?

Is there Historiography, a Postmodern term, to identify in the text?

Is there breaking from Grand narrative to Little narrative?

Research Methodology:

Research methodology is carried out by the application of Postmodernist thoughts,

which are propounded by the postmodernists. Based on the previous studies it is bringing

out the the gap between the previous studies and research questions have risen in this part

of the thesis. A careful and systematic analysis backed with the suitable evidence of the

text in Postmodernists thoughts are taken into an account.

Analysis and Interpretation:

Manju Kapur’s text A Married Woman is another novel that is interpersed with

Postmodern issues. The lead character of the novel Astha is created as a Postmodern

Feminist. Like any other woman, Astha is also loved and protected by her parents. She

belongs to a middleclass family wherein all the middleclass Indian values are the

parameters for the growing Astha. Circumstances lead her if not force her to go into the

postmodern feminist track.

Feminism as a philosophy, challenges the patriarchal symbolic order, social

organization and control mechanism. It, therefore, opposes women’s subordination and

oppression in home and society. To Josephine Donovan, “ It is a tentative beginning in

the development of a feminist literary aesthetic one that is at odds with masculinist value

standards, measuring literature against an understanding of authentic female life”

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(Donovan 46). Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1952), Betty Friedan’s The

Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Miller’s Sexual Politics (1969), Elaine Showalter’s

Literature of Their Own (1977), and other feminists have raised the feminist

consciousness of women to fight for equality with men from 1940s to 1960s and rejected

the existing socio-cultural norms prescribed for women.

The novelist promptly gives vent to her observations of the societal events in her

fiction. The issues that surface in the text are feminist in tone as well. It may be

remembered that Feminism is one of the prominent aspects of Postmodernism. Feminism

has been come from the Latin word ‘Famina’ that means woman. In the beginning, it was

discussed by Alice Rossi, an American in a Book Review published in the Athenaeum as

early as in April 1895. Feminism got a new shape since the publication of The Feminine

Mystique by the American female novelist, Betty Friedan in 1962. But it took center stage

in the 1980s. It seeks to create a new world of women free from traditional discrimination

and sex-subjugation. It pictures the dilemma of contemporary women seeking freedom

from male -- dominance. It condemns discrimination against women and deconstructs the

traditional patriarchal structures to pick up their voices against repression and sex-

subjugation. In Postmodern feminism, As Robert Gnanamony states, “male-female

stereotype rules are being deconstructed day-by-day in the Postmodern world”

(Gnanamony 98).

Conventional systems and customs are deep-seated in India and in the traditional

system. “Indianess” (Gnanamony 98) is structured around gender discrimination giving

more space to male supremacy. Right from marriage, any bride is expected to make an
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attempt to integrate into the family. She is directed and instructed into the lifestyle of her

husband’s family. But despite all her efforts to dedicate herself genuinely into the well

being of her husband’s family, she is invariably considered an outsider at least in the

beginning. Her opinions or ideas hardly gather any moss in spite of her good education

and intellectual calibre. She often experiences frustration and alienation. But when the

same bride turns into a mother- in-law and has an authoritative voice, particularly over

the daughters and daughters in law, she becomes not only an advocate but even the

custodian of the same culture.

A close study of Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman makes us monitor through the

story of her female protagonist, that one can empathetically understand the emotional

upheavals that she undergoes at every stage of her life. Despite her intelligence, position,

and education, when attempting to wed according to her own option, she is likely to mess

up her prospects in both the worlds--the one which she revolts and another she holds.

Any bold step in this direction is rigorously refused and censured and sometimes even

attracted punishment.

The second novel of Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is set in Delhi against the

milieu of communal turbulences erupted on the controversial Babri Masjid-Ram

Janambhoomi issue. The novel draws the story of Astha from her adulthood to her mature

housewife from every angle. As Robert Gnanamony mentions in his article,

The novel A Married Women is heavily plotted. It traces the life of Astha

from her young adulthood through her early middle years. In the process

she dates with a couple of young men of her own choice like her western
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counter parts, marries a man of her parents’ choice and discovers the joys

of intimacy with her husband, begets children, yet grows distant from him,

and struggles to become a painter. Much against her husband and her other

family members she becomes a social activist, and falls in love with a

woman, and finds herself –sort of, more (Gnanamony 102).

The protagonist reflects her middle class values and seems to enjoy her mental bliss for a

long time but gradually experiences that there is something certainly lacking in her life.

She suffers from a sense of incompleteness, suppression and agony which is further

provoked by her involvement into the outer world of upheaval and protest. But the

substitute she seeks temporarily is also hollow from within and fails eventually

compelling her heaving a sigh of relief.

A Married Woman may be read at three levels; first at the postmodern feministic

level, second at the historical level and lastly at the level of deconstruction. In an

Interview with Mona Goel, Manju Kapur reveals that:

I am a feminist. And what is a feminist? I mean I believe in the rights of

women to express themselves in the rights of women to work. I believe in

equality, you know domestic equality, legal equality. I believe in all that.

And the thing is that women don’t really have that -- you know even

educated women, working women. There is a trapping of equality but you

scratch the surface and it is not really equal (Goel 04).

The female protagonist of the novel Astha, who is the daughter of a cultured father

and an orthodox mother, has an earnest desire for passive co-existence in the family. But
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she is dominated against and discriminated at her in-law’s house. There, she is made-up

to have a willing body at night to be in bed, a willing hands and feet in the daytime and a

submissive voice. Her marriage with Hemant, the son of a government official in Delhi,

does not show to be based on mutual co-operation and appreciation. As Robert

Gnanamony shows,

In the domestic space, Hemant behaves like a typical hypermasculine. In

other words, he is a proud member of a patriarchal society dominated by

machismo and heterosexuality. The postcolonial notion of hypermasculinity

is brought to the surface in colonial texts like The Home and the World

authored by Rabindranath Tagore (Gnanamony 104-105).

She is duty-bound to be a stable wife and a sacrificing mother, like a sacred cow in the

position of a married woman. Being depressed of her emotional discharge, she recklessly

seeks for it and drives to “substitute-husband” (Gnanamony 110), lesbianism. Manju

Kapur in her novel A Married Woman through the protagonist –Astha, has stamped out a

self-governing life of the woman for self fulfillment and advocated for inter-religious

marriage and female-female relationship divergent to the patriarchal norms of the

traditional society.

Astha has the passions or infatuations of a teenager like any other girl. She falls-

in-love with a rich guy, namely Rohan. For Rohan, love making is just a pastime. Putting

a lot of hope on Rohan, she has even allowed Rohan to touch and sexually caress her

body. But of late, there is just silence from Rohan; she feels hopeless. The novelist

poignantly captures her mood: “Astha felt hopeless. She sat in silence, next to this boy
 86

whom she had thought she knew. The hands that he had used on her body, were now

clenched around her heart, slowly squeezing, slowly hurting” (Kapur 30). She is taking

her in his old Vauxhall. There is plenty of sarcasm when the novelist says, “Old cars were

so ugly, so useless, so slow, why did anyone bother with them?” (Kapur 30).

Understandably, Astha is like an old car to Rohan and he may go in for a new car in a

new garage.

But Astha is the opposite of that. She is not a conformist. When her mother wants

her to go with her to see a swami at Gandhi Bhavan, she flatly refuses. Her mother is

insistent. The swami could help her see her inner mind. She tells her mother, “I don’t

want to look inside myself” (Kapur 55). She is already married to Hemant. When she

shares this information to Hemant, Hemant looks alert. He tells her, “One has to be

careful around swamis” (Kapur 56). The words that come after this are ominous. He says,

“Thank God I am handling her money”. Astha is awfully put out at this remark of

Hemant. To her, this is nothing short of male chauvinism and she resents it. The text says,

on hearing these words, “Her wretchedness increasing” (Kapur 56).

Going back a little into the Indian attitude to same sex relationships, in the late

eighteenth century there was a genre of Urdu poetry called Rekhti. In this the poet used

women’s speech and talked about their world. Rekhti was, as has been shown by Menka,

Very much in the tradition of riti kavya, medieval romances, and erotic

treatises. It was an evolution of these earlier forms prevalent in Indian

languages. Rekhti depicted female sexual relations and its reception in the

society. The very fact that it was popular and widely circulated shows that
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alternative sexuality of women was an acknowledged truth. Rekhti poetry

was thus providing an alternative world to the women. It was both

produced and consumed by the women. The society which had homoerotic

male relationships was equally aware of the female sex relations as is clear

from the terms in vogue around this time (Menka 119).

That Posmodernism has given ample license to write about sex is very much

evident in all Postmodern texts. Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is no exception to it.

Manju Kapur never minces words when she talks about Astha’s sexual experience and

her inner longings pertaining to it. Here is an instance: “Astha longed to get pregnant.

During sex she imagined his seed spurting into her womb; later she would gather his wet

shrivelled penis, adoring it strong, thick and hot, or wet, limp and woebegone. ‘I want to

have your baby’, she would murmur” (Kapur 56). Even though this kind of dialogue is

very intimate and should be heard only within the four walls of a house, Manju Kapur

brings it here as the text under scrutiny is a Postmodern one. However, Hemant is a

typical patriarch who always wants to dominate his woman partner. And so, tension in

the marital relationship is inevitable. Maju Kapur’s Indian counterparts also have dealt

with this issue in their fiction. Anita Desai’s novels, Cry, the Peacock (1963); Voices in

the City (1965); Where shall We Go this Summer? (1975); and Fire on the Mountain

(1977) show women revolting in a very strong manner. Nayantara Sahgal’s women

characters in her novels, This Time of Morning (1958) and The Day in Shadow (1971) are

presented as trying to assert their individuality which unfortunately results in marital

discord. Shashi Deshpande’s text, The Dark Holds no Terrors (1980) depicts ego clash
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between the partners due to the inferiority complex in the male partner that brings out the

ugliness and brute in him.

Astha is constantly under stress of work and suffocating with her responsibilities

to meet everybody’s need. She is “always adjusting to everybody’s need” (Kapur 227).

She senses that a married woman’s status in the family is always dependent on her

husband. She is torn between her responsibility and socio-religious perception. She has

no emotional free-will from the domestic relationships. She is exhausted of her

responsibility and thinks “a tired woman cannot make wife good” (Kapur 154). She is

reeling under the pressure and dejection of a married woman who is no better than an

unpaid servant. She has to give pleasure to her husband and for pleasing him; she must

be, “A willing body at night, a willing pair of hands and feet in the day and an obedient

mouth” (Kapur 231). She is marginalized in her own family by sadistic social

atmosphere. She thinks of freedom from stress and depression. She thinks of a fine job

thinking that “with good job comes independence” (Kapur 4) so, she joins as a teacher

but this job also does not keep her free from distress and trauma of discrimination.

Indian Society prefers a baby-boy rather than a baby-girl. “Manju Kapur gently

digs at the Indian attitude of preferring a baby-boy to a baby-girl in the novel”

(Gnanamony107). When her daughter Anuradha is four, Astha is conceived again. Her

mother brings in a poojari to perform a special pooja to propitiate the gods to grant them

a boy for Astha. Having given birth to Himansha a son, She does not feel substandard to

anyone in the society and the family members are thankful to her because they feel “the

family is complete at last” (Kapur 68). Astha also feels happy about her motherhood like
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a married woman but she does not like the gender-discrimination. She is much

traumatized at the uninterested response of members of the family and society at her

daughter, Anuuradha’s birthday. But she obtains an appraisal and sanction of motherhood

after the birth of her son--Himanshu. She abhors such a false notion and discrimination

between a daughter and a son; such an outlook of Indian traditional society is injurious to

equal status of women who “feel caught up in the web of daily life”(Kapur 84) and fall a

victim to tension and depression that is “the disease of modern life”(Kapur 76). The

narrow-minded socio-cultural tradition is responsible for such a dilemma of women in

our society ‘where we must recognize the critical role played by popular culture in

reinforcing prejudices against women’. Manju Kapur has responded harshly against

unequal treatment of women in our family and society. Women must have their equal

position like men in the socio-economic set of our society. We have to revolutionize our

traditional prejudices against women and act as equal partners in our life.

Astha has to lead her life in a pitiful condition. She experiences suffocation with

her responsibility to the increasing needs of members of the family forced on her. Her

condition turns into poorest of the poor though she is a teacher in the position of a

married woman. Her husband is also very much unconcerned to her feeling and emotion,

which stretches her agony. Her position becomes submissive like that of unpaid servants.

Socio-political, economic and cultural stuff are responsible for her dependent and

subjugated condition. As Karim Kapadia shows, “It appears […] the community allows

women to do only unpaid work within her home and forces them to be utterly dependent
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on their husbands. But these husbands are often irresponsible men her father being one

such” (Kapadia 79).

Astha responds against men’s insensitive behavior towards women’s dilemma.

She walks against traditional attitude of traditional society that woman should be like

earth. She should hold and live with the burden of the family and obey strictly according

to the conventional norms of the society. She should not open her mouth against the

harassments imposed on her by her husband or her in-laws because religion does not

permit her to disclose the matter against her husband and her in-laws, however atrocious

they maybe. She cannot take up her personal injustices. Women and untouchables have

no place in their system of success and survival. Whosoever disobeys is bound to face

rejection. But the heroine of the novel Astha pooh-poohs the conventional views of the

society. She anchors her personal identity ignoring the traditionalist thoughts of her

family. According to her view, “Religion is a choice as much as other thing” (Kapur 89).

She rebels against her husband and challenges the conventional barriers enforced on

women. She turns to Pipeelika a Hindu Brahmin girl who has married Aijaz Akhtar Khan

a sensitive Muslims lecturer in History. Peepilika is a Postmodern feminist. She cares a

hoot to societal norms and injunctions. Astha welcomes Pipeelika’s ideas of love and

marriage and gradually is drawn towards her. Peepilika’s boldness astonishes Astha.

Pipeelika anchors her right to marry the man of her desire like Ammu of Arundhati Roy’s

The God of Small Things and Saru of Dehpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror.

Radical lesbian theorists state that, “refusing heterosexuality, women could fatally

undermine patriarchy” (Tolan 331). Astha poses an eye for an eye to her husband
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Hemant turning to lesbianism in relationship with Pipeelika who is also the prey of social

aggression, as she becomes a widow after the death of her husband in a riot. Robert

Gnanamony comments, “As Astha had a substitute-husband in Pipee, she didn’t create a

scene at all in the condom-episode. Rather she thought that if her husband had an extra

‘other’ in his life, she could also have an extra ‘other’, a kind of Old Testament tit for tat

attitude” (Gnanamony 110). Finding herself trapped in traditional socio-political and

cultural system and chained up in inhospitable and antagonistic behavior of her husband

and in-laws, she starts seeking for her fulfillment and more meaningful life turning to the

lesbian relationship with Pipeelika who eases her mind from emotional hassle and gives

pleasure which she does not acquire in relationship with her husband in the state of a

married woman. The researcher wishes to add here that she is conscious of her self-

fulfillment like a Postmodern woman and chooses a life for herself dismantling social

codes that restrict her from asserting her own womanhood. When Astha takes the plunge

into lesbian sex, which is forbidden in India but sanctioned in Postmodernism, there is no

going back. She seeks Pipeelika out and tastes the stolen waters. Manju Kapur’s narrative

is quite raw here:

They were standing. Slowly Pipee put her arms around her. She could feel

her hands on the narrowness of her back, on the beginning spread of her

hips. Gently she undid her blouse hooks, and her bra, looking at her face as

she did so and slowly she continued, feeling her back with her palm,

coming round up towards her breasts, feeling their softness, especially

where the nipples were, feeling them again and again, in no hurry to reach
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any conclusion. They were enclosed in a circle of silence, the only sound,

the sound of their breaths, close together and mingled (Kapur 230-231).

This is a clear sexual transgression unapproved by the sex taboos in the Indian cultural

ethos. Selen Aktari in his thesis states that “Transgression of the strictly constructed

boundaries is welcomed” (Aktari 5) in the Postmodern context. Turning to lesbianism

and challenging the social code, Astha deepens her association with Pipeelika. According

to Subash Chandra , “Many of these lesbians identified themselves as lesbian feminists to

emphasize their connection to all women and many of them identify as lesbian separatists

to stress the connection they felt to lesbians everywhere and the strength they got from

being with other lesbians”(Chandra 110).

A lesbian practitioner is a threat to male “egocentricism” (Wikipedia). This being

so, it blinds men to the dilemma and pathetic situation of women and challenged the

patriarchal ideology which has deprived women from the socio-economic and political

rights and emotional fulfillment trapping them to be submissive and subjugated.

Postmodern writers like Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy, Bharati Mukherjee,

Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahagal and Manju Kapur have unraveled

men’s indisputable dominance in family matters and social affairs. They have focused on

the troubles of females in common and Indian women in particular. Manju Kapur like

Shashi Deshpande has concentrated on the women’s problems and dug out the

possibilities of their liberation from the dreadful authority of male chauvinism

challenging man-made discriminations.

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Deshpande’s protagonist Manjari in Moving On is different from the protagonist

of Manju Kapur. Manju Kapur’s Astha, the protagonist of A Married Woman is different.

She turns into a lesbian in order to quest for emotional fulfillment and challenge the ego-

centricism of her husband unlike Manjari of Deshpande, who looks for heterosexual love

outside marriage for her self-fulfillment and handles sex like drinking water. Astha is

unusual even from Virmati of Manju Kapur’s first novel Difficult Daughters who

transgresses social code having married the man of her own wish against the desires of

her mother like Ammu of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Saru of

Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror. Being cheated and dominated by their husbands

these women fight and rebel against their suppression. In their stress and emotional

distress, they don’t bend down to surmount rather break the rules of society. Ammu gives

up her life on the altar of conventional discrimination against women who remain

depressed, unhappy and victim of domination for ages. But Astha of A Married Woman

takes a diverse, secure and protected path of rebellion against male chauvinism. She

neither breaks herself nor becomes violent in the violation of conventional notion of

society rather she turns into more severe in her attack on the traditional customs of socio-

cultural set up of established patriarchal system in turning herself into a lesbian. In this

way she hits two birds with a single stone. She defies male chauvinism of her husband on

the one hand while on the other, she pleases the emotions of her longings with Pipeelika.

Astha is nervous with excitement. The text says,

Sensing how she felt, Pipee took her time, touching every crevice of her

body with her mouth. The sweaty patches of her armpits with small stiff
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hair beginning to poke out, the soft fold of flesh where the arm joined the

torso, the hard bony part behind her ears, the deep crease between her

buttocks, the hairiness between her thighs. In between they talked, the talk

of discovery and attraction, of the history of a three month relationship, the

teasing and pleasure of an intimacy that was complete and absolute,

expressed through minds as much as bodies. Afterwards Astha felt strange,

making love to a woman took getting used to. And it also felt strange,

making love to a friend instead of an adversary (Kapur 231).

To the Indian patriarchal society, Astha’s choice is deviant; but she has no qualms

about it. She boldly takes this step; as a protest and also as a willing choice. Both the

women are victims: Astha is pushed down under by Hemant; her needs are not met with

him, while Peepilika is the victim of societal, communal and political violence and

becomes a widow when her husband is killed in a communal riot. If there is any violence

whether household or social, women are more pulverized in our society. After the death

of her husband Pipeelika has lost everything. Now nothing is left to her to lose. But she

doesn’t lose her heart. Astha also unlike Manisha in Anita Desai’s The Voices in the City

does not like mere survival and passive suffering. She does not make suicidal attempt like

Manisha. But she rebels for her rights.

With more and more creative artists, choose homosexual issues for their creative

enterprise, the same-sex story may not be a taboo any longer for any Indian artist. As has

been observed by Joji John Panicker observes,

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Earlier, novels on same-sex relationships were rare in Indian writing in

English. But in the past couple of years, this scenario is undergoing a

change. Vanita and Kidwai (2000) examine the unchartered territory of the

Indian archive on homoerotic love. Queer scholar, Ruth Vanita’s work on

Indian sexualities is both prolific and covers a wide range of queer

representations, from historical to the literary and popular culture. Mayur

Patel’s novel, Vivek and I, is about a teacher who fancies a student in his

school. Raj Rao, a Professor of Literature in Pune, wrote Hostel Room 131

— a novel tracing a budding love story in the hostel of an Engineering

college. Incidentally, his novel, The Boyfriend (2003) is among the first gay

novels written in English in India. Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine, a collection

of short stories was published in 2010. Continuing the trend, Ghalib Shiraz

Dhalla’s novel The Exiles, is about a homosexual man’s extra-marital

relationship. While queer fiction in English flourishes, there is relatively

less noise about it in regional languages (Panicker 02).

Under the umbrella of Postmodernism, Queer theory appeared in the beginning of

1990s out of feminist studies, lesbian studies and gay. It assumes that sexual identities are

a function of outward manifestations. It also takes up the issues related to the age-long

binary constructions of sexuality. Queer theory mainly explores the tensions of the

categorization of gender and sexuality. Queer theorists claim that identities are not fixed

because identities keep on changing and they consist of varied components and to

identify an individual on the basis of just one feature is, therefore, incorrect. Queer is less
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an identity than a critique of identity. Uncommon sexual practices like same sex

experience comes in to India along with India’s globalization. This uncommon sexual

escapade becomes an accompanying part of the increasing consumer class from the 1980s

to 1990s and the economic liberalization of the 1990s saw a change in approaches to

sexuality. Scholars theorize that

The ‘new woman’ who emerged during the period, signified by and

celebrated for her sexual overtness, marks a departure from the previous

decades in which she is known and praised for sexual conservativeness.

Ironically, however, she continues to be policed and disciplined by the

dictates of heterosexual marriage and motherhood during this period,

something that various aspects of cultural production encourage. The

lesbian’s sexuality re-defines the very idea of the ‘new woman’. Her

sexuality, even when not overt, suggests a disengagement from

heterosexuality, even when marriage and motherhood still occur. The

stakes in confining women’s sexuality to heterosexuality is clear when we

examine the language of the nationalist attacks (Nair 2).

Even though feminism and postmodernism have a shared terrain, as has been

observed by Michelle Denby, “Like postmodernism, feminism challenges the founding

assumptions of the modernist legacy, in particular its androcentric knowledge rooted in

the subject/object, rational/irrational dichotomies” (Denby 01). Queer studies are

correctives to nationalist prejudice against homosexuality which deals that same-sex wish

is ‘western’, Sridevi K. Nair points out the Queer studies

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Have the unfortunate effect of institutionalizing studies of non-heterosexual

and non-heteronormative desire as a separate field of inquiry. Although

Vanita has argued elsewhere that lesbian feminist ideals should not be

separate from feminist ideals in general, her first two volumes have since

spawned a number of works that address sexuality as a separate sphere. The

theoretical parameters of these works, based in recovery and visibility for

the named queer subject, have had the unfortunate effect of creating a field

of ‘sexuality studies’ separate from feminist studies (Nair 18).

Writing about the lesbian subject is an uncomfortable topic in Indian society and Manju

Kapur would have been so bold enough to go about it. It is almost entirely absent within

the Indian canon.

Lesbian culture may have been institutionalized within the western academia. But

the Indian situation is different. Lesbian is one positioned as an ‘outsider’ to the Indian

central societal discourse. It is a deviant self which has been marginalized, vilified,

fictionalized and fantasized. Astha is in the disruptive power of lesbian desire and it is

difficult to extricate her from it. However, both of them would be a little discreet. Manju

Kapur writing with a postmodernist bent through her domestic novel A Married Woman

uses the metropolis of New Delhi to observe lesbian wish as the way to the feminist

growth of her female protagonist Astha. This married protagonist’s intimate association

with the widow of a Muslim campaigner murdered by Hindu fanatics in the Babri Masjid

imbroglio is quite unusual in the Indian literary canon until then. Their secret wishes re-

formulate the very terrain of sexual category and domestic sphere. Going against the
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accepted heterosexual milieu would not only be unacceptable but also dangerous. They

would even be stoned at and the married woman would have to face diverse and domestic

and community ostracism. No woman in India who would love one another and to live

honourably together.

