THE AUTHOR…

ARUNDHATI ROY
▪ Suzanna Arundhati Roy (ध्यान वेश्या) (born 24
November 1961) is an Indian author.
▪ Roy’s father was a Hindu tea plantation manager
and her mother was a Syrian Christian women’s
rights activist. Her parents divorced when she was
two, and Roy moved with her mother and brother
(who was only a few months older than she was) to
Kerala, the setting of The God of Small Things.
 ARUNDHATI ROY
▪ Since then, Roy has written many nonfiction
essays and has become an outspoken critic of
the Indian government, the United States, and
global policies of imperialism, capitalism, and
nuclear war. She currently lives in Delhi and
is working on a second novel.
 ARUNDHATI ROY
▪ Early in her career, Roy worked for television and
movies. She wrote the screenplays for In Which
Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a movie based on
her experiences as a student of architecture, in
which she also appeared as a performer, and Electric
Moon (1992), both directed by her then husband
Pradip Krishen.
 ARUNDHATI ROY
▪ Roy won the National Film Award for Best

Screenplay in 1988 for In Which Annie Gives It

Those Ones.
 THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

▪ The God of Small Things is Roy’s first and only novel, but it
immediately became an international success and Roy was awarded
the Booker Prize in 1997.
▪ The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and
their lives.
▪ It was completed in 1996 which it took four years to complete.
▪ The potential of the story was first recognized by Pankaj Mishra,
an editor with HarperCollins, who sent it to three British
publishers. Roy received 500,000 pounds in advance and rights to
the book were sold in 21 countries.
 RAHEL IPE
▪ Rahel is the partial narrator of the story. As a girl of seven,
her hair sits "on top of her head like a fountain" in a
"Love-in-Tokyo" band, and she often wears red-tinted
plastic sunglasses with yellow rims.
▪ One of the twins and protagonists of the novel, Rahel is an
energetic, imaginative girl.
▪ She and Estha are so close as to almost consider themselves
one person, though their appearances and personalities
are different.
ESTHAPPEN YAKO IPE (ESTHA)
▪ The other twin and protagonist, he is a serious, intelligent,
and somewhat nervous child who wears "beige and pointy
shoes" and has an "Elvis puff."
▪ He also experiences more of the harshness of the world at
an early age.
▪ After twenty-three years Baba “re-returns” him to
Ayemenem and Estha and Rahel are reunited.
 AMMU
▪ The mother of the twins, an independent woman who is both a
loving mother and has an “unsafe edge.”
▪ Ammu was beaten cruelly by Pappachi as a child, so she grew up
with a natural distrust of patriarchal Indian society.
▪ She married Baba to escape Ayemenem, but he was an abusive
alcoholic so Ammu left him after the twins were born.
▪ She dies of a lung disease.
▪ Ammu is then disgraced because of her divorce, and she causes a
huge scandal by having an affair with the untouchable.
 NAVOMI IPE (BABY KOCHAMMA)
▪ Pappachi’s younger sister, Baby Kochamma is the twins' maternal
great aunt.
▪ She is of petite build as a young woman but becomes enormously
overweight, with "a mole on her neck," by the time of Sophie's
death.
▪ She maintains an attitude of superiority throughout.
▪ Her own emptiness and failure spark bitter spite for her sister's
children, further driven by her prudish code of conventional values.
▪ Her spite ultimately condemns the twins, the lovers, and herself to a
lifetime of misery.
 CHACKO IPE

▪ Ammu’s brother, who received all the privilege that

Ammu was denied.
▪ While in London he married Margaret Kochamma, but she
left him after their daughter, Sophie Mol, was born.
▪ Chacko then returns to Ayemenem and takes over Paradise
Pickles.
▪ Though Chacko supports Marxism, in practice he acts as a
typical landlord with traditional caste prejudices.
 VELUTHA
▪ A Paravan (Untouchable) who grew up with Ammu and is
very skilled with his hands. He is an excellent carpenter and
fixes all the machines in the pickle factory, but is still treated
as second-class.
▪ His name means ‘white’ in Malayalam, because he is so dark.
▪ He is an active member of the Marxist movement.
▪ He has an affair with Ammu for which he is brutally
punished.
 SHRI BENAAN JOHN IPE (PAPPACHI)

