Abstract. Arundhati Roy is an Indian author who won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 1997 for her best-selling novel The God of Small Things. The novel is semi-autobiographical and she narrated her childhood experiences in Ayemenem. However, it comprises of many serious issues ranging from politics, racism, love, feminism to post colonialism. The vulnerable role of women in an orthodox patriarchal society is vividly described by portraying women across three generations to assert the continuity of female subordination. The first generations is about Mammachi and the second is about Ammu and finally Rahel. Roy represents herself in novel as women protagonists who struggle with the world of social protest and implicit engagement with India?s socio-political history. She portrays women of contemporary Indian Society who struggle in the male dominant conservative society. Feminism is in fact a theory that is dialogic in nature and draws on women voices. All women voices, with their different value systems, need to be set against one another and the voices of patriarchy. In The God of Small Things, feminist ideologies are reflected from the various attitudes of the characters and the subversive elements used in the novel, rather than a monologic say by the author, whose own consciousness speaks and inspires many to take up this aspect of writing, focusing on the different discourses of marginality such as the position of women, caste segregation and untouchability. The novel depicts the feministic elements, caste and class gender, political and childhood exploitation. It is a tragic ordeal of a woman as a subaltern victim of existing injustice, caste discrimination and various heart rending problems, ultimately stripping them of their individual identity and marginalized them into nothingness. This novel shows how different men and women are treated according to the social norms that separate the views on men and women. The men oppress the women, who are not allowed to live their lives as they want since men rule over them. Women who stand against men and society are punished.
Professor and Head, Department of English, Dr. B.A.M.U, Aurangabad (Maharashtra)