The present researcher sees lesbianism in the text as a domestic sphere of

resistance; it also lifts questions about what accurately it would get to sustain choices to

heterosexuality. Even though the youthful Peepilika, and the wedded woman Astha return

to the limits of domesticity which is destined for them through relentless socializing by

society and family, there is a visible change in their domestic sphere from then on.

Ultimately, this offers a compelling alternative for women whose lives are restricted by

the forces of domesticity as the ‘true sign’ of womanhood itself.

Both the concepts--feminism and postmodernism challenge gender oppression.

Whereas postmodern feminist ‘purists’ take up an entire refusal of Modernism as part of

an unbending commitment to postmodernism, ‘modernist revisionists’ try to reformulate

modernism for a postmodern age. Between these poles, a series of postmodern feminist

theorists have recourse in various guises to some features of modernity, disclosing the

complexity for any political endeavour of entirely distancing itself from universalizing

humanist doctrines or values, however provisionally these are structured.

Women are prejudiced and discriminated in the conventional socio economic

culture of patriarchy system. Feminism opposes this in tooth and nail. Women are

expected to play just support roles and not key roles in the families or communities. This

we can understand from the lines of Chandra, “Women’s voice against injustice and
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inequality to unravel the fact that feminism is the consequence of the culture or society

shaped and governed by men to suit their needs and interests regardless to women’s basic

needs and happiness. In this man made society everything is meant for the pleasure and

profit of male sexuality” (Chandra107).

Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman shows that Postmodern women will never bear

inequality, prejudice and discrimination like a holy cow that is the concept of

conventional families in India. Now the women look their status in each and every

moment and if they discover any discrimination, they are very fast to their feminine

assertion and emphasize their identity transgressing traditional customs and religious

faith. They transgress the traditional laws. They are forced to be emotionally starved and

socio-economically deprived. Astha does the same when she identifies that her husband

is failing in satisfying her emotion and passion. Her husband Hemant has never

understood and respected her deeper self to be loved. As text shows, “When she was with

Hemant she felt like a woman of straw, her inner life dead, with a man who nothing”

(Kapur 287). Astha even dreams of having intimate relationship with Aijaz, Pipeelika’s

husband. As she is drifting away from Hemant, Astha interestingly entertains a dream

wherein she is locked in a long, deep kiss. This kind of inner, secret enjoyment could be

found only in Postmodern Feminist writings. The text shows the dream sequence:

That night as the pain receded and she fell asleep, she dreamt. She and

another person were riding close together in a scooter-rickshaw. The person

turned, it was Aijaz with long silky hair, which brushed across her face.

Astha leaned closer, the corners of their mouths met and pressed, alone
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against the commotion of the street. Slowly Astha opened her mouth, and

bit on the hair. She didn’t let go, even when the scooter stopped, and they

got out, her mouth firmly clamped on the rich, long, black, thick, sweetly

smelling, dusty hair (Kapur 154).

Astha’s desires are sexual. She is in the grip of an aura of dissatisfaction, sexual

dissatisfaction. May be she wants more sex than her husband. It may also be that she

wants to come out of her “sinking into oblivion” (Agarwal 171) statutes. Astha enjoys a

palpable sense of joy that exudes an effervescent love of life with another man, as the

saying goes, ‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is sweeter still’. It all

boils up to Astha’s boredom and monotony of the routine married life. She feels some

free space for her so that she can stretch a little and carve a name and identity for her,

rather than existing as a mere appendage of her husband. As Agarwal says, “Her desire

for companionship, to be an equal partner in the enterprise of marriage, life and living

was out rightly rejected by the too-practical Hemant” (Agarwal 172). Hemant’s advice to

Astha is, “Grow up Az, one can’t be courting forever. […] I have no time for all these

games” (Kapur 66). Hemant gives primacy to his business contacts; he wants to establish

himself as a big business magnate. He flies to South Korea and Japan looking for the best

deals. He always goes alone; he invariably comes back in great good humour, “With

generous presents for everyone: perfume, chocolate, sweaters, jeans, toys, Japanese dolls,

games for the children, underwear for Astha, toiletries, soaps, creams, shampoo, kitchen

and electronic equipment. Gradually their house acquired the gloss of a house with

money” (Kapur 71). Due to his visible absence from home, Astha, in all practicality, has
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become a single mother. She begins to feel like being in a claustrophobic situation.

Claustrophobia is characteristically thinking to have two key symptoms: fright of

suffocation and fright of limitation. A typical claustrophobic will fright limitation in at

least one, if not quite a few, of the subsequent spots: cars, trains, airplanes, subways,

closed rooms, basements, small rooms, elevators, submerged caves etc. In addition, the

fright of limitation can cause some claustrophobia to fright unimportant issues for

example waiting in queue at a super market or sitting in a haircutter’s chair simply out of

a fright of confinement to a single space. In the novel in reference, Astha is being left

alone and to manage her affairs leads to her claustrophobia.

The researcher does not see Astha as a victim of the persecution mentality

syndrome. Domestic happenings make her physically and emotionally tired. Even though

Astha wants to go to her husband against her wish, the reverse is happening, as as the text

shows, “She lifted her feet to go towards him, but found herself walking to her bed. She

was tired, her feet were telling her, and tired women cannot make good wives” (Kapur

154). Disloyalty in love with her husband and discrimination meted out to her by turned

her life suffocating and depressed. But she comes out from her melancholy and

discrimination, when Pipeelika comes into her life like a fresh breeze.

Astha’s effort to adjust and accommodate herself with all these problems of

children, husband, servant and job makes her sick. She starts having regular, headaches

but giving up the job is immature because there is a change in Astha after the birth of

Himanshu. The text says, “Astha who earlier was a woman who only wanted love to a

woman who valued independence” (Kapur 72). Despite these emotional voids in her
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conjugal life, Astha toes the line of an ideal housewife confirming to the demands of

tradition. She does not protest but dutifully obeys her husband. Her position is “like a

catalyst whose presence is never noticed yet whose absence makes a difference”

(Agarwal 172). Astha has transformed from being a woman who just wants to love a

woman who values freedom. She is sick of sacrifice. Her marital bonding with Hemant

has grown to be disappointing and stifling. Taslima Nasrin, another notable

spokesperson of feminism has also assessed such situations, which refuse the women of

their rights. She asserts that, “I have seen that attitude in all fundamentalists: be it

Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, whatever. It is the same. They are opposed to the

liberation of women and their rights to enjoy the same right as men” (Nasrin 47).

In order to ascertain her independence, Astha becomes a school teacher. Shortly

she becomes the right hand of the headmistress. Astha’s world keeps expanding. With the

entry of the social activist Aijaz Akhtar Khan (husband of Pipeelika), her well-led plans

goes awry and the pedestal on which she has ensconced her husband is dismantled. Petty

vexation starts filling in the hitherto unseen gaps. Astha longs to be pregnant, to be a

mother to fulfill these gaps. The birth of Anuradha fills both the parents with joy.

In this novel, Manju Kapur has openly rebelled against the social code of marriage

in which women are supposed to play a passive role in their in-law’s house. They have to

accept the customary views of male members of the family whether they like them or not.

Their husband’s ideas are imposed on them without caring a bit for their emotions and

personal needs. This invariably pushes them to untold sufferings. They can’t voice their

agony and discontentment against their husbands over their distressed relationship. Their
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worries against their husbands and in-laws would bring them to total seclusion from

social constructs and leave them to the place where they would have no asylum. They are

forced to be enduring and sacrificing wives without any care of their individual

requirements. Manju Kapur has defied such conventional views of Indian society, having

turned Astha to the unchartered road to lesbianism. Nayantara Sahgal has also

condemned such situations of Indian women in her novel Rich Like Us. She has criticized

insensitive approach of man towards his wife. In Nayantara Sahgal’s novel Ram Swoop

marries Rose though he is already married to Mona. But he doesn’t have a sense of

fulfillment. He builds up another love affair with Marcella and reveals it to Rose, which

troubles her sentiment. Rose worries a lot after this incident. She is distressed and there is

a violent storm inside her threatening to burst. Nayantara Sahgal’s women characters also

react against total devotion to their husbands. Nayantara Sahgal states, “Her anguish and

rage fought for an outlet and gathered a gale inside her without a word said, as music

threatening to burst but not bursting” (Sahgal 115).

Lesbian relationship has also entered into the Indian cinema with much fanfare.

Deepa Mehta’s sensational ‘adult only’ film Fire (1996) carries the same-sex relationship

on a broader scale. The film shows why a middle class married woman seeks someone

like her from her own gender for emotional and sexual support as follow,

The film flashes forward to Sita, a newly married woman on honeymoon

with her husband Jatin, who is distant and shows little interest in Sita. Jatin

is in a typical joint-family arrangement -- he lives with his older brother

Ashok, his sister-in-law Radha, his paralysed mother Biji and the family
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servant Mundu. Ashok and Jatin run a small store that sells food and rents

videotapes. Jatin shows no care for Sita, and she learns that he only agreed

to the arranged marriage in order to put an end to Ashok's nagging. Jatin

continues to date his modern Chinese girlfriend, and Sita does not rebuke

him. The rest of Jatin’s home is not rosy either. Biji is immobile and

speechless after a stroke, and Sita and Radha must constantly attend to her.

Sita spends her days slaving in the hot kitchen, and finds herself lonely and

frustrated at night because Jatin is out with his girlfriend. She yearns to

break out of this stifling situation and yearns for an emotional outlet.

It is revealed that Radha faces a similar problem. Many years ago, Ashok

came under the influence of a Swamiji, a local religious preacher. He

teaches that desires are the cause of suffering and must be suppressed.

Ashok is completely taken by these monastic teachings and suppresses all

his desires. The Swamiji teaches that sexual contact is permitted only as a

means for procreation, and Radha is infertile. Accordingly, Ashok aims to

stamp out all his desires and has not slept with Radha for the past thirteen

years. He puts Radha through an excruciating ritual in which they lie

motionless next to each other whenever he wants to test his resolve. Radha

is racked with guilt over her inability to have children and driven to

frustration by the ritual. While the older Radha remains bound by tradition

and subdued into silence, the younger Sita refuses to accept her fate. Sita's

attitude slowly spills over onto Radha, who becomes slightly more
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assertive. One evening, shunned by their husbands and driven to

desperation by their unfulfilled longings, Radha and Sita seek solace in

each other and become lovers. Overjoyed at finding satisfaction in this

manner, they continue it in secret. They eventually realise their love for

each other and start looking for ways to move out. The pair’s daily antics

and adventures are witnessed by Biji, who disapproves but is unable to stop

them (Wikipedia).

Critiquing Fire, Indian Feminist critics Mary E John and Tejaswini Niranjana say,

The movie Fire ends up arguing that the successful assertion of sexual

choice is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition—indeed, the

sole criterion—for the emancipation of women. Thus the patriarchal

ideology of 'control' is first reduced to pure denial – as though such control

does not also involve the production and amplification of sexuality – and is

later simply inverted to produce the film's own vision of women's liberation

as free sexual ‘choice’ (John and Niranjana 581).

Whatsoever rebellious potential Fire might have had (as a film that creates noticeable the

‘naturalised’ supremacy of heterosexuality in current culture, for instance) is abolished by

its mostly masculinist hypothesis that men should not ignore the sexual desires of their

spouses, lest they should become lesbian.

So many feminist writers have pointed out on the violence committed against

women and written a lot about the attempts made by governments and NGO’s to protect

women from sexual exploitation and harassment. Different laws have been passed by the
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Govt. of India to secure them from domestic or social violence but crime against women

goes on unabated. The Times of India Tiruchy edition reported on May 15, 2017, a

horrific incident like the Nirbaya1 incident committed a couple of years ago in New

Delhi. Three men kidnapped a young woman and raped her in the passing vehicle. The

newspaper report goes as follows:

A 26-year old woman was gang-raped by three men in a moving car on

Saturday morning somewhere along the Gurgaon-Delhi border and later

thrown out of the car in Delhi’s Najafgarh. The woman was allegedly

abducted from outside her house as she was returning from Delhi, reports

Gayas Eapen. The woman, originally from Sikkim, had gone to Connaught

Place to meet a friend. The duo went for a movie and later had a meal and

drinks till mid-night. The woman there after took a cab back to Gurgaon

along with her friend. Between 1.30 am and 2 am on Saturday, as she

walked home after being dropped off nearby, three men forced her into a

car and drove off. She was taken to an isolated stretch, where she was gang-

raped inside the car (The Times of India 1)

This incident has taken place on the public road; but similar incidents take place within

the four walls of housing units but they are not reported. Laws simply can’t resolve

women’s crisis until the conventional approach of the society changes. The national

crime bureau has registered the increase in number of violent crimes against women in

recent years.
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Despite the aggression against women continues in many ways, women,

nevertheless, have covered a long distance towards equality. Feminist movement has

contributed a significant role in this regard, and instilled strength and courage in them.

The first woman Indian President Pratibha Patil has made a point in this regard:

“Beginning with their determined efforts in the days before our freedom, today, our

women continue to strive to transform the social order in a more just and equal manner”

(Patil 1).

That women do not lag behind in matters of creativity is stressed in Manju

Kapur’s A Married Woman. Aijaz wants Astha to write a script for a play that he wants to

stage about Babri Masjid imbroglio. Astha does not seem to have confidence enough to

prepare the script. But Aijaz has recognized the talent of Astha and he wants her to do it.

When Astha shows the script, “Aijaz liked the script” (Kapur 112). When Astha is

admired openly for the excellent script, she loves to look at Aijaz on the stage. Manju

Kapur goes into Astha’s inner recesses and brings out Astha’s admiration of Aijaz:

Astha loved looking at Aijaz on stage, allowing herself frequent covert

glances. He was of medium height, his body compact. His face was the

clear delicate luminous brown of freshly rained-on earth. His lips were a

darker brown than his skin, and his eyes were black and narrow. While

working he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, allowing Astha to view at her

leisure his round strong arms, hairless, smooth and muscular. He had

prematurely grey hair, which, thick and springy, fell about his face and

neck in ways that suggested a good barber. He must be vain of his hair,
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thought Astha, knowing how attractive the grey made a young face look

(Kapur 112-113).

The family trip to Goa is not a comfortable one to Hemant and Astha. Astha’s

simple wishes are not fulfilled there. She wants to buy an antique silver box priced at Rs.

5000. To Astha it is so beautiful and she falls in love with it immediately. Astha seeks

permission from Hemant whether she could buy the box. The immediate reaction of

Hemant is typically of patriarchy: “You must be out of your mind” (Kapur 164). Her

husband’s tone and the blank refusal hurt her finer sentiments. She is an earning member.

She has never said anything whenever Hemant has chosen to squander money on airline

tickets and hotels. Astha reminds her husband that she also earns. She asks him why she

shouldn’t buy the silver box even if it is a little more priced. Hemant snorts his male

dominance in his reply: “‘You earn! What you earn, now that is really something, yes

that will pay for this holiday’” (Kapur 165). In the taxi, “She didn’t want his touch, his

nearness to compete with the pureness of her despair” (Kapur 165).

She gets through the rest of the day somehow, sick and wretched. The beaches were

lovely, and she feels resentful of their beauty, resentful at being forced to register

anything besides the pain within.

In the midst of her married life, Astha feels like a caged bird. Her situation is

claustrophobic. She could not find relief immediately. Even drugs are of no use. Ira Jha

attributes the reason to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This is Elaine Showalter’s concept of

CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Ira Jha writes,

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According to psychologists, the physical pain originating due to mental

anguish is generally the ‘consequence of unhealthy restriction on some

one’s perception’. Astha too is a prey to such restrictions. Social pressure

forces her to repress her instinctive drives and reaction, which constantly

seek an outlet, thus creating tension in her mind. The other reason for

disturbance, as cited by the psychologists, is breaking up of or shattering of

the ideal image of a person very close to the sufferer. As is the case with

Astha, the initial days of marriage had revived a hope of ‘new-life’ in her.

She idealized her husband ‘to be man of her search for her dreams’ who

would love her eternally. She thought her search for her soul-mate was over

in Hemant. Her husband loved her parents like their own son and he was

free from patriarchal bias. But with time Astha realized that it was a most

irrational and impractical thought to nurse the hope that a ‘man’ (whether

foreign returned or educated abroad) would give up his typical nature, his

superiority complex and his bias; imbibed in him by patriarchal society.

Thus the shattering of Hemant’s ideal image in Astha’s mind, gave her

immense tension, which took the form of her headaches (Jha 78-79).

It is startling to note that even parents are not impartial in their treatment of their

children; boys are pampered and girls are kept under tight security. A very recent survey

of National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) is very surprising which discloses the

inequitable approach of parents against their daughters. NSSO exposes discrimination by

families against girls on the problem of their studies. This mentality continues outside
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also and stops women from receiving the same remuneration for equal amount of work.

The torment of women against their suppression and their subjugation of being broken by

conventional society and their own families are mirrored in many ways. Though we can

boast of extraordinary achievements of Indian women like Sunita Williams, Saniya

Mirza, Kiran Mazundar and Kiran Bedi, a large number of working women face sexual

harassment in their homes and working places. They are deprived of equal status and

integrity. They don’t have a say in decision making processes like men or a few honored

women like Sonia Gandhi, Mayawathi, Jeyalalitha and others. The suffering of down-

trodden women is unspeakable as we see in the torment of Sohini the woman of Mulkraj

Anand’s novel Untouchable. But Postmodern women wouldn’t bear violence imposed on

them. They lift up a brave face against such harsh treatment. They are always in hunt of

their fulfillment. They become rebellious when there is intrusion upon their liberty.

Though women are motivated for freedom from traditional restrictions which distinguish

between man and woman they have been endowed with special power by nature. From

time immemorial they have been performing at the centre stage of power. History bears

witness of such matters. Robert Green writes in his book The Art of Seduction:

“Seduction is nothing but mental witchcraft-psychological persuasion that follows

pattern-attraction, a taste of sensual pleasure, then once the man is hooked, a withdrawal,

forcing him into a pursuit of favors once enjoyed and then ultimately, slavery to the

woman” (qtd. in Nangia 1).

In order to stand on her own legs, Astha takes up teaching in a school and earns a

name for her. Pipeelika tells Astha that she needs a change. She would go to the U.S.A
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for a PhD degree. Both of them try to release themselves from social restrictions having

adopted the means of empowerment. They are always in search of a place of their own

where no one will exploit them. They will have their own identity and they would be able

to enjoy physical satisfaction and emotional relationship. When Pipeelika takes her leave,

all that remains for Astha is “her loneliness, her desire for steady companionship, the

need for commitment” (Kapur 284). After goodbye kisses, Astha suddenly feels a chasm

in her mind. She runs to her car and buries her face on the steering wheel. She takes a

good, long look at the void she has desperately tried to plug through loving Pipee. At this

moment of splitting, the novelist poses a couple of questions: “What would it be like to

be painfully separate having known togetherness? How would she live” (Kapur 285).

In this novel Manju Kapur has registered her aggression against patriarchy through

her created characters, Astha and Peepilika.

Post-modernism and its practice have sought to deconstruct the function of ‘Meta-

Narratives’ as advantaged accounts of world matters, historical and contemporary.

Despite this, such narratives, even if inadequately comprehend, stay at the heart of much

public discussion and continue to form global and national policies. James Ferguson

states his view in his article as “grand narratives are mobilised in assessing or suggesting

‘grand strategies’ for ancient empires and modern states” (Ferguson 15). Writing a text

in hetronormative feminist or lesbian context deconstructs the Grand Narratives and it

leads into Little-Narratives. Astha’s longing for a same gender relationship in A Married

Woman is more appropriately classified as a Postmodern Feminist piece of writing, rather

than a hundred per cent lesbian literature2. The text is a non-heteronormative one, where
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the bodily desire of a female breaks sexual and gender roles formed for women by

removing the woman’s need for a man.

A renowned writer for gender and sexuality, Esther Saxey, portrays this feminist

progress as an act to myths of shared, narrated experiences amongst women:

It was a method of developing women’s awareness of gender oppression

but not by introducing them to theories produced elsewhere; ideally, the

women of each group extrapolated from their shared experiences an

analysis that was both communal and deeply personal. This is certainly the

case of the groups presented in fiction (Saxey 17).

Second-wave feminist narratives that women can refer to as assertion of their own

practices, and chances for explicit discoveries of buried needs. Lisa Hogeland describes

these terms Consciousness Raising (CR) texts. Conscious Raising texts prove to have

remarkable influence on the radicalization of the feminist progress from the 1970’s to

1980’s for the reason that they advertise feminist thoughts to the reading people. They are

more successful than any other political group, asserts Hogeland, for the reason that they

“moderat[ed]” and “soften[ed]” (Hogeland ix) feminist principles by eliminating them

from a dominantly political discourse and “personalizing […] feminist social criticism”

(Hogeland ix). They express the reality and power of a fundamental, non-hegemonic

structure to an otherwise unknowing viewers; but the discourse is not single-sided.

Furthermore exactly, feminist fiction deconstructs traditional theory from women’s

understandings in narrative and from readers’ encounters with those understandings, and

vice versa. According to Judith Roof, narrative continues an “engagement with our
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concepts of culture” (Roof xv), a conversation backward and forward from reader to text.

Second-wave feminist movement employs CR texts to get lead of this link between

reader and narrative to urge ‘consciousnesses of pre-existing ‘subjugation’.

Lisa Hogeland and Esther Saxey pick up on an absolutely essentialist viewpoint on

CR narratives. Feminist narratives are exploring a new ‘subjugation’: the projected reader

wants just to face ‘feminist societal criticism’ stated as an experience in a text. The

rebellious experience, narrated inside a patriarchal formation, helps out the reader

understand its principles stayed alive before that reader was made conscious of them, and

the connotations those beliefs could have on the reader’s own world, constructed upon

same normative principles as the narrative. Like Carol Patrice Christ’s explanation of

‘awakening’ in her book Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest,

female characters (heterosexual and lesbian) and their characters are raised to a womanly

need which already stays alive inside heterosexual milieu. The women characters are

themselves broken out when they understand that they psychologically and sexually wish

for woman, and that need is a lawful element of their individuality.

Bonnie Zimmerman states that, a sort of CR of the lesbianism inside policy and

narrative happened first time between the 1970s and the 1980s in the United States of

America. Lesbianism, earlier ‘unspeakable’, all of a sudden establishes a language inside

narrative to function “what had never been” (Zimmerman 451). Zimmerman contrasts

the new occurrence of lesbian narrative to feminism and its finding of “‘otherness,’

suggesting dimensions previously ignored yet necessary to understand fully the female

condition and the creative work born from it” (Zimmerman 451). Lesbian texts of the
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1970’s and 1980’s had more feminist forms of narrative: they were texts of growing

individuality based in non-normative sexual need, reflective of, and in dialogue with, the

lesbian political progress at the moment. Politics influenced the narratives, and the

narratives associated to the political theory to its viewers in an applicable method.

However both sorts of feminist texts mirrored brand new power of the woman inside

social criticism, politics, and narrative.

Suzanne Keen describes the character-reader association as “a vicarious,

spontaneous sharing of affect […] provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by

hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (Keen 214). Suzzanne states that

empathy varies from ‘sympathy’ for the reason that an empathic individual ‘reflects’

another’s emotions, while a sympathetic individual distances herself or himself from

another’s feeling; sympathy is an ‘anxiety’ of feeling. Narrative empathy permits the

reader to feel awakenings to criticisms in narrative exclusive of requiring earlier feel of

that specific awakening; like in this novel from India, empathy is promising across

diversities of position, time, and gender identities. The proposed reader of the text is the

reader who empathizes with the central character and narrative’s awakening to wish. This

narrate exceeds recognizing that these central characters face non-normative wish, and

empathizes with the wish by experiencing an explicit awakening. The researcher thinks

that in this novel, while a reader empathizes with the awakenings of narrative and the

central character to lesbian wish, the reader’s own awakening gets away from

understanding and acceptance of that wish (lesbian or heterosexual) to the understanding

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that non-normative wish is genuine in heterosexual constructions are outer surface of the

narrative.

