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

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Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic) “Marxist” owner of the pickle factory—a capitalist enterprise. Amitabh Roy comments: “Thus, despite his professed Marxism, Chacko follows Manu and the tradition in asserting the son‟s domination over mother in old age. Mammachi submits to it as such ideas are so familiar to her.”(2005, p.67) Mammchi becomes an instrument of patriarchal domination despite being a victim herself. As a post-colonial Indian woman she succumbs to the lures of pre-colonial caste rules and “Love laws” and at the same time tries to be in an interrogative mode regarding both the colonial past as well as the neo- colonial present in her interactions with her daughter Ammu. In India, even today, evils of caste and class and patriarchal oppressions feed and depend on each other. Mammachi‟s daughter Ammu resists patriarchy and caste and class bigotry in public and pays with her life. Obviously, the web of neo-imperialism masquerading as globalization supports such social structures in place. Chacko‟s British wife is the colonial apparition who although allowed little space in the novels, contributes, coincidental as it may seem, to the demise of Velutha. Her half-Indian-half-British daughter drowns, releasing Chacko of all fatherly responsibilities. Although both her children are divorcees, Mammachi does not resist her tyrannical and manipulative son. She concedes to his “Men‟s Needs” as Chacko‟s flirts with “pretty women who worked in the factory” (Roy, 2005, p. 57). Mammachi does not condone the mutually consensual relation between Ammu and Velutha. Her caste and class bias, though not openly expressed, plays a part. Mammachi‟s complaint against Velutha assists his murder in the hands of the police, a colonial institution that plays the role of the state rouge. Velutha being the son of nature, being the subaltern meets death and becomes the god of small things. But Mammachi‟s family faces disaster. The marriages do not work. Wedlocks, relationships with the Westerners never work out and probably understatedly show the novelists scepticism about and around marriages with the people from the West. But what about values that are imported: uncritically speaking, Chacko‟s being the small world ‘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 67
Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic) Casanova and Rahel‟s desire for her brother apparently seem Western borrowings. However, springing in the fertile nature of Ayemenem, these are local cravings that haunt a disciplinary society which only costs human happiness and penalizes in return. Ammu and Velutha (both subalterns in terms of class, caste, gender and social positions) are probably the only heroes/rebels/unconscious resistant activists that challenge such systems and accept death. Ammus mother Mammachi, however, is not totally complicit in social injustice. She continues to hold on to her dominating role falsifying the idea that women should only obey orders. As a post-colonial Indian woman she is riven by the pulls of pre-colonial tradition, the desire for freedom and equality born at least partially as a result of India‟s encounter with the West and the neo-colonial present which connects the local inequalities of caste, class and gender with the global ones of an unequal and grossly unjust economic and political order epitomized on a micro-scale by a character like Chacko. Although, Mammachi succumbs to the pulls of these forces we retain sympathy for her for the depredations she had to suffer in life and the “resilience” of her character. O. P. Dwivedi in his article titled “The Subaltern and the Text: Reading Arundhati Roy‟s The God of Small Things”, utilizes the concept of “the subaltern” by going back to Ranajit Guha: “In the Preface to Subaltern Studies, Vol.1, Ranajit Guha propounded a working definition of “subaltern”. “The word “subaltern”… stands for the meaning as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, that, is of inferior rank. It will be used as a name for the general attitude of subordination in South Asian Society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way.”…” (2010) The question that arises in considering the case of Mammachi is whether she is a subaltern in sympathy with other subalterns in the novel? In losing her factory to her son, Mammachi is marginalized in terms of class and gender. A descendant of upper class Brahmins, she, however, is not a victim of caste prejudice. Marginalized by her son in old age and facing an economically disadvantaged position, Mammachi is a subaltern in more than one way. ‘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 68
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'Complicity and resistance: Women in Arundhati Roy's The - JPCS

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