'Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy's The - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
manages her relationships with different characters in an apparently ambivalent kind of
way.
Baby Kochamma does not overtly believe in the rights of women as well as subalterns
and makes a distinction between her self-interest and those of other women. In stark
contradiction to her personal subversion and transgression of patriarchy and oppressive
structures, Baby Kochamma concurs in the repressive actions against Ammu. She is
responsible for: poisoning the minds of Mammachi and Chacko, concoction of a false
case against Velutha, tricking the children into betraying Velutha, advising Chacko to
return Estha to his father and forcing Ammu to leave. Baby Kochamma hates Estha and
Rahel as they are half-Hindus born of a love marriage outside community. She hates
Velutha because he is dalit. He, along with Ammu, violates the “Love laws” too. All
these connivings isolate Baby Kochamma to a pathetic life where TV (used as the most
successful machine in the spread of globalization) is her only companion. As a subaltern,
she can be said to be of the lower middle class, in terms of her power and has unstable
class loyalty. Her actions of personal dissidence like abandoning the Syrian Christian
community and joining the Roman Catholic community, for her love of Father Mulligan,
and sticking with that faith even after Father Mulligan‟s newly appropriated avatar of a
Hindu Sadhu as well as her adoption of celibacy, speak of her interrogation of the post-
colonial Indian social order as manifested in Kerala. Though, she is not an active resistant
force against local and let alone global inequities , her actions do make her a kind of
agent of change in the novel, who through not fully acquiescing to the existing iniquitous
social, political and economic order also resists . This is so, especially if we remember
the feminist dicta: “The personal is political”.
The zygotic twins Estha and Rahel are subalterns in the sense of being rootless
economically, financially, in terms of family, lineage and culture. Being deprived of a
“normal” nuclear family, fatherly love and a stable economic base, these two children
have to fall back upon each other most of the time. Amitabh Roy is right when he writes:
‘Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,’ Golam Gaus Al-
Quaderi and Muhammad Saiful Islam
JPCS Vol 2 No 4, December 2011
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