Esther Saxey builds a cautious difference between narrative empathy and

pedagogy in this custom of diffusion of beliefs. The texts related to Feminist may be

didactic in manner, are more victorious in spreading feminist principles while they are

not depending on political language or detached central characters; relatively, more

nuanced narratives are conditional on females within and without the narrative as the

“source of their own enlightenment” (Saxey 18). This difference retrieves to Ismat

Chughtai’s lawyer’s assert in justification of Lihaf [The Quilt] which the feeling of the

girl storyteller can be comprehended as an argument with woman homoeroticism.

According to Sanjiv Kumar, Chughtai asserts that she has never ever heard of lesbian text

before drafting her text, and simply writes about that “which she cannot understand”

(Kumar 138) with the intention of enhanced understand it as a whole image. Chughtai

narrates the experience, however the thought on trial is the readers’ understandings of

that experience, ‘provoked by witnessing’ the young woman’s stun at noticing Begum

Jaan’s quilt moves.

Feminist writer Carol Patrice Christ views on this relationship between a myth of

tales and their empathizing readers’ giving awakenings. The reader’s awakening is a

emotion of justification by the better compilation of text that she cannot get in a

patriarchal society. Carol Patrice Christ reveals Hogeland’s theory of CR narratives:

Carol Patrice Christ makes clear that “storytelling within a female community is

necessary for women to understand themselves and for other groups to understand them”
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(Christ 5). Collected works are vital for women for the reason that “male-centered

structures of society and narratives confine femininity to a fixed role in relation to

masculinity” (Christ 32). Christ deals that readers employ this myth to assist them restore

domineering male egocentrism with breaking and anchoring feminism. If not, the female

hazards succumbing to ‘destruction’ of her body and individuality because of the

devastating patriarchal rejection of her ‘story’. The woman character are not depending

on her value as a societal product in the male view when she has a woman-centered

composition to assert wishes which do not conform to her set character. The female does

not submissively wish men, and her sexual behaviour is not decreased to serviceable

traits as “motherhood and wifehood” (Christ 33). For Christ, a collected works of

women’s texts is the most important tool for females to explore and articulate their

doubts regarding the stasis of their gender self.

However, there are differences between heterosexual feminist narratives and the

lesbian narratives (little narrative), the narratives highlight the quicksand of Grand

Narratives. Astha shows the predilection between the typical heterosexual character and

the lesbian character. In Manju Kapur’s novel characters of feminist identity narratives,

on the other part, lean to be grown-up, wedded, and with kids at the moment of their

anchoring individuality. They are matured already in their sexual category when they

understand that those characters do not convey their “individual desires” (Saxey 16).

Naisargi N. Dave assesses the background of lesbianism and its development. She

gives explanation that as in the USA, India faced a awakening of feminist movement in

the 1980s, however ‘lesbianism’ was not at all integrated into its political movement.
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Indian feminists “resisted ‘Western’ signifiers such as ‘lesbian’ in the name of cultural

authenticity” (Dave 597). Dave says, “Same-sex -- desiring activist women” (Dave 597)

copied strong global knots with other lesbian groups at overseas forums and gatherings,

but was not capable to inject feminist politics inside India. Lesbian personality was

whispered by feminism for the sake of patriotism. Indian feminists pooh-poohed a

domestic lesbian movement “in the name of cultural authenticity” (Dave 596-597). Indian

and Lesbian have been reciprocally elite characters for women in India.

Feminist movement in India continued to display patriotic confrontation to lesbian

display throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, despite the great increase of lesbian

networking groups. According to Maya Sharma, the breakthrough of Deepa Mehta’s

famous movie Fire in 1996 caused chaos from the right-wing feminist activists and

politicians due to the explicit visualization of lesbianism, believed by them as “a

manifestation of promiscuous Western morality that would corrupt Indian values and

Indian women” (Sharma 11). Films with lesbianism have created little development in a

decade after Mehta’s movie also. Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI), is a non-

funded Delhi-based autonomous organization for individuals and groups of lesbians,

gays, heterosexual and bisexual, last period of the 1990s, claimed a attention on the rights

for lesbian sex at the 2000 International Women’s Day, but it was rejected because

“sexual terminology would detract from important political issues” (Sharma 14) of

women’s rights. Lesbian women would be permitted to involve in feminist politics just if

they continued unspoken concerning their gender. As a Postmodern Feminist text, A

Married Woman employs the lesbianism only to develop a nationalist feminist critique. A
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Married Woman finds difficult to use lesbian relationship as a passage for its feminist

critique, however, at last, throws out the lesbian issue as a theme of nationalist discourse.

A Married Woman is aptly categorized a Postmodern Feminist text deconstructing

the grand narrative into little narratives. Astha’s lesbian connection with a widow Pipee is

an expression of her feminist arousing inside a male-centered structure. The text’s title

itself shows the type of arousing set up in the text: the narrative identifies the woman

central character foremost by her societal position concerning a man—‘married’—and

her significant maturity—‘woman’ instead of ‘young girl’. The central character is ‘a’

only example out of a broad group of ‘married women’. Carol Patrice Christ and Saxey

highlight the significance of society or group of people mindsets as structures to

encourage women’s sympathy with one another’s narratives. The title institutes the

central character’s societal value earlier than the narrative even starts. Her leading

individuality is categorized by her sexual category and by her lawful bond to a man. The

woman’s individuality is thus firstly sublimated by the societal supremacy of male

power. Astha’s CR will be a fight against the rigidity of the presumptive position given to

her.

Astha and Pipee’s feminist wishes in A Married Woman show rebellious narrative

strategy in Postmodern Feminist literature. The narrative creates only provisional use of a

woman’s arousing to wish for another woman, until its narrative role is no longer related

to the novel’s feminist principles. The lesbianism of the novel is an element of the

narrative tools and cannot be separated from the identity politics of the novel.
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Fundamentally the Indian society is traditionally structured on a platform and

constructed by a heterosexual hybridist idea of masculine and feminine, constituting a

dependant hierarchal binarism where the former is most celebrated and the latter less

honoured. Enclosed within the orthodox cultural setting, most of the patriarchal societies

and specially the Indian society customarily stresses a gender specific and hetero-sexual

behavior from all the individuals and deems only heterosexuality a normative order.

In the Postmodern drift of Indian English fiction, the feminine concept of lesbian

identity is gaining popularity and significance. The breathtaking women authors like

Shobha De, Suniti Namjoshi, Nayantara Saghal and Manju Kapur are some of the Indian

writers who have established the agenda of vociferously tearing the gendered domination

that have dwarfed women and have symbolized an elite space for a lesbian identity in the

realm of Indian English fiction. In the Postmodern segment Lesbian feminism is being

accepted as a separate domain and being voiced as a provocative measure against male

chauvinism that wages a harsh war for identity, throwing overboard the essentialist

example of homosexuality. As Robert Gnanamony concludes in his article, “Manju

Kapur thus through her narrative constructs a feminocentric protest against the

heterocentric, homophobic, and phallocentrically glamorized patriarchy and in doing so

she is rather constrained to present her heroines as lesbians”(Gnanamony117).

Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is a go-ahead attempt to explore women’s

lesbian identity from a woman’s viewpoint in a culturally backed and traditionally

constructed humanist patriarchal society. Judith Butler rightly examines the possibilities

of dislocating the heteronormative gender discourse in her book Gender Trouble:

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The more insidious and effective strategy [for subversion of the patriarchal

power structure] is a thorough-going appropriation and redeployment of

categorizing identity themselves, not merely to contest sex, but to articulate

the convergence of multiple sexual discourses at the site of ‘identity’ in

order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic

(Butler 163).

The very title A Married Woman literally shows the fundamental move of a fully

exhausted conventional Indian married woman saturated with the undesirable facets of

marital bond as a means to salvage her fragmented self. She ventures to subvert the

norms of the androcentric society by deconstructing the taboos of religion, culture and

gender by substituting a passionate harmonious chemistry of a woman –woman

relationship within a matching wavelength of body, mind and soul effecting a whole

divorce of ‘otherness’ with an autonomous sense of ‘oneness’ raised and asserted.

As a feminist, Manju Kapur in her text A Married Woman challenges the

patriarchal rules, deconstructs the phallo-centric structured society, dismantles gendered

oppression, racial discrimination and subverts the east-west patriarchal discourses of

religion and culture. At the present moment, sex is a taboo in India; no body openly

discusses it, nonetheless, all forms of it had been adorned once the walls of the Hindu

temples in India. Sex is so important, yet it is a neglected subject3. Manju Kapur

questions the so-called accepted facet of the essentialist model of a hetero-sexual

hierarchical ladder and endeavours to defy the supremacy in a feminine viewpoint. With

strong courage she articulates a counter discourse of an entirely feminine lesbian identity
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and unleashes the saga of the obliterated women within the Indian frame work. Even

though there is no room for a healthy discussion of sex-related topics in the Indian

society, Manju Kapur takes a lead by taking her lead characters Astha and Pipeelika

through the ‘forbidden track’. The Indian attitude to sex related issues is interestingly

brought out by Avani Bansal in her article, “Let’s Talk about Sex”. She avers,

Lack of a healthy atmosphere to talk about sex affects both men and

women. If a man makes a move, he may be judged of poor character. The

‘manliness’ to pleasure a woman may be too strong a burden for men,

especially since the Indian woman is portrayed as a passive taker of

whatever ‘love’ comes her way. Given the patriarchal mindset that we

inhabit, the scales are often tilted against women. It may be almost taboo

for a woman to be so forthright that ‘she wants it’ (Bansal 10).

Manju Kapur tries a feminist critique in a socio cultural perspective within the

Indian mindset that scrupulously nullifies the social taboo encrusting lesbianism and lean

to overturn the hegemonic Indian traditional values. She hunts for a deconstructed space

and an approved identity for the lesbian self and attempts to reconstruct her ambience to

kick off the revision of the chauvinist prototype of compelled heteronormative sexuality.

She wishes the chemistry of a woman-woman relationship in contrast to the constructed

heterosexual normative order forced by the prejudiced androcentric society. Through her

novel A Married Woman, Manju Kapur intends to subvert the existing order,

reappropriate the patriarchal ideology of ‘universal sisterhood’ and refigure womanhood

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by spreading a theory of ‘difference’ that alters the so- called heteronormative order in a

conservative society.

The protagonist Astha, the daughter of a government servant-father and a

conventional Indian mother lives from a middle class back ground in Delhi. Though

Astha is given a convent education, she is backed by tough cultural and spiritual knots to

which Astha feels conflicting, rootless and unreasonable to acclimatize. she longs for a

radical and emotional relief during her energetic adolescence. She has beautiful painting

talents within her. Her adolescent love relationships with Bunty and Suresh end up as

eventual failures with least fulfillment and tint of a real love. She later realizes that these

love affairs are like mirage and the literal expressions of a tempting infatuation for the

opposite sex more specifically of the adolescent age. Exhausted by the distresses of

adolescence, Astha longs to marry a well-matured romantic groom with modern ideals

and western education.

Much worthy to her expectations Astha gets wedded to an arranged match

Hemant, a man with romantic skin texture who has an American MBA degree and works

as an officer in a private bank. Astha’s married life begins with great pompous

celebrations much to her parent’s pleasure for having fulfilled their duty fruitfully. Astha

enjoys the riches, travels, comforts and joy of a full-fledged marital life. Hemant becomes

to be the most satisfying romantic hero who admires Astha and persuades her painting

skills in the beginning. In course of time Astha begins learning the lessons of life and the

rear side of the people around her through her day to day practical experiences. She starts

losing the consideration and the concern of her husband. Astha attempts to distract herself
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by choosing a teaching career in a school for a low salary. The wealth of Astha’s house

grows with Hemant’s changeover from a bank job to a television business. He needs to

make frequent trips to foreign countries to establish his family status. Firstly Hemant

shows himself as a gentleman with western principles articulating woman’s equality and

his love of having a girl child. But when Astha is pregnant the second time he performs

like a man of patriarchic traditional values wanting to have a son for which he pushes his

mother to carry out rituals and Puja.

At one point of time, Hemant turns a blind eye to Astha’s ill-health condition, her

frequent migraines and her physical yearnings. He firmly refrains from taking care of his

children and helping Astha personally. After one of Hemant’s foreign trips, Astha finds a

set of condoms in his suit case to her disgust. As a cultured and wise male chauvinist,

Hemant handles the situation very diplomatically. The apathetic behaviour of Hemant

pushes Astha to recognize the hurting realities of life. Much to her shock Hemant is

strictly against Astha’s lively involvement in the political event and even mocks at her.

She begins brooding over her humiliating and undervaluing slaving status as a wife and

mother completely tied with domestic work and child nurturing. Astha goes into a state of

dejection that results in a nonstop physical sickness. The couple lacks compatibility and

understanding wherein the patriarchal authority rules over their relationships manifesting

its dilemma in different ways. After her father’s death, Astha’s mother chooses Hemant

as a caretaker of their property since Astha’s husband and mother underestimate Astha’s

potential as ineffectual and juvenile in money management. The family assesses Astha as
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a submissive and dependent ‘woman’ able to handle only children at school, which

resembles child rearing at home.

Though Astha holds a well-brought-up status in the society blessed with a sound

financial position and a decent familial back ground, she suffers from a mood of

diffusion, isolation, and most significantly a feel of ‘otherness’ wherein she is culturally

and conventionally separated in a emotionless marital bond bound by materialistic

concerns. Torn by suffering experiences, Astha is fully aware that a slaving attitude and a

willing body are the essential requisites and the prescribed norm for a successful

conventional wife in the Indian context. Manju Kapur depicts Astha’s state as a wife and

mother in the Indian segment: “A large part of her belonged to her children [...] a willing

body at night a willing pair of hands and feet in the day and an obedient mouth are the

necessary prerequisites of Hemant’s wife”. (Kapur 231) Astha knows that planning for a

divorce in the Indian scenario will dispossess her social status and would cause untold

sufferings to her and to her children. She desires a real relief and salvation from the

controls of the extensive patriarchal authority in the name of marriage. In a school

function Astha comes in contact with a political activist and a renowned stage performer

Aijaz Akhtar Khan. Drawn by his inspiration and groundbreaking ideas Astha starts

preparing manuscripts for a stage performance related to the sensational Babri Masjid

problem under the control of Aijaz Khan. Poised in the confidence instilled by Aijaz

Khan, Astha does a wide research on the Babri Masjid problem, which gives in a helpful

output and obtains an impressive applause and recognition.

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The sudden killing of Aijaz Khan within a few months of his marriage with a

social worker Pipeelika Trivedi spins Astha’s life upside down. Astha desires to voice

against the killing of Aijaz Khan who is burnt alive in a van along with his colleagues on

his way to a stage performance based on the Babri Masjid problem. A countrywide rally

is organized by the friends and fans of Aijaz Khan to denounce his killing in which Astha

is a vigorous participant who gets the strong dissatisfaction of her husband and family.

She wants to demonstrate her gratitude to the good soul that has given confidence to

bring out her potentials and hidden talents. Astha contributes paintings on sensational

themes to the Sampradayakta Mukti Munch that organizes a wing articulating criticisms

against the murder of Aijaz Khan and the communal fanaticism. Astha assists the Munch

in fund raising to arrange a countrywide meet up in Ayodhya as an anti-communal force

against racial discriminations and religious fanaticism with regard to the Babri Masjid

problem. Thus Astha appears as a social activist and a professional painter who receives

public attention, applause and recognition.

In Ayodhya, Astha comes into a strange contact with Pipeelika Trivedi a radical

woman and the widow of the political activist Aijaz Khan. Very soon there is a strong

emotional bond between the two. They share a close relationship and care for the well-

being of each other physically and emotionally Astha thinks: “[…] if husband and wife

are one person then Pipee and she were even more so. She had shared parts of herself she

had never shared before. She felt complete with her” (Kapur 243). They have such a

matching mindset of body, mind and soul that they end up in a physical culmination and

defeat an alienated sense of ‘othernesses’. At this embodiment of an exclusive femininity,

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Astha and Pipee get mutual solace and salvation from their mechanical hassle loaded

lives. Shere Hite’s psycho-analytical study of Lesbian Feminism exposes: “Woman’s real

life dissatisfaction with hetero sexual romantic love relationships have been documented

by studies which have found women to be generally disappointed and frustrated with the

lack of emotional identity in the love relationships with men” (Hite 27).

Pipeelika is a strong-minded woman who is daring and ready to face any

challenging state right from her childhood. She is a rational woman with sensible

ideologies. She has a mother and a brother. Pipee is working for an NGO after

completing her college education. She is raised in a boarding school that preaches

conventional values and the essence of religion where her widowed mother is a teacher.

Right from childhood Pipee is a rebel who is absolutely against the customary norms and

the traditional culture of the orthodox patriarchic society. Much to the dissatisfaction of

her mother, Pipee falls in love with Aijaz Khan, simply pooh-poohs societal injunctions,

community practices, culture and religion and marries him. But she is traumatized

psychologically by the unexpected and unfortunate killing of Aijaz Khan. It gets more

than six months to recover herself from her dejection. The mourned souls Astha and

Pipee construct an astonishing pair who moves in a same mindset of body and mind.

They hunt an expression and relief through their relationship. It is the turn of political

events in India that unite Astha and Pipee. As Weeks Jeffrey observes, “Political

lesbianism is a return to nature and nature is now benign, female and lesbian” (Jeffrey

181).
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Basically Pipee is self-willed who realizes and claims her rights on her body and

mind. Through her drastic move towards lesbianism, Astha hosts a subtle warning to the

hegemonic Indian traditional values. Hemant turns insensitive to the apathetic behavior of

his wife. There is a great change in Hemant’s behavior and his chauvinistic approach that

he starts missing Astha very badly. He thinks more on his family and realizes that Astha

is only physically present with him yet mentally absent. Hemant observes the inherent

transforms obvious in Astha’s behavior. The cold behavior of Astha is a literal sign of a

mute missile frightening the patriarchic supremacy.

Astha has adopted a distrustful strategy through her secret relationship with Pipee

to oppose the androcentric supremacy. Unlike Astha, Pipee is prepared to meet any

challenge that questions her sovereignty and autonomy. As Pipee remarks on Hemant:

“He is not your owner, you know, he’ll have to face up to his inadequacies” (Kapur 234).

Fundamentally, Astha has no courage to state herself a lesbian in the Indian society

where she holds the status of a dutiful wife and above all she is committed to perform her

duties and responsibilities as a mother of two children. She does not dare to risk the

custody of her children for her individual satisfaction. As a typical Indian mother, Astha

suspends her wishes and does not have a whole self-directed status at the expense of her

children’s happiness. So she has to part Pipee once for all who leaves for USA to pursue

her PhD and take up a new career. Finally Astha can also be seen emerging as a new

woman putting more weight on the extra-curricular activities that she has taken up to

make a mark in the world.

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Thus, Manju Kapur takes up a vociferous call against the supremacy that proposes

a revision of the androcentric perceptions by deconstructing and subverting the structured

heteronormative order through her protagonists Astha and Pipee. She substitutes the

hegemonic patriarchy by foregrounding a lesbian feminist bearing where Pipee articulates

a radical move and Astha that of a ‘mute resistance’ against male domination. A Married

Woman deposes the inherent descriptions of gender, religion, culture and tradition that

trace woman’s inherent potentialities to rise up to the occasion at the right hour and also

to work out a radical mission with guts to state their self identities as and when

circumstances warrant.

Postmodern writing deconstructs history only to write it differently. It loosens the

linearity of time and places itself at an ‘after’ modern place in the history of writing. At

the historical level, this novel deals with the past and the contemporary history. The

novelist through her characters searches the past history and questions the contemporary

history. Manju Kapur carries the narrative to 1987 and makes a situation where focus is

transferred to Ayodhya, Babri Masjid and Ram Janmabhoomi.

The researcher would like to conclude that the lead character of the novel Astha

takes on a forbidden track after experiencing a claustrophobic existence. In order to free

herself from the shackles of the governing patriarchy, she finds a suitable partner in the

widow of Aijaz, Pipeelika. If she had taken another male to satisfy her bodily and

emotional needs, there would be all kinds of scandals and rumours. The family life of the

Hemant’s would go on the rocks then. Same sex relationship not only satisfies her but

also gives her a kind of protection. The researcher finds this issue as a Postmodern issue
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because until 1960 Indian authors wouldn’t dare to touch a subject like this. In the other

parts of the world like France there were writers like Charles Baudelaire who jumped

head long into this forbidden subject breaking free of all societal and administrative

injunctions.

The researcher would now like to move on to the fourth chapter wherein some

other important Postmodern issues would be taken up for an in-depth analysis; this will

highlight the lack of space for ethics and morals in the Postmodern society; this chapter

will show that subalterns cannot be silenced for long; Subalterns can also speak, register

their protest and come up in life like any modern entrepreneur and millionaire.
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CHAPTER IV

Subaltern can also Speak: Analysis of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Literature Review:

L.M. Joshi and Hari Priya Pathak’s study shows that, Aravind Adiga’s The White

Tiger is the typical example of Franz Fanon’s theory, which deals with the sufferings of

subalterns and how they are coming out of their subalternity to anchor their individuality.

Decentering all sorts of ethical codes framed by the power has noted down in this article.

They conclude that, a downtrodden person who has liberated himself through violence.

Sathish Barbudde’s article “The White Tiger: An Ode to Darkness” depicts the

sufferings of the downtrodden in the Postmodern era. The article states that, the central

character of the play, “Balram Halwai unfolds his journey from the Darkness to

Laxmangarh to India of Light” (Barbudde 116). The author pinpoints some of the

emergences of the protagonist. He also points out present situation of India, from the

views of subaltern.

Molly Joseph’s article portrays the text in postcolonial perspective. He states that,

“the novel is a tolerant yet sardonic unveiling of the sway of neo colonialism in the guise

of modernization and development in contemporary Indian scenario” (Joseph 77).

Further, he adds the novel is a piquant mapping of postcolonial India.

Krishna Singh’s article “Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: A Tale of Two Indias”

views from two different perspectives – i.e. India of Light and India of Darkness. His

article pictures the darkness of India from the views of Balram , the central character, and

how he has come out of his rooster coop to lead successful life to live like a human being.
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Problem Statement:

Based on the literature review, the researcher comes to know that no such

exclusive research has been done to find out the possible Postmodern issues in Aravind

Adiga’s The White Tiger. Most of previous studies deal with the subjugation or

suppression of the main character, Balram bu there are more number of possible

Postmodern issues in the text. Therefore, the problem statement and significance of this

part of thesis is to figure out such issues by substantiating with suitable evidence. Thus,

it leads to the research gap in this area.

Research Questions:

A good number of Research Questions emerge as follow,

Can the subaltern speak in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger?

Is there any frequent switchover of a character to establish his/her identity, which is

Postmodern?

Is there any penitence for Balrams’s action (In the Postmodern times, there is no space

for penitence)?

Is there Invocation?

Can the researcher apply Strain Theory in Postmodern context?

Is there Intertextuality, a Postmodern term, to identify in the text?

Is there binary-opposition in the text?