▪ Mammachi’s husband, an Imperial Entomologist who

discovered a new species of moth but then didn’t have it
named after him.
▪ He viciously beats Mammachi and Ammu, all while acting
like a kind husband and father in public.
 MAMMACHI

▪ The mother of Chacko and Ammu, a violinist and pickle-

maker who sees the world in strict divisions of class,
wealth, and caste.
▪ She endures Pappachi’s violence without complaint, but
after Chacko stops Pappachi, Mammachi comes to love
Chacko with an almost sexual love.
 SOPHIE MOL

▪ The daughter of Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, Sophie

is beloved by all the Ipes because of her whiteness and
beauty.
▪ The twins befriend her for the short period before her
death. Her visit is the setting for most of the novel’s action.
 MARGARET KOCHAMMA

▪ Chacko’s English wife and Sophie Mol’s mother.

▪ Her parents don’t approve of her marriage to Chacko, and
she later leaves him for Joe.
 KOCHU MARIA

▪ The cook of the Ipe family, an extremely short, bad-

tempered woman who comes to share in Baby
Kochamma’s TV addiction.
 VELLYA PAAPEN

▪ Velutha’s father, an Untouchable with a glass eye that the

Ipes paid for.
▪ Though he loves his son, he is willing to kill Velutha to
fulfill his social obligation.
 COMRADE K. N. M. PILLAI

▪ The ambitious leader of the Communist Party in

Ayemenem.
▪ He is an opportunistic man who prints labels for Chacko’s
pickle factory while also trying to convince Chacko’s
laborers to revolt.
 BABA

▪ The father of Rahel and Estha, and ex-husband of

Ammu. After marrying him, Ammu learns that he is an
alcoholic and compulsive liar.
▪ He tries to prostitute Ammu to his boss in order to keep
his job and later grows abusive, and then Ammu leaves
with the children.
 INSPECTOR THOMAS MATHEW

▪ A police inspector of Kerala who sends the officers to

beat Velutha.
▪ When it seems like Velutha might be innocent, he tells
Baby Kochamma’s that the twins will have to implicate
Velutha or else he will charge Baby with the crime.
 OTHER MINOR CHARACTERS

▪The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man

▪Father Mulligan
▪Larry McCaslin
▪Joe
▪Urumban
▪Reverend E. John Ipe (Punnyan Kunju)
SUMMARY
The events of The God of Small Things are revealed in a
fragmentary manner, mostly jumping back and forth between scenes in
1969 and 1993, with backstory scattered throughout. The story centers
around the wealthy, land-owning, Syrian Christian Ipe family of
Ayemenem, a town in Kerala, India. Most of the plot occurs in 1969,
focusing on the seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel, who live with
their mother Ammu, their grandmother Mammachi, their uncle
Chacko, and their great-aunt Baby Kochamma.
SUMMARY
Lacking sufficient dowry to marry, Ammu Ipe is
desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as
Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as
Mammachi. She finally persuades her parents to let her
spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta.
SUMMARY
To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man, Baba, who
helps manage a tea estate. She later discovers that he is an alcoholic,
and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss in order
to keep his job. She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband,
and returns to Ayemenem to live with her father, mother and brother,
Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England (where he studied
at Oxford) to run the family's pickle business after his divorce from an
English woman, Margaret, and the after death of Pappachi.
SUMMARY
The multi-generational family home in Ayemenem also includes
Pappachi's sister, Navomi Ipe, known as Baby Kochamma. As a young
girl, Baby Kochamma fell in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish
priest who had come to Ayemenem to study Hindu scriptures. To get
closer to him, Baby Kochamma converted to Roman Catholicism and
joined a convent against her father's wishes. After a few lonely months
in the convent, Baby Kochamma realized that her vows brought her no
closer to the man she loved.
SUMMARY

