Arundhati Roy has painted the canvas of the dirty picture of our society very aesthetically. The novel is an ?ugly picture beautifully described? in which the character of Ammu stands for Mary Roy and where victims of social ostracism have been kaleidoscopically depicted. One is touched to tears to find the plight of Christian Paravan family to which Velutha belongs. Velutha is an untouchable and for that matter a natural prone to the brutality by ?touchables?. So he is oppressed, tortured, tyrannized and scoffed at by the owners.The caste was in full swing like an outrageous fury in every section of the society. As a result a Syrian Christian family looks down upon him as an outcaste. Velutha is a parallel figure of Bakha in Untouchable. The most horrendous is that Velutha, the marginalized, never gets a chance to break his silence as a defence of the accusation and punishment for the crime he has not committed. The marginalized has always been marginalized despite a plethora of socio-political reforms and it is a million dollar question still unanswered.
Research Scholar, P.G. Dept. of English, Magadh University, Bodh-Gaya