Research Methodology:

Research methodology of this part of the thesis is to find out how far subaltern is

coming out of his rooster coop to anchor his identity in Postmodern Perspective. The
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researcher will use the different functions of the Postmodernism to confirm his statement

clearly by substantiating valuable evidences. The researcher will trace the intertextual

elements in the text by using Julia Kristeva’s statements. Confirming the text as a

Postmodern one by means of Postmodernists concepts. Based on the previous studies it

is bringing out the the gap between the previous studies and research questions have risen

in this part of the thesis. A careful and systematic analysis backed with the suitable

evidence of the text in Postmodernists thoughts are taken into an account.

Analysis and Interpretation:

Aravind Adiga is the latest entrant in the contemporary scenario of Postmodern

Indian English Fiction. He initiated his profession as a novelist with a big bang like

Arundhati Roy. His debut novel The White Tiger (2008) bagged the coveted Booker Prize

for Novel. He shot swiftly into worldwide fame when he won this award. With the

winning of this popular award, Aravind Adiga has come to position with such renowned

Booker prize-winning Indian English novelists as Salman Rushdie for his Midnight’s

Children (1981), Arundhati Roy for her The God of Small Things (1997) and Kiran Desai

for her The Inheritance of Loss (2006).

The White Tiger is doubtlessly a Postmodern Indian English novel. As a matter of

fact, there is no other Indian English novel that can set beside it in the matters of serious

spunky sideswipes on various aspects of Postmodern contemporary life in India as well

as its narrative strategy. Brutally realistic, Adiga dishes out in the novel the flipsides of

the harsh contemporary reality pervading India, ripping off the false facade thereon in an

extremely gritty and gusty way. Unlike V.S.Naipaul4, an outsider trying to look inside in
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his non-fictional works such as An Area of Darkness, India a Wounded Civilization and

India: A Million Mutinies Now, Adiga is an insider looking sharply beneath the so-called

glossy veneer that India attempts to project abroad. Adiga has done an admirable job by

coming up with such a courageous novel.

One of the hallmarks of the Postmodern texts is narrating the story just as it takes

place. Postmodern authors do not attempt any kind of sophistication, either in the

delineation of the story or the narrative style. Christopher Butler corroborates this view in

his text, Postmodernism. To quote his words: “ The postmodernist novel doesn’t try to

create a sustained realist illusion: it displays itself as open to all those illusory tricks of

stereotype and narrative manipulation, and of multiple interpretation in all its

contradiction and inconsistency, which are central to postmodernist thought” (Singh 1).

Any Postmodern text narrates the story just bluntly. In the novel in reference, there is no

illusion; the story is narrated bluntly.

The White Tiger boils down to a serious penetrating study, infuses profusely with

dark comedy, of strong-willed endeavours towards an upward social mobility of the chief

protagonist called Balram Halwai alias Munna. Balram the white tiger is the child of a

rickshaw-puller living in an unremarkable village in Gaya District of Bihar in India.

This novel, which is Adiga’s censure of the false notion of India, brings us back to

the terra firma i.e the forgotten space within, uncovers “Two Indias” (Adiga 251) which

Balram in the novel terms as “Darkness” (Adiga 251) and “Light” (Adiga 251) and the

wide gap existing between the two.

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The author formulates several unfeigned assaults through Postmodern tracks on

present day politics, religion, economy, education, judiciary, socio-political

maneuverings, new emergent morality etc, bringing into focus the corrupt dynamics that

ensure that the poor remain poor always, weaving them deftly into the thematic texture of

the novel revealing an excessive amount of guts and a striking sort of freshness that

cannot be pooh-poohed at all.

Written primarily in the letter (e-mail) form, the text is apparently a collection of

eight letters written by an Indian ex-servant called Balram Halwai who recently has made

it big by committing the murder of his own boss Mr.Ashok Sharma to Mr.Wen Jiabao,

the Chinese Premier. The book portrays in a very refreshing manner Balram’s incredible

journey from darkness to light, from rags to riches, from the crippling clause of

conversation to debouching autonomy of urban anonymity. This attitude of Balram

Halwai stamps the reality of Postmodernity.

The novel starts with an e-mail sent to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, when it

is announced by All India Radio that he would be coming to Bangalore in the following

week on an official visit. Balram e-mails to Mr.Jiabao that:

Our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system,

public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, punctuality,

does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in

the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—we entrepreneurs –have

set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run American now

(Adiga 4).
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Balram unhesitatingly gives advice to Mr.Jiabao that “One fact about fact India is

that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and

turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing”(Adiga 15). He

further cautions Mr.Jiabao not to take a dip in the Ganga, although the prime minister

will urge you to do so. He says: “No! Mr.Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga

,unless you want your mouth full of feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo,

carrion and seven different kinds of industrial acids” (Adiga 15).

Balram Halwai was born in a nondescript village called Laxmangarh. His father is

a richshaw–puller. His mother died when he was a child. He has been admitted to a

school because his mother wishes to educate him. Balram comes into the rebellious streak

from his mother whose toes have resisted the black mud of the Ganga while her corpse

has been cremated as well as from his father who refuses to work in the fields for the

landlords and prefers instead the independence of a rickshaw-puller. Schooling remains a

brief affair, as Balram is dropped down from school to work in a tea shop to repay the

loan his father has taken for the marriage of his aunt. At the tea of the shop he mashes

coals, cleans tables and serves tea to customers. But Balram desires to do something big

and wishes to live like a man as his father wants him to. But his father passes away sadly

of TB in a government hospital, unattended. Balram is fully aware of the kind of

miserable painful life stuffed with deprivations, distresses, sorrows and sufferings, insults

and humiliations that his father has undergone as a rickshaw–puller. But however Balram

is dismissed from the tea shop because of his habit of snooping on others. Like many

other young boys, Balram too desperately wants to get a job so that he can buy his food,
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but it is not that simple. Adiga poignantly captures the desperate attempt of the village

boys who struggle along with Balram for a job:

Things are different in the Darkness. There, every morning, tens of

thousands of young men sit in the tea shops, reading the newspaper, or lie

on a charpoy humming a tune, or sit in their rooms talking to a photo of a

film actress. They have no job to do today. They know they won't get any

job today. They've given up the fight.

They're the smart ones.

The stupid ones have gathered in a field in the center of the town. Every

now and then a truck comes by, and all the men in the field rush to it with

their hands outstretched, shouting, ‘Take me! Take me!’ Everyone pushed

me; I pushed back, but the truck scooped up only six or seven men and left

the rest of us behind. They were off on some construction or digging job—

the lucky bastards. Another half hour of waiting. Another truck came.

Another scramble, another fight. After the fifth or sixth fight of the day, I

finally found myself at the head of the crowd, face-to-face with the truck

driver. He was a Sikh, a man with a big blue turban. In one hand he held a

wooden stick, and he swung the stick to drive back the crowd.

‘Everyone!’ he shouted. ‘Take off your shirts! I've got to see a man's

nipples before I give him a job!’

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He looked at my chest; he squeezed the nipples—slapped my butt—glared

into my eyes—and then poked the stick against my thigh: ‘Too thin! Fuck

off!’

‘Give me a chance, sir—my body is small but there's a lot of fight in it—I'll

dig for you, I'll haul cement for you, I’ll—'

He swung his stick; it hit me on the left ear. I fell down, and others rushed

to take my place.

I sat on the ground, rubbed my ear, and watched the truck leave in a big

cloud of dust.

The shadow of an eagle passed over my body. I burst into tears.

‘White Tiger! There you are!’ (Adiga 54-55).

Though globalization has transformed India in a big way, it hasn’t made any

significant in-roads into some north Indian states like Bihar, UP and Chhattisgarh.

Globalization is one of the prominent issues of Postmodernism. Globalization has

brought in enormous changes in the contemporary world. Globalization has dissolved the

physical boundaries across the nations of the world paving way for openness, integration

and flow of thoughts, information, technologies, services, supplies, finance, resources,

and people across the topographical borders. When the global culture blends with the

local culture, we have the glococulture5. Thomas Friedman has something more to share

about this:

The more you have a culture that naturally glocalizes – that is, the more

your culture easily absorbs foreign ideas and best practices and melds those
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with its own traditions – the greater advantages you will have in a flat

world. The natural ability to glocalize has been one of the strengths of

Indian culture, American culture, Japanese culture, and lately, Chinese

culture. The Indians, for instance, take the view that the Moguls come, the

Moguls go, the British come, the British go, we take the best and leave the

rest – but we still eat curry, our women still wear saris, and we live tightly

bounded extended family units. That’s glocalizing at its best (Friedman

325).

The to and fro exchange involving people, products and services has brought

about reflective alterations in the established culture, values and institution of the age-old

tradition bound society. As Ashcroft et al say, “in the context of globalization, analyses

of local cultural production and specific social and historical developments are becoming

more and more important” (Ashcroft 210). With the virtual destruction of borders, people

are moving to a unified culture with alterations and altercations on behavioural, moral,

ethical, spatial and cultural grounds.

Aravind Adiga, “a promising postmodern writer of Indian-Australian dual

citizenship from India, has envisioned the global force on the local heritage with the

village and city social life as the backdrop in his Man Booker The White Tiger and the

subsequent Last Man in Tower” (Veena 59) . In the arid atmosphere in India, impact of

globalization and liberalization has been quite intense on consumerism, international

elitism, multicultural practices and free individual choices especially in cosmopolitan

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cities. The resultant disruption in the individual identity leads to cultural transfer,

religious disbelief and social disintegration.

The sweeping global culture is fluid with the divergence of all rigid customs and

practices of all the nations that has “resulted in a postmodern condition of accepting the

world view which is for an open knowledge drive” (Veena 60). It makes the people

accept anything and everything under the sun without any inhibition. The after-effect of it

is the non-lineage of the people with regard to the concrete beliefs and practices. The

postmodern concept, according to Mike Featherstone, gives importance to “fragmentation

against unity, disorder against order, individualism against universalism, syncretism

against holism, popular culture against high culture and localism against globalism”

(Featherstone 74).

In the Postmodern situation, there is space enough for any man to come up in life

and earn a quick buck. The aspirant can take any road—there is no good or bad road any

longer. Balram, the fragmented subaltern individual travels through such a road. He never

bothers whether or not his road is straight or crooked. Right before him, every walk of

human life is corrupt; his boss is corrupt; the entire family of his boss is corrupt; the

political system of his country is corrupt; the economic system is corrupt. Balram, in such

a corrupt system, will have to be a chauffeur all throughout his life, living in shanties and

garages leading a hand-to-mouth existence. He puts a question to himself: why shouldn’t

I deviate a while and earn some money and change my poverty-stricken situation? He

argues that there is no perfect individual; all are corrupt. Stiffening his conscience a little,

he commits the murder that would elevate him economically and socially. This kind of
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narrative is possible only in Postmodern times. Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen or Charles

Dickens would never dream of such a narrative in their fictional works. Balram has been

sick of his life as a driver; he does not wish to remain throughout his life as a servant and

die an unhappy death like his father. Since he is doomed to die in the blind pathway of a

servant’s life and there is no one around to help him out, he finally commits the murder

of his master Mr.Ashok and robs the red bag containing a huge amount of money which

is intended to be given to a minister as a bribe. With that money he sprints to Bangalore

and turns himself into an entrepreneur running a number of cars which elevates him from

rags to riches. This is part of an eternal silent class war that has nowadays taken a new

murderous dimension.

In the Postmodern times, there is no space for penitence in any man’s life.

Accordingly, Balram does not feel any remorseful of having committed the murder of his

master. He knows that one day he will be hanged. He remarks: “I’ll never say I made a

mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat. I’ll say it was all worthwhile to

know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant”

(Adiga 320-321).

Balram ends up as a criminal with a notable capacity for self-justification. He

justifies the murder. In a strikingly spunky manner he remarks:

But isn’t it likely that anyone who counts in this world, including our prime

minister (including you, Mr.Jiabao ), has killed someone or other on their

way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to

you near Parliament House in Delhi –but that is glory, and not what I am
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after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man –and for that, one murder

was enough (Adiga 318).

C.N.Srinath’s protest to the lack of “remorse, a sense of guilt and final expiation”

(Srinath 5) in the character of Balram as against what we observe in Arun Joshi’s The

Apprentice is indigestible to many people today. Expiation or reparation in the

Postmodern times for any kind of guilt is now a matter of antiquity, without any

scriptural relevance. Today reparation or expiation is an out-of-date experience. In a wild

world full of aggressive competitiveness, one does not have time enough for remorse

today. Balram does feel remorseful enough for the murder of his master. In his words,

“True, there was the matter of murder--which is a wrong thing to do, no question about it.

It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India won’t

clean my hand again” (Adiga 18). His hardened emotion is a stark contrast to Macbeth’s

anguished cry after killing King Duncan, instigated by his wife, Lady Macbeth:

How is't with me, when every noise appals me?

What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas in incarnadine,

Making the green one red (Macbeth 73-78).

In the context of this novel ‘murder’/‘killing’ refers to outmaneuvering one’s

adversaries in the contemporary world of murderous competitiveness in all the spheres of

life. Apart from being a survival tactics, outmaneuvering one’s adversaries with a view to
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climbing up the ladder to attain the top is an international phenomenon in the Postmodern

world which adds up to ‘murder’/ ‘killing’.

Frequent switchover of individuality by a character is an important feature in some

of the works of Postmodern fiction like V. S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (1957). In

Adiga’s novel, Balram Halwai jumps from identity to identity, from role to role, from

place to place. Firstly Balram is a servant at a tea shop, where he breaks coal and cleans

the dining table, then again he becomes a chauffeur and finally he becomes an

entrepreneur by killing and robbing his master. After he establishes himself as an

entrepreneur he covers up his family background and also his personal past. He even

changes his name from Balram Halwai to Ashok Sharma, which is the name of his own

master who is murdered by him. The series of breakdowns Balram Halwai undergoes,

apart from betraying a sense of frustration, a sense of worry, strongly underscores his

crisis of identity. We notice this prominent feature of Postmodernism in the novel of the

most well-known Postmodern novelist, V.S. Naipaul, particularly in his first novel, The

Mystic Masseur (1957) in which Ganesh Ramasumair jumps from role to role, from

identity to identity, in rapid succession trying to invent and reinvent himself time and

again and ultimately ends up changing even his name from Ganesh Ramasumair to

G.Ramsay Muir. Gopal Chandra Paul has poignantly captures the various stages in the

life-situations of the protagonist, Ganesh Ramasumair:

In The Mystic Masseur Ganesh seems to move between two cultures-

Indian and Western; he moves from the Indian culture to the British

culture.Cultural background of the novel is equally lively, based on much

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of the time on Naipaul’s first-hand knowledge of how East Indians lived

in Trinidad. The novel records the failure and highlights the success in

Ganesh’s life, and tells us how Ganesh changes throughout the novel. Each

time that Ganesh moves to a different career in his life, marks a shift in the

socio-culture of Trinidad. Ganesh struggles to find his place in the

economical establishment in Trinidad. […] Naipaul also offers Ganesh

sympathy and admires him for his persistence to rise above his situations.

Ganesh’s wife Leela is seen as a major influence on his life throughout the

novel. (Gopal 01).

In the Postmodern times, there is no space for reverence for god or invocation. In

the bygone era, ‘Invocation’ has been an important aspect of the western as well as the

Indian literary tradition, mostly of the ancient epic or of some work which the author

believes to be of epical importance. However, In Adiga’s fiction, in tune with the

Postmodern practice, god is made a funny creature.

Adiga pooh-poohs the conventional practice and refers to gods in the most

sacrilegious mocking manner. This mocking manner, coupled with black comedy, strikes

the keynote in the novel and this sort of mockery is part of a Postmodern endeavour

which eggs an author on to spurn and play with the Western literary tradition as well as

the indigenous one.

Dismantling literary tradition and genres, and boldly combining different literary

genres, showing utter irreverence to tradition and convention, is an element of

Postmodernism. In The White Tiger, Adiga has combined the epistolary type of the text
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with the dramatic monologue and with the confessional form of narration. Thus in the

novel Adiga expresses a skillful fusion of these disparate narrative modes, as is

noticeable in the novels of V.S.Naipaul, who is unquestionably a past master in the

artistic fusion of different narrative modes without causing any prejudice to his novels.

Technically the early part of the novel is reminiscent of Saul Bellow’s Herzog; but as the

novel progresses, one is reminded of a dramatic monologue and then of Camus’s novel,

The Fall which has been narrated in the confessional mode by the judge protagonist.

Thus on a careful analysis, one detects that in The White Tiger the epistolary form obtains

progressively fuzzy and shades off into the dramatic monologue and later into the

confessional mode of narration--a narrative strategy boldly resort to by some Postmodern

novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is an extremely powerful Postmodern text which

treats of the nuts and bolts of contemporary India having a perennial appeal. The Booker

Award Committee has rightly recognized the novel for its insightful perceptive projection

of the psyche of a subaltern who wants to live like a normal human being. In tune with

the Postmodern style of presentation and taking the story forward, Adiga shows scant

respect to prudery of expression. He uses the sexually packed connotative expression

“dip his beak” (Adiga 25) in to her/him. Adiga uses this term in three places of the novel:

“he liked to dip his beak into their backsides” (Adiga 25); “people said he had let the

politician dip his beak in his backside” (Adiga 31); “Kishan got two weeks to dip his

beak into his wife” (Adiga 51). This phrase is exclusively well expressed, as it refers

euphemistically to both homosexual and sexual act.

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Authors of Postmodern texts are point blank in narrating the events they wish to

put across. They do not soften down in any way. Adiga is no exception to it. When

Vajpayee was the Prime Minister of India, there was a slogan going around—‘India

Shining’; it was a notable motto referring to the general mood of economic cheerfulness

in India in the early years of the third millennium. It celebrates the success of the Indian

IT boom. Indian IT firms provided high-end Internet solutions for big companies in the

US. In other words, big tax outsourcing operations had been given to India. Indian IT

personnel built up software entitled VTR—Virtual Tax Room—to facilitate the

accounting firms to simply outsource tax returns. To quote some statistics, “In 2003,

some 25,000 U.S. tax returns were done in India. In 2004, the number was 100,000. In

2005, it is expected to be 400,000. In a decade, you will assume that your accountant has

outsourced the basic preparation of your tax returns – if not more” (Friedman 13).

The rural poor in India are some of the most impoverished people in the world. A

good number of them have been living in the self same village for many generations

where the skills, knowledge, poverty and fragments of land have been handed down to

the progeny. There is virtually no improvement in their life. Adiga is so sarcastic in

presenting the village where the lead character of his novel is born. In Adiga’s The White

Tiger, Laxmangarh in India is portrayed as one such village. Describing it as a “typical

Indian village paradise” (Adiga 19), Adiga says,

Electricity poles -- defunct.

Water tap -- broken.

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Children-too lean and short for their age, and with

Oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine like the guilty conscience of

the government of India.

Yes, a typical Indian village paradise, Mr.Jiabao. One day, I will have to

come to China and see if your village paradises are any better (Adiga 20)

To eke out a living, poor Indian people are migrating to the cities is search of

temporary jobs. In an interview, Adiga says to Arthur J Pais, “The other thing that struck

me is the disparity in income. The rich are so rich, the Indian economy is booming but

the money was not really getting down to the poor and the difference in the world

between the rich and the poor was phenomenal” (Pais 1). This is echoed well in the

oeuvre. The four landlords are living in “high walled mansions just outside Laxmangarh”.

Says Adiga, “[…] [They] fed on the village and everything that grew in it, until there was

nothing left for anyone else to feed on” (Adiga 26). Arthur J Pais adds that the societal

construction in India is beginning to tremble and the prospective for social interruption is

developing by the day. Tracing the cause, he says,

The shameless way wealth is flaunted is extraordinary. Poor people [see]

the money the very rich have. Migration of labor is increasing in a big way,

especially in north India. Old traditional ties and social structure in the

villages and small towns are disappearing, and social unrest and resistance

are growing. The naxalite [maoist] movement is reviving in many parts of

the country and is gaining strength. My novel attempts to look at what kind
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of man would be prepared to break the structure. You can in essence say

this is a warning story, a fable of things that might lie ahead for India (Pais

1).

The central character of the novel is Balram Halwai. In the novel, he is portrayed

as an untouchable, marginalized, dehumanized and oppressed person. He is the victim of

the Indian Apartheid. He is the eponymous ‘White Tiger’ of the text. The novel depicts

his drifting from dusk to brightness, from the village Laxmangarh to metropolis Delhi

and Bangalore and in the progression, traces his hunt for identity, from a ‘Country

Mouse’ to a ‘White Tiger’. There are many such Munnas/ Balrams and Ashokas spread

all over the country. This shows that the welfare measures announced by the ruling class

have not penetrated the grassroots highlighting many dichotomies like darkness and light,

yellow and brown, and big bellies and small bellies.

The rich make the poor slaves, bonded slaves. The outcastes and Harijans are ill-

treated. Balram’s father realizes the value of education. He is a rickshaw puller but a

“man with a plan” (Adiga 27). He wants his son to read and write. Yet due to the heavy

debts, Munna/Balram is not able to continue his studies. He quits school and works in a

tea stall. That is why, he remarks ironically that his story narrates how “the half baked”

(Adiga 207) are shaped in India. His work in the tea shop signifies the continuation of

slavery in India. His father is a slave and his elder brother Kishan and he are slaves. He

says, “[...] Why did I feel that I had to go close to his feet, touch them and press them and

make them feel good--Why? Because the desire to be a servant had been bred into me:
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Hammered into my skull, nail and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial

poisons are poured into Mother Ganga” (Adiga 193).

The nature of slavery has finally changed. Thus, as Balram grows up, he becomes

aware of class relations, authority, feudal system and the power equation rampant in the

society. This wide gap, being poor, unemployed and discriminated against all odds leads

to his exclusion from economic, social and political life. The varied experiences in his

personal and social life of domination, segregation, vulnerability or discrimination result

in a feeling of marginalization. Just as Peter Leonard points out, societal marginality is

“being outside the mainstream of productive activity and/or social reproductive activity”

(Leonard 180). Once marginalized, the subaltern people find it very difficult to come out

of their downgraded position. Marginalization affects deeply the psyche of the

marginalized. Carolyn Kagan describes marginalization as:

Marginalization is at the core of exclusion from fulfilling and full social

lives at individual, interpersonal and societal levels. People who are

marginalized have relatively little control over their lives and the resources

available to them; they may become stigmatized and are often at the

receiving end of negative public attitudes. Their opportunities to make

social contribution may be limited and they may develop low self

confidence and self esteem (Kagan & Burton 296).

Marginalization leads to the feeling of alienation. According to Lewis Coser and

Rosemberg Bernard Rosemberg, investigation of “the ‘unattached’, the ‘marginal’, the

‘obsessive’, the ‘normless’, and the ‘isolated’ individual all testify to the central place
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occupied by the hypothesis of alienation in contemporary social science”(Coser and

Bernard 374). Alienation further constructs powerlessness, which is at the heart of most

of the current literature. It also directs to meaninglessness resulting in ‘low confidence

limits’. The alienated person is powerless to guess future outcomes of behaviour. Thus,

the marginalized psyche is distinguished by distortion, marginalization, otherness and

difference. This falls out in a dualism between the oppressors and oppressed. Very

seldom the marginalized breaks free the walls that surround them. Only one in a million

like Balram achieves this.

Inequality theories are highly developed by nearly all of the subjects of the

behavioural and social sciences. These justifications of violent behavior and aggression

are correlated to the various ways in which advantages, inequalities, subjugations,

hierarchies and discriminations, on the one side, outwardly stimulate somebody to

exploit, abuse, neglect and in general take advantage of those tagged as in a social

context substandard and, on the other side, within stimulate those people subject to the

brands of low standard to oppose and rise up aggressively against their conditions. These

justifications of aggression are stranded in the political economies of entrepreneurial

growth and private assets.

