5 - The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy's ‘Made in India’ Bookerboiler

Summary

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) was the first ever Indian novel in English to win the Booker Prize. In this paper I attempt to highlight the problematic position that the novel occupies in relation to the writer's self-acknowledged activism, which is in part rooted in her personal experiences, and the role of the market in shaping India's literary production.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy (1961–) was born in the state of Assam. Roy's mother, the social activist Mary Roy, is a Syrian Christian from the state of Kerala. Her father was a Bengali who managed a tea plantation in Assam. Roy and her brother were still very young when her parents divorced. Mary Roy returned to her parents who lived in Aymanam, a small conservative rural town in Kerala. Mary Roy's unsuccessful marriage, divorce and supposedly ‘shameful’ return gendered obdurate hostility towards herself and her children. Under these circumstances, Roy and her brother were deprived of formal education, leading Mary Roy towards starting an informal school of her own. Perhaps the seeds of rebellion with a cause were sown in young Arundhati at precisely that point.

The God started off as stray thoughts keyed into her first computer. It took Roy four and a half years to bring her book to the finish line. In a now well-known story, she gave a copy of the manuscript to Pankaj Mishra, the editor at the HarperCollins India division, who in turn passed it on to British literary agent David Godwin, who arrived at Roy's door with a fat check within three days of receiving the book.