Balram’s father is enforced to spend his life in misery due to poverty. Farmer’s

life in the village is a prolongation of the same age old misery and poverty. Farmer is

cooped up because of his family. Adiga sheds more light:

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[…] That’s because we have the coop. Never before in human history have

so few owed so much to so many Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this

country have tainted the remaining 99.9% -- as strong, as talented, as

intelligent in every way -- to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so

strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he

will throw it back at you with a curse (Adiga 175-176).

Balram plans to break out from the coop. His first move is to go away from the

family. In the city, he spends all time in the company of other drivers, like the Vitiligo-

lips and others when he is not working. He becomes conscious of the differences that

exist amongst the haves and the have not’s in India. He understands that the poor in the

city take on and carry out a number of ways and means to bamboozle and cheat their

employers. They lie, cheat and steal to be like their masters. In self-introspection Balram

also digs at him. He has become corrupted in the company of chauffeurs and becomes

“from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity,

and wickedness” (Adiga 197). To enjoy luxury at least once, Balram starts drinking in

the same style as his master and is dressed up like him, visits the city mall and longs for a

prostitute with golden hair. Balram’s behaviour is in harmony with the Reference Group

Theory. He believes in the behaviour of Mr. Ashok as ideal behaviour and mimics it. He

compares himself with his employer. He wishes to go up higher in the societal structure

and as such becomes keenly aware of his weaknesses. This feeling of relative weakness

brings to the mood of relative dispossession in the ‘Country Mouse’ Balram. Thus as a
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result of relative dispossession, Balram takes up the values of Mr. Ashok which, results

in a change in his behaviour. As Shelly Shah observes,

Man is the only animal capable of Reference Group Behaviour. He can

change his behaviour by assimilating the values and standards of other

individuals and group. This condition, in the words of Sheriff, ‘stems from

man’s psychological capacity to relate himself to groups, values and goods

beyond the limits of immediate surroundings within his perceptual range,

and beyond the limits of the living present into the future (Shah 1).

Yet another deviation of isolation is derived from Durkheim’s description of “anomie”6

and it reveals a state of normlessness. Quite often, people commit crimes in order to live

like the other, a life of material comfort. Social Psychologists like Emile Durkheim,

Albert K. Cohen and Robert King Merton have studied this aspect and brought out the

Strain Theory. To go a little deeper, one could see that the Strain Theory7 is the extension

of Postmodernism; it has been developed by Robert Merton.

It is not difficult to see why Balram commits the murder of his boss. It is due to

anomie. He is not supported by any ethics or morals. He is not fully aware of these

things. All he sees is corruption, ruthlessness and high-handedness. As Coser and

Bernard point out, “In the traditional sense, anomie denotes a situation in which the social

norms regulating individual conduct have broken down or are no longer effective as rules

for behaviour” (Coser and Bernard 374).

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Unlike the majority of the Indians, Balram is a white tiger, who wants to break

free from his cage. He doesn’t want to be a trained circus tiger. He wishes to be roaming

free just as a man-eater in a jungle. Ironically, the world, especially the capital city where

he goes off and on is a jungle increasingly marked by lawlessness in all spheres of life.

His eyes feast luxury all around. He wishes to live like a rich man. He wants to enjoy life

like any other rich man; he is ready to sacrifice anything. It includes even the cold-

blooded butchery of his kith and kin in the hands of the land lords’ hooligans. To realize

his ambitions, there is just a single murder on the way. As he is a tiger, he jumps upon his

prey and hacks him to death. No one can expect any moral catechism in a Postmodern

text. Adiga’s text is no exception. This is how the strain theory functions. Social strain

and poverty keep a person down long enough to devastate his hopes and dreams for him

to notice alternative means to dig it up. As Coser and Bernard state, “Following Merton’s

lead, the anomic situation, from the individual’s point of view, may be defined as one in

which there is high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviours are required to

achieve given goals” (Coser and Bernard 407). Durkheim thinks that various social

conditions lead to “overweening ambition” which constructs a breakdown of regulatory

norms. Man’s social wishes cannot be synchronized and in turn, lead him to abnormal

behaviour. Balram too longs to taste the life of his master. All do’s and don’ts force upon

him turn him angry and the way in which he is forced to own responsibility for the

accident committed by Pinky, makes him furious. Later his position as a human being is

quashed by Mr. Ashok by his comment, “I had nothing but this drive in front of me for

five nights. Now at least I have someone real by my side: you” (Adiga 189). The
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aggravation reaches its climax and at that moment, he reads in a book, “You were

looking for the key for years/But the door was always open!” (Adiga 253). Balram

annoyed by the discrimination in sharing of power. Ralf Dahrendorf highlights that those

without authority and power have an interest in changing the “Imperatively Coordinated

Associations” (Dahrendorf 238) so that they can obtain more power, whereas those with

authority have an interest in maintaining their privileged positions. This latent clash of

interests can become overt under certain conditions. The more the subordinate

understands his position in the disadvantaged group, the more is the possibility of violent

behavior. Dahrendorf’s concept of Imperatively Coordinated Associations (ICA) is

becoming a reality in the text. Balram observes that men sit together and read. They

group together and discuss. One night they will join together to deconstruct the Rooster

Coop. Yet Balram does not believe in an organized ICA. He says,

An Indian revolution? No, sir. It won’t happen. People in this country are

still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else --

from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will

never happen. Every man must make his own Benares. The book of your

revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out and read

(Adiga 304).

What Balram expects is a descent place “where humans can live like humans and

animals can live like animals” (Adiga 318). It is, at this stage, that he takes the matter in

his hands. He explains his situation and says, “All I wanted was the chance to be a man
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and for that -- one murder was enough” (Adiga 318). He is not a tough-hearted criminal

but a sufferer of circumstances, and of marginalization. He clarifies his role in the new

India:

Why not? Am I not a part of all that is changing this country? Haven’t I

succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making –the

struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of

indistinguishable bodies that will not rot in the black mud of Mother

Ganga? True, there was the matter of murder -- which is a wrong thing to

do, no question about it. It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening

creams sold in the markets of India won’t clean my hands again (Adiga

318).

Criminologists Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub have given a theory of

“Informal Social Control and Cumulative Disadvantage”. Their rationalization of

rebellious manners argues that there are significant actions and circumstances that

redirect and change abnormal ways. Their theory is developed three correlated arguments

or ideas. First, that structural states or factors for instance poverty or racial discrimination

impact the growth of societal relationships. Second, which an amalgamation of societal

condition and labeling methods can lead to increasing disadvantage and the strength of

rebellious behaviour across the life period. Third, that the progress of societal capital later

in life, particularly in middle age, can change rebellious paths to conformity. All these are

visible in The White Tiger. That inequality prevalent in the society raises crime rates; it is
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a forecast of the three most powerful natural theories of crime: Gary Becker’s ‘Economic

Theory of Crime’, Robert Merton’s ‘Strain Theory’, and ‘The Social Disorganization

Theory’ of Clifford Shaw and Henry H. McKay.

In the economic theory of crime, regions of high discrimination place pitiable

individual who have small income from market action next to high–income individuals

individuals who have goods worth taking, thereby growing the income to time assigned

to unlawful action. Strain theory deals that, when met with the relative achievement of

others around them, ineffective persons experience dissatisfaction at their condition. The

bigger the inequality, the upper this strain and the bigger the stimulus for low-position

persons lead to do crime or wrong thing. Social inadequacy theory deals that crime or

wrong thing takes place when the instruments of societal control are declined. Aspects

that decline a community’s ability to normalize its members are racial heterogeneity,

poor quality, family unsteadiness and housing mobility. In this part, discrimination is

allied with the crime for the reason that it is associated to poor quality: areas with high

discrimination lean to have high poverty percentage. Facts also validate that as the

poverty space widens in India, caste-based violence is flashing throughout the country.

Strategies of admittance from marginalization have to be worked out. As Balram

comments, “I think the Rooster Coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs

masters like Mr. Ashok--who, for all his numerous virtues, was not much of a master-to-

be weeded out, and exceptional servants like me to replace him” (Adiga 320). Yet in spite
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of having made it and having broken out of the coop, he is not able to forget his real self–

that of being Balram.

Adiga’s The White Tiger is a novel with a social message in the Postmodern

context. It illustrates the effects of servitude, marginalization and dislocation on the mind

of the protagonist. The central character is not very persuasive and genuine yet an

identifiable character from the point of view of Postmodern perspective. Adiga points out

the rationale of his writing in an interview. He says,

I see this in a sense as a cautionary tale. What my narrator is a white tiger–

he’s unusual for his time. Very few servants in India actually kill their

masters and take their money. The endurance of the servant class in India is

heroic, but I see signs that this endurance may be coming to an end and the

family bonds that held people to their servile posts may be fraying. And so

what my narrator has done today may be something that more and more do

on a larger scale in the future [...] (Adiga, 1 “The Autobiography of a Half-

baked Indian”)

The same message has been expressed by Adiga in yet another interview with

Stuart Jeffries. He explains his stand and role, “At a time when India is going through

great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important

that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society […]. That’s what I’m

trying to do—it is not an attack on the country, it’s about the greater process of self-

examination” (Jeffries 1).

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Somehow or other he achieves his liberty, he desires for it even while he is a kid,

even while he is labouring in the tea stall with other “human spiders that go crawling in

between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed

uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties of forties but still ‘boy’” (Adiga 51). This is

after emerging from the boundaries to centre that he is progressive and seizes a radical

footstep to stay in centre rising as a latest man, an oppressed getting the name of his boss,

the oppressor, to start a fresh and liberated life.

The White Tiger is the narrative of a man, now liberated and positive and e-

mailing to Chinese Premier revealing about himself, about India, about his journey from

boundaries to the centre, about how he is a victorious capitalist despite killing his boss

Mr. Ashok, and revealing him how a cute, childlike, full of inadequacy, low-confident

rural community boy breaks out of his low standard and turns into a man to give

employment to several other men and considers them neither lower nor higher but equal.

Balram has to overcome from the repression; that dishonor which they all have been

suffering from long period of time. As Jean-Paul Sartre quotes, he must live as a man,

and must emerge of even the non-violent feelings because “even your thoughts are a

condition born of an age–old oppression” (Sartre 151).

Balram kills his boss. He has become an independent, triumphant, and intrepid

man, who can think of e-mailing to a Chinese Premier in such a voice. The brutality he

has committed has emboldened him. Franz Fanon tells: “At the individual level, violence

is a cleaning force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and
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despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence” (Fanon 51).

Balram has to get this awfully radical step for the reason that an animal is going to turn

into a man, a man deconstructing himself. By this act he is going to attain what all his

generations have been lacking freedom–freedom from the irons of the chains he is locked

up. Murdering is the need in the primary phase of upheaval, says Sartre, “eliminating in

one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and other man free” (Sartre iv).

Furthermore by doing so he is rinsed out – rinsed out at the cost of his family in dark, is

rinsed out of his multifaceted of being a subaltern, and rinsed out of the humiliation of

being treated as nothing more than a menial servant.

The lead character of The White Tiger is an emblematic Fanonian personality who

can go to any level to obtain freedom. He spurns all that walks for servitude, loyalty and

faithfulness. He is not sparing even Hanuman, a Hindu sacred character of highest

devotion to Lord Rama. He is of the faith that such admiration makes it awfully hard for a

common man like him to emerge from slavery and win liberty. His vision is to blow the

globe of the rich, and of the suppressor.

Balram is not at all pleased with the way God has formed the world. He is a Devil,

a Satan, a rebel, who, standing at the walls of The Black Fort spits at God’s formation all

over again after he attains it in driver uniform, becoming the chauffeur to Mr. Ashok. It is

this stumble upon with the Fort for the reason that of which he dares to spit out at God

when He looks to ask him; “Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand? Aren’t you grateful

to be my servant? […] He is angry, very angry with god who created the world this

particular way, instead of all the other ways it could have been created” (Adiga 88).
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Balram is a man who knows no authority. Fanon states about the suppressed

person in his article that, the suppressed “patiently waits for the colonist (oppressor) to let

down his guard and then jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed”

(Fanon 16). Balram practices quite a few attempts to murder his boss, sometimes with a

steel rod and one more time with the heavy bottle of Johnnie Walker. It’s with the

concluding that he avenges himself at last when he finds the chance.

A subjugated is a subjugated not only bodily but also mentally. Traditional feature

of this domination is as significant as the economic or the bodily one. The use of

language of the boss, the dresses they dress in, all function a very important role in

reminding the slave of his slavery. They are ridiculed and dishonored for the lack of

employing their boss’s verbal communication or not wearing what they dress in. This is

where they are discriminated in the culture. They formulate a detach lower class -- those

who cannot say mall or pizza or are devoid of any awareness of the number of planets,

and are not permitted entering a shopping mall for the reason that they dress in servants’

uniforms. The uniforms are the signifiers — signifiers of the colonizer and the colonized,

of the oppressor and the oppressed. Crossing boundaries provides the opportunity to

emerge from this subalternity. Balram does not urge enter a shopping mall in the

servant’s uniform. He enters there in a clothes like that of his boss Mr. Ashok— “that

was all white, with a small word in English in the center” (Adiga 150) and shoes. He is to

be in the driver’s uniform, vivid ones, which differentiate him as a driver. He is capable

to get rid of them everlastingly only when he is liberated man, only when he urges do
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something no slave can even think of – it is only after the murder of his boss that he is

capable to wear on the dresses of a liberated man.

Fanon says, “[…] there is not one colonized subject who at least once a day does

not dream of taking the place of the colonist” (Fanon 5). Nothing wonders Balram gets

the name of his boss, Ashok Sharma. He likes to have chandeliers just as the Stork (the

landlord in his village). He has set one in his bathroom. He fixes Chandelier not for the

light but for thevsign of richness.

The oppressed people are not permitted to dwell in proper place. They live in dirty

quarters without any sanitation. They live only in the areas like, pathways in the road,

under the bridges, in the slums. They don’t have the proper identity. Theirs is eternal

dark. Highlighting the same Fanon writes:

The colonized sector […] is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable

people. You are born anywhere, anyhow .You die anywhere, from

anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled on top of the other,

the shacks squeeze tightly together. The colonized sector is furnished

sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized sector

is a sector that crouched and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is

prostrate (Fanon 4).

Balram is a rebel who breaks out of his subalternity. He compares himself with the

oppressed people and with the hens in the rooster coop. He says this to the Chinese

Premier,
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Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into

wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other

and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage

giving off a horrible stench -- the stench of terrified feathered flesh. On

the wooden desk above the coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off

the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with

a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from the

above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know

they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop

(Adiga 173).

Because of the suppression, Balram, The White Tiger breaks the coop. He is a

subaltern, an oppressed who has freed himself through aggression. The liberated man,

Ashok Sharma alias The White Tiger, also feels of a society unspoiled by morals or

religion, which makes it not possible for a subaltern to come out of the coop in which he

is entrapped. He elaborates his strategies to the Premier in the following lines:

After three or four years in real estate, I think I might sell everything, take

the money, and start a school -- an English language school -- for poor

children in Bangalore. A School where you won’t be allowed to corrupt

anyone’s head with prayers and stories about God or Gandhi — nothing but

the facts of life for these kids (Adiga 319).

This is how Balram has moved from the boundaries to the centre. According to Balram a

subaltern won’t be the subaltern always.

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Postmodernism discovers several features of Modernism reactionary—it is

hierarchical orientation, it’s recourse to totalizing myth, it’s externally forced order, it’s a

historicity and it’s deadlocked sarcasm. Postmodernism has a lot to do with Jacques

Derrida’s theory of ‘play’, Jean-François Lyotard's theory of the ‘grand-narratives’ and

‘little-narratives’, and Jean Baudrillard’s ‘simulacra’. The common subject matters and

techniques used in Postmodern Narratives comprise Irony, Playfulness, Black Humour,

Intertextuality, Pastiche, Meta-fiction, Pastiche, Poioumena8, Temporal Distortion,

Magic Realism, Paranoia, Maximalism, Minimalism, etc.

Intertextuality is a phrase first coined by Julia Kristeva during 1960s. A literary

text, then, is not merely the artifact of a particular writer, but of its association to some

other works and to the constructions of language itself. “Any text” she argues, “is

constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of

another” (Kristeva 66).

Many hints and allusions found in the novel The White Tiger make the text multi-

layered and give rise to different levels of meaning. The title that Balram gives to the

story of his life ‘The Autobiography of a Half Baked Indian’ alludes to another

autobiography written by the famous writer Nirad Chaudhari that he published in 1951.

Chaudhari’s book relates the life-story of the author, the mental, intellectual development

of the self-confessed anglophile writer. While The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

monitors the changing historical state, at the time when the British were leaving India, the

‘Autobiography of a Half Baked Indian’ narrates the moral decline and squalor of a

poverty-stricken villager who wants to come out of his bondage. One can recognize that
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the mining scams that were exposed during the period of the writing of the novel give the

motivation and the resource material for the novel. The infamous ‘coalgate’ scam

reverberates in the novel. The connections of Ashok, the miner from Dhanbad with the

diverse politicians and the greedy appetite for money and power by both the sides is a

mirror image of the extensive corruption that the news papers carried especially when the

novel was being written.

Through a series of e-mails, Balram attempts to describe to the Chinese Premier of

the factual situation of the globally shining India, the sheen of which can be rubbed off

easily. The mention of ‘Shining India’ is a parody on the ‘India Shining’ campaign run

during the 2004-2005 elections “India Shining was a marketing slogan referring to the

overall feeling of economic optimism in India in 2004” (Wikipedia). The motto primarily

constructed as part of an Indian Government’s drive aimed to advance India globally. The

government paid out a likely $20 million US Dollars of government money on national

media and advertisements featuring the ‘India Shining’ motto. The growth and

development of India is used in the novel with the allusion of ‘India Shining’ slogan.

Arvind Adiga has himself accepted the influence of Ralph Ellison’s novel

Invisible Man on his work. Written in 1952, Invisible Man deals with many social and

rational issues like Black Nationalism, the relation between Marxism and black identity

as well as problems of personal identity and individuality facing the African Americans

in the beginning of 20th century.

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The tales of the two novels have their own equivalents. In Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man the narrator, An Afro-American, of course, a subaltern like Balram opens

the novel in an interesting way:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edger

Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man

of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said

to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse

to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows,

it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.

When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or

figments of their imaginations – indeed, everything and anything except me

(Ellison 1).

In Adiga’s novel, Balram too adopts the first person narrative and tells the Chinese

Premier,

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said

only in English.

My ex-employer the late Mr. Ashok's ex-wife, Pinky Madam, taught me

one of these things; and at 11:32 p.m. today, which was about ten minutes

ago, when the lady on All India Radio announced, “Premier Jiabao is

coming to Bangalore next week,” I said that thing at once (Adiga 3).
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The content of the text, The Invisible Man is given in the opening paragraph itself;

likewise, the content of The White Tiger is suggested in the opening lines itself.

The Invisible Man reveals the reader that he has gone subversive in order to write

down the story of his invisibility and life. The protagonist of The White Tiger too has

gone underground to write about his autobiography. The parallels between the two

narratives are striking. Balram, the insignificant man from the land of ‘darkness’, sits

under a huge chandelier in his 150 square feet office in Bangalore to write out the story

of his life and to disclose to the Chinese Premier the distasteful reality of the so called

democracy. By writing these letters to the Chinese Premier he is emphasizing his identity

and his place in the society.

The hero, Balram, is a killer and reminds us of Fyodor Dostovesky’s novel Crime

and Punishment. It zooms on the mental suffering and the moral dilemmas of a poor

student Rodion Raskolnikov, who plans and kills a dishonest pawnbroker for cash.

Balram too kills his corrupt but compassionate master to break his shackles free and lead

a decent life like his master. Raskolnikov tries to defend the deed in various ways -- the

good deeds he can perform to counterbalance the act while ridding the world of an

insignificant person; to test his hypothesis that some people are unsurprisingly capable of

doing such acts etc. He compares himself with Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that

murder is acceptable for higher reason. Balram also compares himself to Alexander,

Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong, and Hitler who “led successful revolutions to free slaves

and kill their masters” (Adiga 304). Raskolnikov’s story and Balram’s story are the
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same; only Balram does not like Raskolnikov let “foolish” guilt churn his inside out.

Although Balram is responsible for not only the murder of his master but also Balram’s

entire family, his heart doesn’t bleed nor does his soul cry out. As he is a Postmodern

guy, he is skeptical, immoral, wicked and unremorseful.

Cinema is the most influential factor of the Postmodern Indian society and shapes

a vital part of its consciousness. Indians bank on cinema for their entertainment factor

and the evidence of this is that India releases the largest number of films in the world.

Reference to cinema can be established from the very beginning in the novel “I no longer

watch Hindi films” (Adiga 5) to the last pages. In Bollywood films, there would be

fantasy like,

A poor man kills a rich man. Good. Then he takes the money. Good. But

then he gets dreams in which the dead man pursues him with bloody

fingers, saying, Mur-der-er, mur-der-er.

Doesn't happen like that in real life. Trust me. It's one of the reasons I've

stopped going to Hindi films (Adiga 313).

Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality emphasizes the importance of and the

decisive influences that other texts have in shaping a particular work. It is not other works

of literature but other texts such as films, advertisements, and media whose occurrence

can be perceived in the novel. In the novel, intertextual aspects can be discerned in many

of its conditions and episodes. Ram Persad, the senior driver of Mr. Ashok, is exposed

praying religiously to more than “twenty” idols and chant mantra “Om Om” while
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performing his pujas every morning (Adiga 77). One morning at pre-dawn, Balaram,

finds him offering Namaz. This arrangement is a well kept secret between the Nepali

watchman and Ram Persad. The chauffeur has to pose himself a Hindu in order to get the

job. The condition and the whole episode comes across a clear parallel in the iconic

Tamil movie Avvai Shanmughi which was reproduced in Hindi as Chachi 420 where a

Muslim character Shiraz takes up the job of a cook with the name Pandit Shivraj Sharma

with a similar powerful master Durgaprasad. In a near parallel Durgaprasad’s secretary,

Banwarilal, finds out the truth in a similar fashion. One can consider the movie Chachi

420 as an intertext to the novel.

Another intertext that can be noticed in the making of the novel is another popular

Hindi movie which was released around the same time as the novel. The chauffeurs

discuss their masters when they are away from them just as in the movie Page 3 by

Madhu Bhandarkar. The chauffeurs while waiting for their masters, who are either at a

social gathering or party or at a discotheque or nightclub or shopping, spend the time

discussing the personal lives of their masters, reading sleazy magazines, play cards and

verbally abuse other drivers. The novel shares its intertextuality with these two films.

The characters are given names of animals as per their characteristics and their

area of domination. The four landlords in Laxsmangarh are described as -- The Stork who

controls all water bodies; The Buffalo who rules over the road and takes a cut from every

rickshaw puller and every road user; The Raven who takes control of the infertile land

and takes a cut from all grazers and goatherds; The Wild Boar who owns all the
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agricultural land. The novel becomes a caricature for the fables. One recalls the Aesop’s

fable Country Mouse and City Mouse when Balram is nicknamed ‘country mouse’ by the

city drivers. In a sarcastic inversion of the fable the country mouse gains knowledge of

the lessons of the city and even hits the city mouse to come out of the rooster coop and

gain liberty. While the fables show moral lessons, Adiga’s novel show the exact opposite

of that as the text is a Postmodern one. Postmodern texts do not have any morals to offer.

The White Tiger is a realistic text in which the content of the matter is fore-

grounded. In the Postmodern age of hyper-reality, Aravind Adiga gives a realistic work

of art. Daniel Chandler advocates,

Deconstruction of Western Semiotic System, denying that there are any

ultimate determinable meanings. While for Ferdinand Saussure the

meaning of signs derives from how they differ from each other, Derridea

uses the term ‘difference’ to allude to the way in which meaning is

endlessly differed which Pierce has already thought of as unlimited

semiosis (Chandler 75).

Derrida emphatically states that ‘there is nothing outside the text’9. The White Tiger, true

to this dictum, employs effective language and covers the experience of a Postmodern

hero, a subaltern, who breaks free of all shackles, nay, he even breaks open his cage and

lives an emphatic life.

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When semiotically explored, The White Tiger proves a sign-relation of two types --

horizontal (syntagmatic) and vertical (paradigmatic) amongst the characters. Here at the

vertical level, Balram is the central character who appears to be more violent than the

masters, viz. the members of family of the landlord of Laxmangarh. The reality status of

these members has been signified as the raven, the stork, the buffalo, the wild boar,

mongoose, etc. according to their nature and personality. At the horizontal level, their

acts are correlative and hence we can identify an orderly combination/contract of

relations between the binary opposites, viz. Indian Liquor men--English Liquor men

(Adiga 58), God–Devil (Adiga 87), Ashok--Mukesh (Adiga 75), Naxal-Terrorists--

Landlords (Adiga 85), Socialist--Rich (Adiga 91), Top caste--Bottom caste (Adiga 64),

Men with small bellies--Men with big bellies (Adiga 64), Two destinies -- today-

tomorrow (Adiga 06), High class--Low class (Adiga 227), Virgin--Non-Virgin (Adiga

270), Hindu--Muslim (Adiga 08), Black--White (Adiga 12), Master--Servant (Adiga

470), Good men--Bad men (Adiga 54), no.1 Servant--no.2 Servant (Adiga 77), etc. In

brief, the characters appear to be of two categories as per their acts--hypocrite and

realistic.

One of the most significant things that has been vastly stressed in the novel is that

cities are populated not by the so-called people but rather by “the men of [this] city,

frankly speaking, “animals” (Adiga 298). Adiga, it shows, has preferred animal names

rather than human names in the novel even if they are figurative and metaphorical in their
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suggestive, connotative ambience. Frederic Jameson, who has something to offer to

interpretative10 signs, adds,

It is not so much the individual word or section that ‘stands for’ or

‘reflects’, the individual object or event in the real world but rather that the

entire system of signs, the entire field of the langue, lies parallel to reality

itself, that it is the totality of systematic language, in other words, which is

amalgams to whatever organized structure exist in the world of relish and

that our understanding proceeds from one whole or Gestalt to the other,

rather than on a one-to-one basis (Jameson 32-33).

The White Tiger is a factual story of the present India told by an Indian and is very

interesting because in the Postmodern times as the author asks, “Stories of rottenness and

corruption are always the best stories, aren't they?”(Adiga 50). The protagonist Balram is

the storyteller who tells his life written in seven nights and thus it is an epistolary novel.

Aravind Adiga, the author has attempted to construct the novel so realistically that the

reader cannot escape the spell of reality.

The novel is the life-story of Balram told by Balram himself. So it is an

“‘Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian.’ That's what I ought to call my life's story”

(Adiga 10). Jiabao’s visit to India is to know the reality of Bangalore and to meet some

Indian entrepreneurs of which Balram is one.

The White Tiger is the story of Balram aspiring to becoming a man and to

deconstruct the order of his life to live like a rich man. Reference to Naxals kidnapping
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the son of a Landlord of Laxmangarh specifies the motif of Balram. Balram inherits the

attitude of doing something valuable from his father Vikram Halwai, “Rikshawpuller he

may have been -- a human beast of burden--but my father was a man with a plan. I was

his plan” (Adiga 27). And this plan is: “Munna must read and write” at all costs. (Adiga

28).

Munna (the boy) got his name Balram by his class teacher and the “White Tiger”

(the rarest of animals) by the school inspector for Balram’s intelligence. But the way,

soon after obtaining money and power Balram christens himself Ashok Sharma, a North-

Indian business man, settled in Bangalore. However, his aim is to erase the earlier

backdrop and construct his own new individual identity. In Postmodern society humans

are liberated to select their own identity.

The Postmodern traits of the novel are the instances of shifting the hierarchies, as

one finds in “I protected his good name when I was his servant, and now that I am (in a

sense) his master”( Adiga 47). “I am not an original thinker – but I am an original

listener” and “The poor shaking off the rich” (Adiga 47).

Facts and metaphors are interrelated so as to give double emphasis on the realities.

As Balram says in one of his emails to Wen Jiabao, “The way things are changing in

India now, this place is going to be like America in ten years” (Adiga 89). The place that

Balram refers to is Bangalore. The realistic narrative about India cannot be thought

complete without talking about general elections – a five year national festival,

“Election, my friend, can be managed in India. It’s not like in America” (Adiga 13).
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Balram has a dream to fulfill, the dream of becoming a rich man like Ashok.

Although he knows that “the dreams of the rich and the dreams of the poor […] overlap,

do they?” (Adiga 225). He asks these questions but at the same time he knows the futility

of it. The poor in India has no chance of getting anything worthwhile, it includes

healthcare. He regrets, “The diseases of the poor can never get treated. My father had

T.B. and it killed him” (Adiga 237). However, he raises some pertinent questions whether

the rich are happy with their richness. Ashok summarizes the anguish of the rich people,

“I’m sick of the life I lead. We rich people, we’ve lost our way, Balram. I want to be a

simple man like you, Balram” (Adiga 238). The life of the half-baked in India is similar

to that of chickens in a Rooster Coop, the weight machines of a train station are “the final

alarm bell of the Rooster Coop” (Adiga 248).

The centre of power of India is Delhi: “Delhi is the capital of not one but two

countries – two Indians. The Light and the Darkness both flow into Delhi” (Adiga 251).

With these two faces its real nature is unsure. Its contrastive features disclose the tragic

history of its birth and growth that represents India, the nation.

Through Balram Halwai, Aravind Adiga brings before the reader the life of an

average poor Indian in the capital city. Not only is the content Postmodern, but the

construction and expressions too. Balram finds himself in a newly-created slum; it

has been created by the migrant construction workers. Balram continues,

I was at the slum. […]

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The men were defecating in the open like a defensive wall in front of the

slum: making a line that no respectable human should cross. The wind

wafted the stench of fresh shit toward me.

I found a gap in the line of the defecators. They squatted there like stone

statues.

These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents

covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of

sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh. […]

I went back to the line of crappers. One of them had finished up and left,

but his position had been filled.

I squatted down with them and grinned.

A few immediately turned their eyes away: they were still human beings.

Some stared at me blankly as if shame no longer mattered to them. And

then I saw one fellow, a thin black fellow, was grinning back at me, as if he

were proud of what he was doing. […]

He began to laugh—and I began to laugh—and then all the crappers

laughed together.

‘We'll take care of your wedding expenses,’ I shouted.

‘We'll take care of your wedding expenses!’ he shouted back.

‘We'll even fuck your wife for you, Balram!’

‘We'll even fuck your wife for you, Balram!’

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He began laughing—laughing so violently that he fell down face-first into

the ground, still laughing, exposing his stained arse to the stained sky of

Delhi (Adiga 259-261).

Balram’s sole intention seems to be to break the rooster coop. As long as he

remains there, he will see only the darkness. One must see what is beautiful in the world.

Balram states, “Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is

beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave” (Adiga 276). Ultimately, humans are not

supposed to be cursed to live like animals. “Let animals live like animals; let humans live

like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence” (Adiga 276). Both the content

and language so typical of Balram is spokesperson of the world he has lived. Balram can

feel this urge and break the coop or the cage as does a white tiger and can know after

slitting his master’s throat, “just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it

means not to be a servant” (Adiga 321).

In the Postmodern era, there is a constant eroding of ethics and selfhood. The

White Tiger presents the reason why there is an erosion of ethics. This novel reveals the

story of the desire of the poor and the rich with black humour. Balram, the narrator of the

text gives details thus: “The poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and

looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the

poor” (Adiga 225).

Balram Halwai is born in Laxmangargh village, Gaya District, Bihar. Gaya is the

illuminating place of Lord Buddha. It is also the birth place of the disloyal servant and

murder, Balram. He sarcastically narrates it thus: “I wonder if the Buddha walked

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through Laxmangargh -- some people say he did. My own feeling is that he ran through it

-- as fast as he could – and got to the other side – and never looked back!” (Adiga 18)

And a small branch of Ganga that runs just outside Laxmangargh. Balram ditches the

common belief of the Hindus that the Ganga is Goddess Ganga Devi and should be

treated with utmost reverence. Making a mockery of established conventional notions is

one of the hall marks of the Postmodern practices. Balram does it handsomely; nay Adiga

does it through his creation. Balam seriously tells Mr. Jiabao not to get into holy river

Ganga, as it is a river of death filled with shit and seven different types of industrial

wastes. Throughout his portrayal, Balram is ironic and self-mocking, which is another

aspect of Postmodernism.

Adiga gives an interesting account of how Balram becomes the White Tiger. It is a

powerful image and Balram has it deeply interred in his brain. This notion has never

deserted him. Had the School Inspector never complimented him with this image, Balram

would ever be a Munna cleaning tables and breaking coals in his village; sometimes he

would even be a buffalo-herd. This event in the school is so crucial in the life of a simple

boy. This is in fact a turning point in Munna’s life. The Inspector, who comes for

inspection to his school, and points out his cane straight at Balram that

‘You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd

of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals— the

creature that comes along only once in a generation?’

I thought about it and said:

‘The white tiger.’ (Adiga 35)

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The School Inspector appreciates him by calling him the White Tiger11, as he is the one

and only boy who knows writing and reading. He presents him with a book and assures

him of scholarship. Thus he becomes The White Tiger. Like the White Tiger, Balram

gets power and dignity when he is born again as an owner of rental cars.

Balram does not get happiness from love, sex, relationship. He just needs to get

money and live like a human being. He tries to emulate Ashok’s behaviours, and

dressing. He buys clothes like his master’s, wears it, and gets into the Shopping Mall

through the rear entrance.

In Postmodern times, there is no place for compunction or pity. Crimes are

committed knowingly or unknowingly; but the perpetrators have no predilection to own

up the crime; the crime is thrust upon innocent people and the latter own up the crime and

go to jail for a few pieces of silver. Adiga’s novel describes such a situation. While

coming back from a party at night, as a result of consuming more alcohol, Pinky is

intoxicated and wants to take the steering wheel from Balram. Balram sits on the rear

seat. Ashok and Pinky pinch each other and enjoy the ride. The motor goes at break-neck

speed. Suddenly Pinky’s vehicle runs over a street girl crossing the road. Pinky becomes

panicky. Adiga describes the scene without any censorship. The reader gets the

impression that this is how most of the motorcar accidents are covered up in India.

Adiga’s narrative brings out the poignancy of the situation:

Without a word between us, Mr. Ashok and I acted as a team. He grabbed

her, put a hand on her mouth, and pulled her out of the driver's seat; I
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rushed out of the back. We slammed the doors together; I turned the

ignition key and drove the car at full speed all the way back to Gurgaon.

Halfway through she quieted down, but then, as we got closer to the

apartment block, she started up again. She said, ‘We have to go back.’

‘Don't be crazy, Pinky. Balram will get us back to the apartment block in a

few minutes. It's all over.’

‘We hit something, Ashoky.’ She spoke in the softest of voices. ‘We have

to take that thing to the hospital.’

‘No.’

Her mouth opened again—she was going to scream again in a second.

Before she could do that, Mr. Ashok gagged her with his palm—he reached

for the box of facial tissues and stuffed the tissues into her mouth; while she

tried to spit them out, he tore the scarf from around her neck, tied it tightly

around her mouth, and shoved her face into his lap and held it down there.

When we got to the apartment, he dragged her to the elevator with the scarf

still around her mouth.

I got a bucket and washed the car. I wiped it down thoroughly, and

scrubbed out every bit of blood and flesh—there was a bit of both around

the wheels.

When he came down, I was washing the tires for the fourth time (Adiga

163-164).
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Ashok and Pinky’s relationship goes on the rocks. Their married life comes to an

ending. Ashok hits him harshly, when he comes to know that Balram drives her to the

Airport. Balram says,

He grabbed me and pushed me against the balcony of the apartment. The

landlord inside him wasn't dead, after all.

‘Why did you drive her there, sister-fucker?’ […]

He pushed me harder against the balcony; my head and chest were over the

edge now, and if he pushed me even a bit more I was in real danger of

flying over. I gathered my legs and kicked him in the chest—he staggered

back and hit the sliding glass door between the house and the balcony. I slid

down against the edge of the balcony; he sat down against the glass door.

(Adiga 182)

As Ashok has no female companion at the moment, he seeks his ex-lady love Ms.Uma.

Balram tells to Premier, “He was spending more and more time with her these days. The

romance was blossoming” (Adiga 267). There is virtually no space for sentimentalism in

Postmodern texts.

Ashok has a red bag. It is full of bribe money which has to be given to the

minister. It is a raining night. Already Balram is with a Johnnie Walker Black bottle in

the car. Balram has been planning to put an end to Ashok and covet the money meant for

some corrupt minister. Pretending that a tyre has been giving problem, Balram stops the

car in an isolated spot and pretends to repair it. Ashok is coaxed to get out of the car and

examine the tyre. To quote Balram’s candid words to the Premier,

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I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times

into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains. It's a good,

strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black—well worth its resale value.

The stunned body fell into the mud. A hissing sound came out of its lips,

like wind escaping from a tyre.

I fell to the ground—my hand was trembling, the bottle slipped out, and I

had to pick it up with my left hand. The thing with the hissing lips got up

onto its hands and knees; it began crawling around in a circle, as if looking

for someone who was meant to protect it. […]

Putting my foot on the back of the crawling thing, I flattened it to the

ground. Down on my knees I went, to be at the right height for what would

come next. I turned the body around, so it would face me. I stamped my

knee on its chest. I undid the collar button and rubbed my hand over its

clavicles to mark out the spot.

[…]The Stork's son opened his eyes—just as I pierced his neck—and his

lifeblood spurted into my eyes.

I was blind. I was a free man.

When I got the blood out of my eyes, it was all over for Mr. Ashok. The

blood was draining from the neck quite fast—I believe that is the way the

Muslims kill their chickens (Adiga 285- 286).

Balram covets the booty--700, 000 rupees from Ashok and decamps. He knows well that

he is doing murder, as the Stork will get vengeance. He moves to Hyderabad; there he
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sees his wanted notice; he confirms that no one could find him since “it could be the face

of half the men in India” (Adiga 295). Next he comes to Bangalore, by giving adequate

bribe to the police, he shows himself as an owner of a rental car service. He keeps on

paying them on a regular basis. One more reason for his run off is “The city was full of

outsiders. No one could notice one more” (Adiga 296).

Balram could forecast all the upcoming jeopardy. His mind is roaming in

paranoiac thoughts. None the less, he has his own outlook. He would find fed up one day

of his call taxi business and finish it. And he would start a trending Real Estate business.

After that he might even start a School, a more moneymaking business etc. He knows

that he may one day be caught. The police would go after his trail and one day point a

finger at him and book him for murder. But he would not regret for his action, for he has

gained freedom at last from slavery, from poverty, and from utter humiliation. Even if he

would gain an hour of freedom, he would cherish it and it would be better than living in

utter humiliation and downtrodden condition. The Postmodern tendency in Balram

propels him speak like a repeat-offender: “Yet even if all my chandeliers come crashing

down to the floor—even if they throw me in jail and have all the other prisoners dip their

beaks into me—even if they make me walk the wooden stairs to the hangman's noose—

I'll never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master's throat” (Adiga

320-321). Like a hardened criminal, Balram makes his final statement and every word in

it is soaked in Postmodernism.
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CHAPTER V

Narratology

The study related to narrative and narrative forms are termed as Narratology12 . Its

theoretical roots are visible to Aristotle but modern narratology is believed to have started

with Vladimir Propp13 , the Russian Formalist.

Vladimir Propp’s theory of Narrative is largely the basis for the future theory of

Narratology of the Postmoderns. According to Postmodern theoretician Linda Hutcheon,

“Postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks that

much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humour14 and

the general concept of ‘play’ (related to Derrida’s concept or the ideas advocated by

Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of

postmodernism” (Sharma and Chaudhary 193). Black humour means ‘sick joke’. It

becomes more and more noticeable in the 20th and the 21st centuries. It has been stated

that black humour is mainly famous in the so-called ‘literature of the absurd’.

Postmodern fiction is no exception to it. In fact, it’s general for postmodern novelists to

deal serious subjects in a humorous and playful manner: for instance, the way Joseph

Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon address the actions of World War II in their

fiction. In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman

and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger too there are plenty of instances of irony and black

humour. For example in The God of Small Things, Baby Kochamma is portrayed as a

older woman in the text. Her name is Navomi Ipe, but everyone calls her Baby.

Ironically, she becomes Baby Kochamma when she is old enough to be an aunt.
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Another instance of irony is the incident related to the “Orangedrink Lemondrink

Man” (Roy 2) and what he has done to Estha at Abilash Talkies. The boy is

psychologically affected by this unexpected event. It is not a small thing. But Arundhati

Roy ironically refers to this incident as “These are only the small things” (Roy 3).

There is rich black humour in the incident related to the birthing of Rahel and

Estha almost in a bus. Ammu is taken to a hospital in Shillong; she is in labour. The car

breaks down. Ammu is lifted into a state transport bus. Arundhati Roy describes this

event in her own sarcastic and humourous way,

With the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off,

or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated

passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha

and Rahel’s father had to hold their mother’s stomach (with them in it) to

prevent it from wobbling (Roy 3).

Postmodernism subverts its resources by ‘parody, irony and pastiche’. The art of

scripting itself turns into subversive in The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy uses

syntactic scissoring in the novel when the words and sometimes lines are read backwards.

It has been put in the novel in terms of childhood mischief of the fraternal twins: “‘eht

seruntnevdA fo eisuS lerriuqS enO gnirpS gnibroM eisuS lerriuqS ekoW pU’. They

showed Miss Mitten how it was possible to read both Malayalam and Madam I’m Adam

backwards as well as forward” (Roy 60). Božilović Nikola’s article is a classic example

of the novelist’s “subversive style” (Nikola 51) of presentation. It changes the image of a
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post-colonial sensibility where backward reading of certain lines and words would go

hand in hand with the Postmodernist technique of parody by ‘subverting’ language.

Roy has stretched language to deconstruct the anguished world of her novel. The

linguistic extremes are one of the elements of the rebellion, according to Ranga Rao, an

Indian novelist. Many critics and writers have eulogized Roy’s attempt at decolonizing

English. P.S. Sundaram is also an Indian novelist. He quotes the English language which

R.K. Narayan has portrayed as being “So transparent that it can take on the tint of any

country” (Sundaram 130), has obtained much richness and mixture through contact with

different cultures which have used the language for creative literature. The Booker

committee’s admiration of Roy’s verbal enthusiasm is evident when they remark “With

extraordinary linguistic invectiveness Roy funnels the history of South India through the

eyes of seven year old twins” (Rao XIII). The small one word sentences and the way she

transplants several Indian, even Malayalam expressions into English are attempts at

generating an identity for Indian English. Highlighting Roy’s heightened power for

wonder Jason Cowley a Booker Prize judge who comments that this “accounts for the

defamiliarising quality of her prose, her metaphorical exactitude and striking similes”

(Cowley 28).

Manju Kapur’s A Maried Woman too has black humour in many places of the text.

For instance, in the opening pages itself, when the woman protagonist’s mother wants her

daughter to pray to God, Astha “Astha obediently closed her eyes to delicious images of a

romantic, somewhat shadowy young man holding her in his strong manly embrace”

(Kapur 1)
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In Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, the novel begins with black humour. Indians

do everything with a prayer. In the same way, Balram Halwai, the protagonist wants to

pray to god before he composes his e-mails to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China. Balram

begins his mail saying,

It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a

story by praying to a Higher Power.

I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's

arse.

Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.

See, the Muslims have one god.

The Christians have three gods.

And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.

Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from

(Adiga 8).

There is irony as well as black humour when Balram narrates the incident related

to buying a bottle of the Indian-made foreign liquor. In Balram’s email, he adds,

It was the usual civil war that you find in a liquor shop in the evenings: men

pushing and straining at the counter with their hands outstretched and

yelling at the top of their voices. The boys behind the counter couldn't hear

a word of what was being said in that din, and kept getting orders mixed up,

and that led to more yelling and fighting. I pushed through the crowd—got
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to the counter, banged my fist, and yelled, ‘Whiskey! The cheapest kind!

Immediate service—or someone will get hurt, I swear!’

It took me fifteen minutes to get a bottle. I stuffed it down my trousers, for

there was nowhere else to hide it, and went back to Buckingham (Adiga

144).

Another prominent postmodern narratological device is Pastiche. It is

a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment

on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses

science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science

fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and

science fiction, Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica,

travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so on. Though pastiche commonly

refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included

(metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of

the postmodern novel) (Sharma and Chaudhary 194).

In The God of Small Things too there are some interesting instances of Pastiche.

For instance, when Sophie Mol’s funeral is in progress, everybody is care-worn and sad

and standing around the coffin and singing a sad song. Just then,

Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive

funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place

between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby

Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing
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stopped for a ‘Whatisit? Whathappened?’ and for a Furrywhirring and a

Sariflapping (Roy 6).

As Rajinder Kumar Dhawan states, when the novel in reference is explored the

researcher comes across its appeal to the Postmodernist sensibility with its “extraordinary

linguistic inventiveness” (Dhawan 20). Certainly the text employs the language in

unconventional manner and in a way that mostly creates for its riveting quality. Though

Roy handles freedom with the language for artistic reasons in the text, she does not

meddle with its grammar, structure, or the rhythm. Arundhati Roy does so (as did Nissim

Ezekiel or G.V.Desani) to provide reliability and legitimacy to her characters e.g., in

creating use of the speech of the insufficient bilinguals like K.N.M.Pillai. Though, she

does not fetishize it to the position of depicting the text queer or meaningless to the

international reader. Fortunately for her, she does not have to because the people she

chose to write about are westernized Syrian Christians whose participation with English

is very intimate.

Roy follows the tracks of the “Rushdiesque” (Pandey 242) convention where the

language used is not only lawful but also shorn of the gravitas of nationhood: the attempt

here is to internationalize the language. She uses language in a new way that merges

disrespect, joking, sarcasm, etc. What shows as ‘abundant style’ and a ‘tendency to

overwrite’ or ‘too much artifice’ in the text is in truth a deliberate style choice prepared

by the writer to suit her aestheticist belief that sets elite emphasis on style. So the

spotlight of Roy’s fictional world is constantly on perverts, enthusiasts, unusual and such

the other emotionally handicapped men. And the entire thing is shot through with
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amusement, cynicism, parody, and at times, sexual perversity sure fire ingredients of

popularity. This perhaps is also the reason why the heroic conflict put up in real life by

Arundhati Roy’s mother, Mary Roy, does not find fictional transference in the novel.

A detailed type of pastiche is a continuous work written generally or fully in the

manner and style of a different writer. In Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman and Aravind

Adiga’s The White Tiger also contain numerous expressions that are closely related to

Salman Rushdie’s chutnification15 of English language. In Manju Kapur’s A Married

Woman, Manju Kapur describes the family custom of the protagonist. Once a month, on a

Sunday, the family would go to a Bengali Market chaat shop for a treat. Each one of them

would order a plate of tikki which is one rupee per plate. The family would wonder that

the charge the owner demands is very high. Manju Kapur says,

The potatoes he must be buying in bulk, so that is only one anna worth of

potato, the stuffing is mostly dal, hardly any peas, a miserable half cashew,

fried in vanaspati not even good oil, let alone ghee; the chutney has no

raisins, besides being watery, and what with the wages of waiter and the

cook, the whole thing must be costing him not more than […] (Kapur 5)

Some of the other interesting expressions of chutnification in the novel are, “big

dowries” (Kapur 35); “tent-wallahs” (Kapur 36); “puja and havan” (Kapur 68); “Dada

Dadi” (Kapur 78); “Beti” (Kapur 87); “Beta” (Kapur 88); “bhajans” (Kapur 184); “kar

sevaks” (Kapur 185); “Yatra” (Kapur 251).

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In Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Ashok is amused to know that his chauffeur

Balram is a sweet maker. He asks Balram whether he could cook while he is not driving.

Balram says,

“Certainly, sir. I cook very well. Very tasty sweets. Gulab jamuns, laddoos, anything you

desire, […]. ‘I worked at a tea shop for many years” (Adiga 65). Other instances of

chutnification in the novel are, “maal” (Adiga 147); “It’s not piJJA. It’s piZZa. Say it

properly. Wait—you're mispronouncing it too. There’s a T in the middle. Peet. Zah”

(Adiga 154); “paan” (Adiga 167); “dal and chapattis” (Adiga 189); “potato vada” (Adiga

205).

Intertexuality is another postmodern narrative device, which zooms on the

interrelation and interplay of works, was first used by Julia Kristeva in during 1960s.

Julia Kristeva herself says in an interview that, the formation of intertextuality is

significant in the postmodern era: “In postmodernism, the question of intertextuality is

perhaps even more important in certain ways, because it assumes interplay of contents

and not of forms alone” (Kristeva 282, 1984). Graham Allen adds his own view point of

intertextuality: “It is a postmodern concept that involves interplay of contents” (Allen 5).

Ever since intertextuality is a postmodern practice, it is not possible to “speak of

originality or the uniqueness of the artistic object, be it a painting or a novel” (Allen 5).

Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva assert that work is like “a tissue, a woven fabric”

(Allen 5). An exploration of intertexuality in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,

Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman, and Aravind Adiga’s The Whiter Tiger is carried out

in the following paragraphs.

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Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things has abundance of instances of

intertextuality. For instance, in the text, Esthappen and Rahel sit before an enactment of

Duryodhana Vadham. The Text shows, “Quietness and Emptiness, frozen two-egg

fossils, with hornbumps that hadn’t grown into horns. Separated by the breadth of a

kuthambalam. Trapped in the bog of a story that was and wasn’t theirs. That had set out

with the semblance of structure and order, then bolted like a frightened horse into

anarchy” (Roy 236). The link between The God of Small Things and Mahabharath is

very clear. The reader infers from this that no good Indian text can escape from the

influence of classic epics like Mahabharath and Ramayan. In another instance,

Esthappen and Rahel take a secret trip in an untimely hour to the History House near their

house. They move like the characters in a ghost story. As Roy’s text shows,

It was four in the morning, still dark, when the twins, exhausted, distraught

and covered in mud, made their way through the swamp and approached

the History House. Hansel and Gretel in a ghastly fairy tale in which their

dreams would be captured and redreamed. They lay down in the back

verandah on a grass mat with an inflatable goose and a Qantas koala bear

(Roy 293-294).

Arundhati Roy also makes a reference to a popular film. Just as there is tragedy

after tragedy in The God of Small Things, in the classic Malayalam movie Chemmeen that

the novel refers to has a few tragic events.

It was the story of a poor girl who is forced to marry a fisherman from a

neighbouring beach, though she loves someone else. When the fisherman
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finds out about his new wife’s old lover, he sets out to sea in his little boat

though he knows that a storm is brewing. It’s dark, and the wind rises. A

whirlpool spins up from the ocean bed. There is storm-music, and the

fisherman drowns, sucked to the bottom of the sea in the vortex of the

whirlpool.

The lovers make a suicide pact, and are found the next morning, washed up

on the beach with their arms around each other. So everybody dies. The

fisherman, his wife, her lover, and a shark that has no part in the story, but

dies anyway. The sea claims them all.

[…]Pandoru mukkuvan muthinupoyi,

(Once a fisherman went to sea,)

Padinjaran katarbu mungipoyi,

(The west wind blew and swallowed his boat,) (Roy 218-219)

Numerous passing citations are constructed into the text like The Jungle Book, The

Adventures of Susie Squirrel (Roy 59), WWF’s Hulk Hogan and Mr. Perfect (Roy 28),

Julius Caesar (Roy 83), Ulysses and Penelope (Roy 157), and Sinbad: The Last Voyage

(Roy 80). These texts serve as intertextual elements in the novel to connote positive or

negative experiences. The author is knowingly or unknowingly intertext these references.

Sophie Mol’s arrival to India is another clear example of intertextuality in the text.

Sophie Mol is not a native of Kerala; she is half-Malayali, half-English and the cousin of

Ammu’s children, and her forthcoming visit to Kerala exposes Rahel and Estha to the

Anglophilic mania of their aunt during the “What will Sophie Mol Think?” week (Roy
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36). The extent to which the twins are cowed down by Baby Kochamma is evident in the

series of questions that come in the minds of “certain two-egg twin members audience in

Abhilash Talkies” (Roy 106) and the regular refrain is weighted in favor of Sophie Mol.

The Oxford-graduated Chacko too generously admits the family’s Anglophilia to the twin

kids.

One more example of intertextuality occurs in Sophie Mol’s words when Estha

and Rahel run away to the History House. Her words are so similar to Tom Sawyer’s

dramatic adventures and his thoughts in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

that one almost sees the three cousins altered into those pranksters:

[...] That the absence of children, all children, would heighten the adults’

remorse. It would make them truly sorry, like the grownups in Hamelin

after the Pied Piper took away all their children. They would search

everywhere; just when they were sure that all three of them were dead, they

would all return home in triumph. Valued, loved, and needed more than

ever. Her clinching argument was that if she were left behind she might be

tortured and forced to reveal their hiding place (Roy 292).

Just as Pied Piper of Hamelin16 wields an irresistible pull to the children all around the

Hamelin town, the History House of Ayemenem has a magnetic pull towards the

children, if not the grown-ups. Thus, Arundhati Roy’s connecting the text to the folk tale

is quite interesting.

The text is an attempt to bring the ambiance of colourful Kerala into the novel

roping in the folk traditions of Kathakali, the temple elephants as well as Kerala’s boat
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songs, and the boat races during which they are sung. Likewise, the early-morning

performance of Bhima drinking Dushyasana’s blood is changed and moved into another

morning: the cruel profligacy of this is connected by the savage economy of that

morning, a clear allusion to the arrest of Velutha on the morning after Sophie Mol’s death

as in “The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all” (Roy 308).

There is also an interesting parallel between the narrative of Roy and the narrative

of William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. It is put in Jefferson, Mississippi. The text

centers on the Compson family, former Southern nobles who are finding difficult to deal

with the dissolution of their family and its status. During the period 30 years or so related

in the text, the family drops into monetary damage, go downs its religious trust and the

respect of the town of Jafferson, and most of them die sadly. Just as the Compson family

comes to ruin day by day the Mammachi’s family too ruins day by day due to Sophie

Mol’s untimely death, Ammu’s divorce, Estha and Rahel’s dubious relationships,

Ammu’s nocturnal affairs with Velutha, Velutha’s lock-up death, Ammu’s humiliation in

the police station, and her suicide leaving the children in the lurch.

Velutha in The God of Small Things and Charles Bon in Faulkner’s Absalom,

Absalom seem to be cousins of the same blood. They are discarded in different ways

because of the casteist/racist manners of the other characters. Baby Kochamma the sad

virgin of The God of Small Things is not so different from Rosa Coldfield of Absalom,

Absalom who suffers “an itching winter’s discontent” (Faulkner 145) and dries up even

as she wishes to bloom. There are also comparable overtones of long disturbed years in
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Kochamma’s “waiting” for Father Mulligan and Rosa’s ‘waiting’ “not for light but for

that doom which we call female victory” (Faulkner 144).

Likewise, a good number of hints and allusions could be found in Manju Kapur’s

novel A Married Woman, which makes the novel multi-layered and offers different levels

of meaning. Cinema is the most powerful factor of the postmodern Indian society and

shapes a very important part of its consciousness. Indians rave on cinema and India

produces the largest number of movies in the world. In down south, Kollywood is famous

for its iconic productions. Reference to Tamil films can be found in the novel. The novel

holds many references to Ayodhya, Ram Janmabhoomi and the Demolition of the Babri

Masjid in the Mani Ratnam directed Tamil cinema, Bombay17 (1995). Julia Kristeva’s

concept of intertextuality highlights the significance of and the important influences that

other texts have in determining a particular work. It is not other works of literature but

other forms like film whose incidence can be perceived in the novel. In the novel,

intertextual elements can be detected in many of its episodes. Most of the major

characters of the novel revolve around the Ayodhya, Ram Janmabhoomi and the

Demolition of the Babri Masjid issue. By highlighting this, Aijaz Akhatar Khan, a

lecturer in History and the founder of Street Theatre Group organizes street plays. He is

brutally murdered for conducting the street play “Babri Masjid-Fact, Fiction and You”.

Even after the Demolition of Babri Masjid, the horrible incidents extend their wings as

similar to the Tamil movie Bombay. The film is focused on incidents that happened

mainly between December 1992 and January 1993 in India, and the issue covering the

Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, its following devastation on December 6, 1992 and the
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resulting religious pressures in the metropolis Bombay (now Mumbai) that direct to the

Bombay Riots. The movie pictures the death of innocent people in the violent clashes that

ensure the Babri Masjid demolition. These incidents interconnect with the death of Aijaz

who is kidnapped and killed. Another intertextual connection is that, Peeplika is the wife

of Aijaz; she is basically a Hindu. She marries Aijaz, who is a Muslim. Likewise in the

movie, Aravind Swamy is the husband of Manisha Koirala; Arvind is a Hindu; Manisha

Koirala is a Muslim. Aravind and Manisha very much resemble Aijaz and Peeplika of

Manju Kapur’s text.

Manju Kapur’s female characters are all portrayed as women fighting against all

odds. Readers can find visible strains of feminism in her oeuvre. The issues they face are

largely connected to their supposed fragility, vulnerability, struggle for identity, and

bondage in the patriarchal system. These female issues of her novels are interlinked with

one another. The central character of her first novel Difficult Daughters feels betrayed by

the traditional patriarchal norms. Virmati has been growing up in a family where the

woman has no individuality of her own; she is not allowed to pursue higher education.

She wants to study and loves to have a career but is restricted by layers of social

conventions of the place and time. She fights and claims on her right to pursue higher

education. The protagonist of Home is Sona, who is like an imprisoned bird. Astha in A

Married Woman continuously rebels for creating her identity and fighting for social

issues. Her married life gives her joy and excitement in the beginning but gradually she

becomes alienated. Finally, Astha shows the strong point of a liberating soul. Thus all

these novels centre around feminism.

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Lesbianism is the central theme of Shobha De’s Strange Obsession and Manju

Kapur’s A Married Woman. There is thus intertextuality. It is a medium of security and

comport for them. Meenkshi Iyengar (Minx) is an example for this kind of distressed

psyche in the novel, Strange Obsession. She is the distressed child of a Police

Commissioner; she suffers from indifference of her parents. Hence she makes a decision

to involve in a bizarre relation like lesbianism with the model Amrita Aggarwal18. Astha

and Pipeelika’s relationship in A Married Woman is also similar to the major female

characters of Strange Obsession. Astha in A Married Woman is trapped in traditional

socio-political and cultural system and chained up in unfriendly behavior of her husband

and in-laws. She starts searching for emotional fulfillment and a meaningful life. A

chance meeting with the young widow Pipeelika takes her to the lesbian track, something

that India so far hasn’t permitted by law. She is conscious of her self-fulfillment like a

postmodern woman and breaks free from stifling social codes and injunctions that restrict

her from asserting her own personhood.

Traces of intertextuality are also seen in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Balram

Halwai, the central character of the text, tells his life in a series of emails to the Chinese

Premier, Wen Jiabao. There are forerunners of the epistolary form of writing before the

arrival of The White Tiger. Mary Shelley’s epistolary novel Frankenstein; or, The

Modern Prometheus19 (1818), where Captain Robert Walton writes letters to his sister. In

The White Tiger Balram is portrayed as a rare species of animal, the white tiger, which

kills a rich man, even though he is fully aware of its consequences. Likewise the monster

in the Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is closely related to Balram, the white
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tiger. While reading both the novels one can easily find the interconnectedness of

contexts.

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks20 (1952) is another text making an

intertextual link with The White Tiger. Some of the incidents in these texts are looking

similar. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon psychoanalyzes the subjugated Black person

who is alleged to have to be a smaller being in the world of White and explores how she

or he approaches the world through a performance of White-ness. Fanon shows how the

black person’s language is seen by the colonizer as predatory, and not transformative,

which in turn may make insecurity in the black’s consciousness. This kind of theme is

similar in the first page of The White Tiger, Balram starts his mail like “Neither you nor I

speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English” (Adiga1).

Subaltern literature relates to the predicaments and issues faced by the

marginalized and the oppressed sections of the society. Untouchability is the most

heinous crime in India, and the subaltern community is at the receiving end everywhere.

The protagonist of The White Tiger is a subaltern. He is at the bottommost rung of the

ladder. He has absolutely no scope for the upward mobility. His utmost position is a

chauffeur to another man. He will end as a chauffeur. Almost all the subaltern novels

produced from India deal with the same problem which is faced by the subalterns. The

White Tiger interconnects with the novel Untouchable (1935) by Mulk Raj Anand. There

are traces of intertextual elements in both the novels, which prove that these are

interconnected. In India, castes are categorized by the nature work of the people do for a

course of time. Bakha is one of the prime characters of the novel Untouchable. Mulk Raj
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Anand describes Bakha in the first person narrative: “I am a sweeper, sweeper-

Untouchable! Untouchable! Untouchable!” (Anand 43). He is categorized as a lower

caste or a downtrodden chap by his nature of work. Similarly, Adiga’s description of his

characters is interesting, “Goldsmiths here. Cowherds here. Landlords there. The man

called a Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchable

cleaned feces” (Adiga 63).

Another notable narrative technique involves in Postmodernism is metafiction.

According to Patricia Waugh, metaficiton, “is a term given to fictional writing which self

consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose

questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2, 1984). This kind

of writing not only examines the fundamental formation of text, but also lifts the issue on

“the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (Waugh 2, 1984).

Comparing with pragmatists, whose point is to portray characters and incidents from an

objective perception, forcing us to think they are accurately what exists in the actual

world; postmodernists emphasize the fictionality of a work before the reader, as being the

creation of the author. As Kundan Bhardwaj states in his book, “Metafiction is often

employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to

advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of

storytelling” (Bhardwaj 11).

In all the three fictional works taken up for analyses, there is metafiction. It looks

as though Postmodern texts could not escape metafiction. Arundhati Roy’s The God of

Small Things is a suitable example. The narrative structure of the novel shifts
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unexpectedly. This is one of the major elements of metafiction. The scores of episodes

created in the text make an impression in the minds of the readers that they are strange,

uncommon and pleasurable. However, they keep themselves away from the narrative

strain and anxiously look for the next episode. Postmodern fictional works do not help

the readers connect with the characters emotionally. Catharsis is visibly absent there.

Even if there are many shifts of narration for the story to get a strong and concluding

shape, the major narration is shown through the eyes of Estha and Rahel. The

metafictional thematic pattern of the novel gets developed in this process.

Metafictional texts are opposite to the realist fiction as “Metafiction differs from

realist fiction, which employs traditional order and sense” (Cuddon and Habib 431).

Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman opposes traditional order and sense. The readers of the

novel can find metafictional narrative style in Manju Kapur’s text too. Moving from real

to unreal, order to disorder and sense to senselessness are the elements of metafiction.

The protagonist of the novel Astha turns from heteronormative life to lesbian love with a

like-minded female companion, Pipeelika. Readers are not ready for this jolt; the

unexpected jolt is the key characteristic feature of Postmodern fiction.

A Married Woman deals with an abnormal sexual relationship; uncommon in the

Indian context; this kind of relationship is not yet accepted in India, even though it has

been made even a law, if not in all the states and countries, but at least in some states in

the west. For Pipeelika it is a stop-gap arrangement. She is having Astha to fulfill the

empty space that Aijaz has made. Astha gets an unwelcome sexuality from her husband.

Now she is on the edge of coming out of her traditional marriage with Hemant and
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conventional family life. She lives in vagueness. The readers of the novel can identify the

disorder and senselessness while reading the following lines, “In the small bedroom,

Astha tense with nervousness. She was afraid, yet there was no going back. Sensing how

she felt, Pipee took her time, touching every crevice of her body with her mouth” (Kapur

230).

Realist fiction deals with “rich characters” (Cuddon and Habib 431). On the other

hand, in metafiction, there is no space for characters of the Shakespearean type. In

metafiction even a man on the street can be a hero as in the case of Balram Halwai.

However, in metafiction, the characters jump from one personality to another to attain or

anchor his/ her identity. The reader finds it in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.

Balram Halwai is the central character of the novel. There are no rich personality

traits in his character. As chauffeur he needs to be very loyal to his Master but he doesn’t

show any loyalty. He is like any typical chauffeur. He has all the characteristics of a

Postmodern hero; he steals; he becomes a lecher; he visits a brothel; he even kills his

master; he amasses wealth by bribing the police; he forges his identity as an entrepreneur.

His master Mr. Ashok considers Balram as a loyal servant; but Balram is

harboring an evil plan to kill Ashok and do away with the booty. It looks as though he

would do anything to break the rooster coop. Thus Balram emerges as a metafictional

Hero.

Historiographic Metafiction is yet another Postmodern narrative technique, which

is coined and introduced by Linda Hutcheon. According to her,

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The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be

reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its

echoes of the texts and contexts of the past. In order to distinguish this

paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it

“historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 3).

Historiographic metafiction21 highlights writers’ thoughts in telling the story in more

artifice style; such a fiction is far away from reality of any kind; this postmodern literary

technique is used by many postmodern writers, for instance, Joseph Heller’s war fiction,

Catch 22. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman,

and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger do have this technique. The authors of these texts

use this to recreate some sensational events of India in their fiction. Already, the doyen of

Postmodern Indian Fiction Salman Rushdie has employed this device quite profitably in

his fiction The Midnight’s Children. Historiographic metafiction has been employed by

all the chosen authors in creating their sensational stories in the backdrop of events that

rocked the Indian history in the immediate past and present.

Historiographic metafiction is typically a postmodern art form with its heavy

reliance on the parody, textual play, and developing or rewriting a new history through

fictional characters. While in The White Tiger the protagonist narrates his life story, in

The God of Small Things and in A Married Woman the omniscient narrator interprets the

circumstances of the characters. Arundhati Roy satisfactorily confounds the Marxist

history of Kerala through her liberal use of irony, sarcasm, dry humour, and raw details

of human conduct. The history of God’s own country may not be in the media channels
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for long, but Arundhati Roy’s text holds it forever for the progeny. Arundhati Roy’s

account of Marxism and the behavior of the Keralites may be a direct challenge to the

officials’ view of history. This is not to say that the readers will swallow it in its entirety;

there will naturally be skepticism to such historiographic metafiction. However, it is not

the business of the authors to break their heads about these issues.

Manju Kapur has also used this device in her A Married Woman; she has used the

Babri Masjid imbroglio as a backdrop canvas for her story. The communal tension that

erupts as a sequel to the masjid demolition results in Aijaz Ahmed’s horrific murder and

the resulting the widowhood of Peepilika; the true event becomes an interjection that

helps the protagonist goes closer to the widow, who thinks it is better to sleep with one’s

own gender than sleeping with another guy and may get into issues. The little narrative of

Astha and Peepilika tries to recreate the Babri Masjid shameful event into a permanently

etched historical event. Historiograhic metafiction does this unfailingly.

In Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, the slogan of India Shining takes a back seat

with Adiga’s narration of the true state of India. The fictional account revolving Balram

Halwai dismantles a good number of established notions; these include the skeleton in the

cupboard of the millionaires, the true nature of the white-clad political bigwigs, official

apathy, organized corruption, breaking down of conjugal relationships, the turmoil in

human relationships etc. The novel unmistakably shows that all is not well in a country

that poses as a spiritual head of the world and an ideal destination for meditation and

peace.
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The by gone and the present history interlaced in the three novels are shown in

fragmentation, in changeable narration, in multifaceted philosophical undertones, in

flowing language, and in intertextual paradigm or in Linda Hutcheon’s phrase

‘interdiscursive’. Historiographic metafiction is dissimilar from a historical novel. As

Linda Hutcheon says in her essay, “Historiographic Metafiction--Parody and the

Intertextuality of History”,

Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical

discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of

a seriously ironic parody that effects both aims; the intertexts of history and

fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of

the textual past of both the ‘world’ and literature (Hutcheon 4).

Interestingly, these three novels are created in the background of certain disturbing events

in the homeland and the literary content in the impacting texts dominates the historical

account of events. Historiographic metafiction in this way helps the readers not to put

into amnesia of the bygone events. At the same time, it also helps the readers enjoy the

texts.
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CHAPTER VI

Summing Up: A Balanced Depiction

At the present moment in man’s history, Postmodernism survives in numerous

fields. This is for the reason that Postmodernism proposes a diverse method to understand

social actuality. Over the past decades, the world has altered a lot because of the

impacting supremacy of the vast progression in technology and media. As a result, social

issues, man’s life styles and his day- to-day practices are all taking new turns. Feminism,

border crossing, proliferation of refugee camps, civil wars, threat with nuke weapons,

gay rights, same sex marriages, penetration of third gender in all walks of life,

demonetization, environmental degradation, towering infernos in city squares, the rise of

international terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, etc., – all these are impacting the

common man in a big way. Postmodernism captures all these issues under its wider zoom

lens.

Unlike Romantic Fiction or Historical Fiction, Postmodern Fiction goes to the

inner most recesses of contemporary issues and brings out what exactly is amiss with the

contemporary society. The three novels taken up for analysis have done this

unfalteringly. In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, when the Malayalee society

is beset with issues, tension, and turmoil, Arundahti Roy’s high power micro lenses

capture them with all details and help her compose her text page by page with startling

little narratives, which are of course small things. As Arundhati Roy’s text shows, the

god in heaven is a god of small things. The creator of the universe was once a big god

dealing with big things, but that god is no longer in control. Arundhati Roy’s god is a
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smaller god like a village god or a family god dealing with smaller issues. As Friedrich

Nietzsche22 shows, ‘God is dead’, all kinds of ungodly things are happening even in

god’s own country. Instances are aplenty in the novel: Sophie Mol’s untimely death in

drowning in the Meenachal River in the Ayemenem town; the confinement of Ammu and

her twins in the urine stinking police station at Kottayam; Police Inspector Thomas

Mathew’s sexual harassment of Ammu23; the poor performance of Estha in a boys’

school in Calcutta; Estha’s refusal to go to college; Estha’s loneliness; Estha’s alienation;

Estha’s withdrawal from the world24; death of Khubchand, Estha’s beloved, bald,

incontinent, seventeen-year-old mongrel; the eye sore of Gulf-money houses constructed

by bank clerks, masons, nurses and wire-benders who toil day and night miserably in

distant hot and humid Gulf countries25; clipping of low-priced soft-porn periodicals about

untrue South Indian sex fiends clipped with clothes pegs on the way to the ration shop;

the untimely death of Comrade Pillai’s wife Kalyani due to ovarian cancer; Comrade K.

N. M Pillai’s walking through the world like a chameleon; Estha’s expulsion from

Ayemenem; the inner perturbation of Estha due to “Trains. Traffic. Music. The stock

market. A dam had burst and savage waters swept everything up in a swirling. Comets,

violins, parades, loneliness, clouds, beards, bigots, lists, flags, earthquakes, despair were

all swept up in a scrambled swirling” (Roy 15).

Twin kids of Ammu are on a rough patch and do not know where to turn to. Their

father has ditched them; their mother seeks her own end. Just as Estha is drifting apart,

his twin sister Rahel is also drifting apart. She is migrating from one school to another.

She spends her vacation in Ayemenmem, “largely ignored by Chacko and Mammachi
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(grown soft with sorrow, slumped in their bereavement like a pair of drunks in a toddy

bar) and largely ignoring Baby Kochamma” (Roy 15).

With failures and disappoints galore in the lives of the characters, Roy

unmitigatingly puts them across the readers; in fact, the text is full of them; they are the

‘small things’; there is no redemption for the characters involved in them; they have been

narrated with a dramatic irony; Arundhati Roy is a past master in it; for instance, the

young Baby Kochamma’s passion for Father Mulligan; the Catholic father is not

expected to marry, still the romantic girl is going head over heels in love, stands in

vantage points to catch a glimpse of the Father, who covers himself in “chocolate robes

and comfortable sandals”, walking “like a high-stepping camel” (Roy 24). He has,

Young Baby Kochamma’s aching heart on a leash, bumping behind him,

lurching over leaves and small stones. Bruised and almost broken. […]

With special dispensation from the Vatican, she took her vows and entered

a convent in Madras as a trainee novice. She hoped somehow that this

would provide her with legitimate occasion to be with Father Mulligan. She

pictured them together, in dark sepulchral rooms with heavy velvet drapes,

discussing theology. That was all she wanted. All she ever dared to hope

for. Just to be near him. Close enough to smell his beard. To see the coarse

weave of his cassock. To love him just by looking at him (Roy 24).

The love of Baby Kochamma is not consummated. This is not the end of the story; Baby

Kochamma turns her attention to a new love; the satellite television; it has engendered a

new sensation in her; it’s a Postmodern pleasure-giving platform, where the Postmodern
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man can have virtual pleasure on all issues—“Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex,

music, coups d’etat—they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They

stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a

musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton

could be summoned up like servants” (Roy 27). Instead of joy, the channels like the

BBC bring terror to Baby Kochamma; the news channel brings famines, revolutions and

wars to her drawing hall; her disturbance grows when she watches famine, genocide and

ethnic cleansing. She also catches diabetics and needs insulin doses; ironically, she thinks

that her foreign-returned Rahel is up to some mischief; in her mind, “even the innocent

and the round-eyed could be crockery crooks, or cream-bun cravers, or thieving diabetics

cruising Ayemenem for imported insulin”(Roy 29).

Everyone in Baby Kochamma’s house hold is touched by grief and bitterness. As

the text says,

Margaret Kochamma’s grief and bitterness at her daughter’s death coiled

inside her like an angry spring. She said nothing, but slapped Estha

whenever she could in the days she was there before she returned to

England.

Rahel watched Ammu pack Estha’s little trunk.

‘Maybe they’re right,’ Ammu’s whisper said. ‘Maybe a boy does need a

Baba.’

Rahel saw that her eyes were a redly dead (Roy 31).
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Estha’s situation is worse; He has horrible images in his mind; he bears with him “the

memory of a young man with an old man’s mouth. The memory of a swollen face and a

smashed, upside-down smile” (Roy 32). He is under the grip of an octopus; it is lodged

inside his mind; “deep inside some fold or furrow, like a mango hair between molars.

That couldn’t be worried loose” (Roy 32).

The twins’ mother Ammu has to undergo unspeakable violence and sadness in her

life; she has married the wrong man; when her husband wants her to sleep with his estate

manager, she loses her temper and hits her husband with the heaviest book in the shelf,

The Reader’s Digest World Atlas; this is not the end of it; drunken violence follows by

post-drunken badgering; the text says, “When his bouts of violence began to include the

children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her husband and returned,

unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem. To everything that she had fled from only a

few years ago. Except that now she had two young children. And no more dreams” (Roy

42). Back in Ayemenem, there is no one to believe her story; she confines herself to a

back verandah or a front verandah; Ammu swiftly learns to identify and hate the ugly

face of empathy. Ammu is very much worried about her children; her “twins seemed like

a pair of small bewildered frogs engrossed in each other’s company, lolloping arm in arm

down a highway full of hurtling traffic. Entirely oblivious of what trucks can do to frogs”

(Roy 43). Ammu watches over them severely.

Arundhati Roy’s novel is a text revolving on binary oppositions: this includes the

higher caste Syrian Christians and the low caste Paravans. Velutha and Velutha’s father

Vellya Paapen, who “[…] was an Old-World Paravan. He had seen the Crawling
 208

Backwards Days and his gratitude to Mammachi and her family for all that they had done

for him was as wide and deep as a river in spate” (Roy 76). To good number locals,

Velutha is a non-conformist man; Velutha starts avoiding home; Velutha works late; he

catches fish in the Meenachal and cooks it on an open area; he sleeps outside the home.

When he disappears for a few months, rumour runs riot that he has become a Naxalite;

when he resurfaces; Mammachi rehires him as carpenter to the pickle factory and puts

him as a in-charge of common maintenance. This causes “a great deal of resentment

among the other Touchable factory workers because, according to them, Paravans were

not meant to be carpenters. And certainly, prodigal Paravans were not meant to be

rehired” (Roy 77). Mammachi would not allow him to enter the house. That the high-

caste Ammu and the low-caste Velutha enjoy sex is first noticed by Vellya Paapan and is

horror-stricken; he goes straight to Mammachi and narrates the whole episode without

mincing words. His untouchable son has touched the touchable. He is even ready to kill

his son for loving Ammu and entering into her. To Vellya Paapan this is unimaginable.

Baby Kochamma overhears everything. Her reaction is ironic: “She said (among other

things), How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular

smell, these Paravans!” (Roy 78) (Italics as found in the text). The unthinkable becomes

thinkable in the Postmodern times.

And then Arundhati Roy also gives a hint at the uncommon closeness of the twin

brother and sister—Estha and Rahel; having nobody to go to, nobody to get guidance and

help, the brother and sister are thrown together; it results in an incestuous relationship.

The novel traces the event rather openly:

 209

Rahel searched her brother’s nakedness for signs of herself. In the shape of

his knees. The arch of his instep. The slope of his shoulders. The angle at

which the rest of his arm met his elbow. The way his toe-nails tipped

upwards at the ends. The sculpted hollows on either side of his taut,

beautiful buns. Tight plums. Men’s bums never grow up. Like school

satchels, they evoke in an instant memories of childhood. Two vaccination

marks on his arm gleamed like coins. Hers were on her thigh.

Girls always have them on their thighs, Ammu used to say. Rahel

watched Estha with the curiosity of a mother watching her wet child. A

sister a brother. A woman a man. A twin a twin (Roy 92-93).

Postmodern fiction narrates everything point-blankly; when Rahel comes back to

Ayemenem, she finds that the river Meenachal has shrunk but Rahel has grown; there are

all sorts of ugliness in Ayemenem; the river ferries fetid garbage to the sea; the steep mud

banks of the river changes

Abruptly into low mud walls of shanty hutments. Children hung their

bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto the squelchy, sucking

mud of the exposed riverbed. The smaller ones left their dribbling mustard

streaks to find their own way down. Eventually, by evening, the river

would rouse itself to accept the day’s offerings and sludge off to the sea,

leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake. Upstream, clean

mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents. People

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bathed. Severed torsos soaping themselves, arranged like dark busts on a

thin, rocking, ribbon lawn (Roy 125).

Arundhati Roy pooh-poohs the painting of Kerala as ‘god’s own countr’ by her

unmitigated narrative style and this is one of the features of Postmodernism.

Self-construction is important to differentiate an individual’s personality from

others. It facilitates a person to understand his own ‘self’. But in the Postmodern world

where individuality has reached a fluid state, it stirs along as it cannot stay torpid or

stagnant according to an individual’s background, observations and curiosities. It allows

individuals to state multiple facets of their traits. In the perception of Postmodernism,

fluid identity is embedded in a dialogical process, where the narrative approach reveals

the flux of the identity bounce with fragmented reality. Therefore, the fragmented

individual with fluid identity directs himself to the path of fluid narration reflecting his

sense of implication within himself and with his story. As both his identity and narration

have become fluid, his subjective reality which is tangled in his identity and narration

ultimately becomes a fluid one in association with the former two factors.

Over three decades of feminist scholarship has contributed to feminist perspectives

that have challenged the hypothesis made about women, critiqued how discussions have

positioned women, and examined gender/power issues imbedded in institutions and

language. The feminist contribution has fashioned wide-ranging social changes and has

advanced women’s status, rights and conditions. Some of the initial crucial work of

feminism has now been taken up by post-structuralism, Postmodernism, and queer

theory. Feminist views have been uncovered in A Married Woman in the context of
 211

Postmodernism. In this novel, Manju Kapur has shown that transformation in the norms

of traditional patriarchal system is important for women’s rights and their individuality.

Inter-caste and inter-religious marriages diminish the women from conventional

restrictions. Postmodern women are always in the hunt of their individuality. They show

a stiff resistance to sex subjugation and suppression. They want co-existence and equality

in all spheres of man’s life. They would not bear social or domestic violence. Just as their

male counterparts enjoy unlimited freedom, the women too want to enjoy the same. Any

restriction to this freedom is stubbornly opposed to. Social or religious issues should not

interfere with their individuality.

Astha, the female creation of Manju Kapur in A Married Woman has defied

patriarchal restrictions time and again. She longs for freedom, and even transgresses the

conventional notion of women’s subservience and serenity like the holy cow. The

economic freedom is not enough for her. By her words and deeds she clearly

demonstrates that she can no longer remain subservient, subjugated, discriminated and

submissive.

Manju Kapur resorts to deconstructive style of writing; she dismantles the

conventional notion that the middle class cultured women are home-bound, duty-bound

and religion-bound. They won’t transgress the conventional codes of society. The grand-

meta narrative that the Indian women are the mythic Sita-like characters takes a back seat

in Manju Kapur’s narrative. Just as Postmodern theorists assert that all the meta-

narratives are in dead end and in Postmodern period all the ideas are localized and

relative, the story of the text peters out the grand-meta-narrative. Writing a text in
 212

hetero-normative feminist or lesbian context deconstructs the Grand Narratives and it

leads into Little-Narratives. Astha’s desire in A Married Woman is more aptly classified

as a feminist hetero-normative literature.

The central focus of Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman is lesbianism, which is a

Postmodern issue. It might have been practised in the global communities from time to

time; but it has never taken a centre stage until the Postmodern times. This lesbian text

transgresses geographic, temporal limitations, cultural and bridges the discussion

between essentialist and Postmodern thinking in its combined ending that lesbian

personality can be legitimized as a part of hetero-normative formations. By reading this

text in Postmodern perspective, Postmodernists can figure out the various dimensions of

Postmodernism in the text. Astha wants to reiterate that she wants some space exclusively

for her. She makes an emphatic demand to her husband:

‘I need more space’

Hemant drew her close. ‘The whole house is yours, Az.’

‘I was thinking of something more specific. You know, a place to work in

peace, spread my stuff about.’

She knew it sounded presumptuous and unfamily-like to want space that

was hers and hers alone. Hemant clearly thought so too, as he said, ‘You

don’t need more, you have all you can use here.’

‘Not quite. I get in everybody’s way.’

‘Many women would die to have the space you do. We could never afford

anything like this now (Kapur 156).

 213

In order to stand on her own legs, Astha vows bitterly to earn enough money to

run her own studio one day. In the meantime, if there is no area available to her, she will

try and make do the drawing with the wide ranges inside her head. Constantly reminded

of the constrained space, and nobody is ready to listen to her thoughts, she becomes very

bad-tempered during interruptions. Finally she steels herself, she shuts the door, and if

any one disturbs, also frequently locks it. Thus a certain troubled privacy is granted to

her. Astha does the uncommon thing very much to the chagrin of her husband; no woman

in her position would do it; presenting the communal violence following Babri Masjid

imbroglio with a broad canvas for the millions to see it. The Postmodern instincts in her

come to the fore when she works on it, defying openly her husband’s injunctions. Manju

Kapur in her characteristic narrative style puts it across the reader:

To portray this Astha chose a large canvas, four by six, and again drew

inspiration from Rajasthani miniatures. On one end was a temple, on the

other was the Babri Masjid, on its little hill. Between the two the leader

travelled, in a rath, flanked by holy men, wearing saffron, carrying trishuls,

some old, some young, their beards flowing over their chests. Besides the

rath on motorbikes were younger men, with goggles and helmets, whose

clothes she painted saffron as well, to suggest militant religion. She

sketched scenes of violence, arson and stabbing that occurred in town on

the way, people fighting, people dying; she showed young men slashing

their bodies, and offering a tilak of blood to the Leader; she showed young
 214

men offering even more blood in a vessel; she showed the arrest of the

Leader as he approached Ayodhya (Kapur 158).

Astha vociferously protests with like-minded companions against the BJP and the

Congress in let losing violence against the minority Muslim community and their

combined failure in protecting the Babri Masjid. She finds the tentacles of

Islamopobhia26 in North India and its evil results witnessed on a daily basis. This is

increasingly witnessed in hate narratives perpetuated by the orthodox Hindu

fundamentalists. Astha, as she is evolved into a Postmodern human being, registers her

protest against this by signing a memorandum and taking out a procession to the

Rashtrapathi Bhaven, New Delhi. Astha’s response is to the kar sevak’s all out hate

narrative against the Muslim minority community that is echoed in their following

expressions:

Give us three places in India that is all we want, Ayodhya, Varanasi, and

Mathura where the Muslim invader built mosques on our sacred sites. If

necessary, we will bathe these mosques in blood. Why should Hindus give

up their position of dominance in the only Hindu country in the world? If it

is mosques the Muslims want, let them go to the many countries where

Islam is the official religion, we are not stopping them (Kapur 185).

Hemant wants Astha to remain at home; according to him, the place of a family woman is

in the home and not on the roads. Astha defies it openly; she participates in the

procession taken out to the Rashtrapathi Bhavan in New Delhi to present a memorandum
 215

protesting the killings of the Muslims following the communal violence that erupted soon

after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Manju Kapur succinctly approves that women need more love than men; women

hunger for love. This is evidenced when Astha and Peepilika go for a tea. They stop for a

moment under the shade of a tree to exchange phone numbers, when a monkey jumps on

Astha’s back. The sudden weight, the shock of her sari being pull from her shoulder, her

own scream, leave her collapsed with fright. Pipee grabs Astha and examines her arms,

her back, her neck, pushing the hair to one side, looking minutely for any scratch the

monkey might have left. At last she draws her away from a crowd that is beginning to

gather, curiosity gleaming in their eyes. ‘It’s all right’ she declares, ‘no scratch; you

won’t need rabies injections’.

As Astha openly defies her husband’s restrictions, she encounters a disturbing

event; she comes across a condom in her husband’s suitcase. She stares at it for long; its

implications are running through her head. Manju Kapur’s text poignantly captures

Astha’s emotions in the following words,

What should she do? Leave it in the suit-case, throw it, or confront him?

Who had he slept with, he who was never in any place for very long, it

could not be that he was in love – or had a relationship – or maybe he did.

Some woman might travel with him, how would she ever know? Maybe the

distributor had supplied him with someone; she had read somewhere that

women were often a part of business deals (Kapur 213).

 216

It is amidst these muddling emotions, Astha responds positively to the same-sex advances

of Peepilika, the widow of Aijaz Akhtar Khan. They begin to meet frequently. Astha is

cautious in revealing the time she spends with Pipee. She knows it would be frowned

upon as extreme. When limitations of what might be believed usual communication pass,

she starts to lie. Thus an part of mystery enters the association and gives it an unlawful

character.

The mother instinct in Astha doesn’t allow her to go into a full-fledged lesbian.

She is only a part-timer. She knows full well that she cannot continue in this muddling

relationship for ever. Already she looks dreary and depressed; it even tells upon her

physical wellness. She could not pay attention on anything for long. Noticing this,

Astha’s daughter Anuradha tells her father, “Mama’s gone mad” (Kapur 285). Astha is

relieved of her madness only when Pipee flies to the USA.

The third Postmodern text Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger leads the readers step

by step and show how the subaltern protagonist Balram Halwai breaks the rooster coop

and comes out. There is no doubt that he commits a murder; yet in his email to the

Chinese Premier, he opens his heart and says that there is no place for any remorse in

him; he may be hounded and the police one day may arrest him; his family may be

hunted down and pounded to dust; and yet he says, that he is entitled to enjoy some piece

of luxury some time or other; and the only possible root to him is murdering his boss for

the red bag of money. To quote his words to the Premier, “I'll say it was all worthwhile to

know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant”

(Adiga 321).
 217

Balram in order to justify his conduct puts a genuine question to the Premier,

But isn't it likely that everyone who counts in this world, including our

Prime Minister (including you, Mr. Jiabao), has killed someone or other on

their way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues

to you near Parliament House in Delhi—but that is glory, and not what I am

after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man—and for that, one murder

was enough (Adiga 318).

Balram, the Munna is totally transformed; he is a guy who always sees ‘tomorrow’ when

all others look just ‘today’. He also confesses that he is a “first-gear man” (Adiga 319).

What he means by this is that very shortly he will be bored of his present business of

running the Travel Agency transporting software personnel from their homes to their

work stations with twenty-six beautiful SUV Toyota Qualises; he will sell this start-up

business to some other man with a premium and land on the trendy real-estate business.

Kneeling down and praying the Lord in heaven for washing off one’s sins is a

matter of the past; at least from the novel’s point of view. In the Postmodern world, there

is no space for such finer emotions. The perpetrator of the crime is not under pressure to

relive his past crime and look for penance of any kind; in whichever direction he turns to

there are all sorts of criminals committing crimes either to make a living or to make a

quick buck. Balram doesn’t even have any contrite feelings for the murder of his master.

There is sacasm and dark humour in his reporting of the murder to Mr. Wen Jiabao:

“True, there was the matter of murder—which is a wrong thing to do, no question about

it. It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India
 218

won't clean my hands again” (Adiga 318). The novel ends with a Postmodern imagery.

Seeing a sign board in front of the Yahoo building on the MG road in Bangalore that

reads, HOW BIG CAN YOU THINK, Balram takes out his hands from the driving wheel

and holds them wider than an elephant’s cock and says aloud, “That big, sister-fucker!”

(Adiga 319).

All the three novels thus highlight various Postmodern tendencies of the

contemporary times. They very faithfully reflect the time and the issues.
 219

Notes

1. Nirbhaya is an imaginary name assigned to a gang-rape victim in New Delhi.

2. Lesbian literature is one of the emerging literatures. It comprises texts by lesbian

writers, and lesbian-centred texts by heterosexual writers.

3. Sex is at the core of human relations. It can be a source of liberation or slavery. Indian
culture has always treated sex as a spiritual subject, adorned the walls of temples with
meditative sexual poses, but over time we exalted it so much that we don’t talk about it
anymore (Bansal 10).

4. V.S. Naipaul is a Nobel Prize-winning British writer. He has published numerous texts

5. Glococulture is a term coined by Robert Gnanamony putting global, local and culture
together. The term is used to indicate the impact of the global culture on the local culture
and the emerging new culture. Globalization is the mega event that has brought about this
new culture, which is a kind of a middle culture, neither purely western nor purely
eastern but in between.

6. Anomie, derived from French “anomie” and Greek “anomia” means lawlessness. It
leads to social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values. As a result
it creates personal unrest, alienation and uncertainty. All these happen due to lack of
purpose or ideals.

7. Strain Theory is a notable theory in the field of sociology and criminology constructed
by Robert K. Merton in 1938.

8. A particular kind of metafiction in which the narrative is about the development of

construction (sometimes the creation of the story itself).

9. “There is no outside-text”. It is usually mistranslated as “There is nothing outside the

text” by his opponents to make it appear that Derrida is claiming nothing exists beyond
language.

10. Interpret means “to translate or to explain”. If you view an interpreting dance, the
performers are interpreting the music with their physical movements.

11. White Tiger. Male snow/white tigers are between eight and 10.2 feet long from head
to tail. Female tigers are smaller with a total length between 7.1 and 8.5 feet. Male’s total
weighs averages between 420 and 570 pounds.
 220

12. The beginning of narratology lend to it a strong relationship with the structuralist hunt
for a formal method of practical explanation applicable to every narrative content, by
similarity with the grammars employed as a foundation for parsing sentences in some
types of linguistics.

13. Vladimir Propp proposed that characters got on the function of narrative “fields of
Action” or roles.

14. Black Humourist. At the end of 20th century, it was found to be customary to label
Postmodern novelists as black humorists. Novelists include: Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth,
Bruce Jay Friedman Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, could be found in this list.

15. The term Chutnification is coined by Salman Rusdie in his novel Midnight’s
Children. It means the adoption and coining a new expression of Indian expression and
using it profitably for the narration of his text.

16. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is the label character of a fable from the city of Hameln in
Germany.

17. Bombay, the 1995 Mani Ratnam movie is a block buster one produced and released
in multiple languages. The background to the movie is the Hindu-Muslim religious clash
witnessed in Mumbai. The Mumbai-centric movie showcases an interesting romantic
escapade between a Hindu youth and a Muslim woman.

18. Strange Obession is the narrative of the beautiful youthful model Amirta Aggarwal.

19. Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus is a textl written by English writer Mary
Shelly.

20. In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon applies psychoanalytic and psychoanalysis
theory to describe the emotions of dependence and subalternity that Black people face in
the White society.

21. Metafiction is a fiction in which the writer self-consciously interconnects to the

artificiality of a text by imitating from novelistic principles and conventional narrative
methods by contrast, makes its readers to consider foremost its own artifice; it disturbs
the fantasy that text provides direct contact to the ‘real world’.

22. Nietzsche was a nonbeliever for his adulthood and didn’t signify that there was a God
who had really died, rather which our thought of one had.
 221

23. Then Inspector Thomas Mathew “tapped her breasts with his baton. Gently. Tap tap.
As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out the ones that he wanted
packed and delivered” (Roy 08).

24. He (Estha) “grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted
its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away”
(Roy 12).

25. It is interesting to note that the major income of the Kerala State is coming from the
NRI’s of the state living all over the world especially in the Gulf Countries and the US.
The nurses of the Gulf Hospitals are mostly Kerala origin and they plow back their salary
into Kerala and build palatial bungalows and give their state an affluent appearance.
 222

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LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

1. A. Hariharasudan, S. Robert Gnanamony, “Feministic Analysis of Arundhati

Roy’s Postmodern Indian Fiction: The God of Small Things”, Global Journal of
Business and Social Science Review, (2017), 159-164.

2. A. Hariharasudan, S. Robert Gnanamony, “Feministic Analysis of Manju Kapur’s

A Married Woman”, International Journal of Scientific Research and Education,
(2017), 6135-6140.

3. A. Hariharasudan, S. Robert Gnanamony, “An Application of Strain Theory in

Aravind Adiga’s Postmodern Indian Fiction: The White Tiger”, Journal of
Advanced Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, (2017), 195-198.
 238

VITAE

A. Hariharasudan was born on 17th April 1986 in Sivakasi, Virudhunagar

District. I completed my schooling in Muslim Hr. Sec. School, Sivakasi.
I studied Bachelor of Arts at VHNSN College, Virudhunagar, Master of Arts at
MSS Wakf Board College, Madurai and Master of Philosophy once again at VHNSN
College, Virudhunagar.
Now I am working as an Assistant Professor of English at Kalasalingam
University, Krishnankoil for the last 8 years.
I joined PhD programme in the Department of English at Kalasalingam University
in February 2011 as a part-time research scholar. I have published three research papers
in International Journals. I presented two research papers in the International
Conferences.
My current research area is Postmodern Literature.