Her father eventually rescued her from the convent and sent her to
America, where she obtained a diploma in ornamental gardening.
Because of her one-sided love for Father Mulligan, Baby Kochamma
remained unmarried for the rest of her life, becoming deeply embittered
over time. Throughout the book, she delights in the misfortune of
others and constantly manipulates events to bring down calamity on
Ammu and the twins.
SUMMARY
The death of Margaret's second husband in a car accident
prompts Chacko to invite her and Sophie (Margaret's and Chacko's
daughter from their brief marriage) to spend Christmas in Ayemenem.
The day before Margaret and Sophie arrive, the family goes to a theater
to see The Sound of Music. On their way to the theater, the family
(Chacko, Ammu, Estha, Rahel, and Baby Kochamma) encounters a
group of Communist protesters.
SUMMARY

The protesters surround the car and force Baby Kochamma to wave a
red flag and chant a Communist slogan, thus humiliating her. Rahel
thinks she sees Velutha, a servant who works for the family's pickle
factory among the protesters. Then, at the theater, Estha is molested by
the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man," a vendor working the snack
counter. Estha's experience factors into the tragic events at the heart of
the narrative.
SUMMARY
Rahel's assertion that she saw Velutha in the Communist mob
causes Baby Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at
the protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor a deep hatred toward
him. Velutha is an Untouchable (the lowest caste in India), and his
family has served the Ipes for generations. He is an extremely gifted
carpenter and mechanic. His skills in repairing machinery make him
essential at the pickle factory, but draw resentment and hostility from
the other Untouchable factory workers.
SUMMARY

Rahel and Estha form an unlikely bond with Velutha and come to love
him despite his caste status. It is her children's love for Velutha that
causes Ammu to realize her own attraction to him, and eventually, she
comes to "love by night the man her children loved by day." Ammu and
Velutha begin a short-lived affair that culminates in tragedy for the
family.
SUMMARY
When her relationship with Velutha is discovered, Ammu is locked in her
room and Velutha is banished. In her rage, Ammu blames the twins for her
misfortune and calls them "millstones around her neck." Distraught, Rahel and
Estha decide to run away. Their cousin, Sophie Mol, persuades them to take her
with them. During the night, as they try to reach an abandoned house across the
river, their boat turn over and Sophie drowns. When Margaret and Chacko
return from Cochin, where they picked up plane tickets, they see Sophie's body
laid out on the sofa. Margaret vomits, hits Estha, and hysterically berates the
twins because they survived and Sophie did not.
SUMMARY
Baby Kochamma goes to the police and accuses Velutha of being
responsible for Sophie's death. She claims that Velutha tried to rape Ammu,
threatened the family, and kidnapped the children. A group of policemen hunt
Velutha down, found in History House, savagely beat him for crossing caste
lines, and arrest him on the brink of death. The twins, who are also in the
abandoned house, witness the horrific scene. Later, when they reveal the truth
to the chief of police—that they ran away by choice, and that Sophie's death was
an accident—he is alarmed. He knows that Velutha is a Communist, and he is
afraid that if word gets out that the arrest and beating were wrongful, it will
cause unrest among the local Communists.
SUMMARY

He threatens to hold Baby Kochamma responsible for falsely accusing Velutha.

To save herself, Baby Kochamma tricks Rahel and Estha into believing that the
two of them would be interlaced as having murdered Sophie out of jealousy and
were facing sure imprisonment for them and their Ammu. And as a way out of
this she suggests them to lie to the inspector that Velutha had kidnapped them
and had murdered Sophie. Velutha dies of his injuries overnight.
SUMMARY

After Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes to the police to tell the truth about her
relationship with Velutha. The police threaten her to make her leave the matter
alone. Afraid of being exposed, Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko that Ammu
and the twins were responsible for his daughter's death. Chacko kicks Ammu
out of the house and forces her to send Estha to live with his father. Estha never
sees Ammu again. She dies alone and impoverished a few years later at the age
of 31.
SUMMARY
After a turbulent childhood and adolescence in India, Rahel goes to
America to study. There, she marries and divorces Larry McCaslin before
returning to Ayemenem after several years of working dead-end jobs. Rahel and
Estha, now 31—the age their mother was when she died; a "viable, die-able age,"
as Roy writes—are reunited for the first time since they were children. In the
intervening years, they have been haunted by their guilt and their grief-ridden
pasts. Estha is perpetually silent, and Rahel has a haunted look in her eyes. It
becomes apparent that neither twin ever found another person who understood
them in the way they understand each other. The twins' renewed intimacy is
consummated in their having sex.
 AYEMENEM OF KERALA, INDIA

▪ India is a very complex society with various cultural and religious

habits and beliefs. Society is divided not only by the very strict caste
system but also by class consciousness.
▪ Many languages are spoken in India, but the higher classes make a
point of speaking English, sending their sons to study in England
and adopting certain English habits.
▪ Kerala itself, where the story is set, has a complex social setup, with
Hindus, Muslims, and Christians displaying different lifestyles and
traditions. It also has the largest Christian population in India,
predominantly Saint Thomas Christians or Syrian Christians. In
the Kottayam district, Christians are a majority.
FAMILY AND SOCIAL OBLIGATION
▪ Baby Kochamma, one of the book’s most negative characters, allows her
personal grievances and preoccupation with society’s approval to lead her to
betray her own family.
▪ Outside of the Ipes, Vellya Paapen also chooses his duty to society over familial
love when he offers to kill his son, the Untouchable Velutha, for sleeping with
Ammu.
▪ The very existence of the twins in Ammu’s current state of divorce is also a
disgrace for Ammu in Indian society.
▪ Mammachi deals with social and personal issues with her children as well, as
she loves Chacko with a repressed sexuality and forgives his affairs, but
disowns Ammu when Ammu sleeps with an Untouchable.
INDIAN POLITICS, SOCIETY, AND CLASS
▪ In the larger society of Kerala, India (in the 1969 portion of the
novel), Marxist ideas have taken root and begin to upset the class
system of landlords and laborers. This directly affects Paradise
Pickles and the characters of Velutha, Chacko, and Comrade Pillai.
▪ The ancient Hindu caste system is another important factor – this
system was officially abolished years earlier, but it still remains
strongly imprinted on the minds of the public. The “Love Laws” of
the caste system are of particular significance, particularly the
divide between Touchables and Untouchables (a caste seen as vastly
inferior).
INDIAN POLITICS, SOCIETY, AND CLASS
▪ Estha and Rahel, who are half-Hindu, half-Syrian Christian, must
then struggle with this conflicting identity.
▪ The gender double standard of Indian society is another large factor
in the plot, as Pappachi and Chacko’s sins are generally overlooked,
while Ammu is disgraced and scorned for being divorced.
▪ Overall, the “small things” that occur between the characters of the
novel serve as a microcosm for the “big things” happening
throughout India,
LOVE AND SEXUALITY
▪ The relationship between Estha and Rahel is the strongest of the
book, as the two are so close as to almost consider themselves one
person.
▪ Ammu’s relationship with Velutha, an Untouchable, is horrifying
to the community and leads to Velutha’s death and Ammu’s exile,
but it is also the most positive example of romantic love in the
novel.
▪ Unfortunately, love and sexuality often take on more violent and
oppressive forms, as Mammachi is beaten by her husband and Estha
is molested by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man.
LOVE AND SEXUALITY
▪ Roy ends the novel with Estha and Rahel’s incestuous
union after they are reunited, followed by Ammu’s first
sexual encounter with Velutha.
▪ The poetic descriptions and juxtaposition of these scenes
against violence and death gives them greater impact, and
through them Roy shows that love can cross divides of
politics and hatred.
CHANGE VS. PRESERVATION
▪ Paradise Pickles & Preserves is the most obvious symbol of
preservation (pickling things to preserve them), as
Mammachi and the people of Ayemenem cling to the old
caste system and the gender double standard.
▪ In places like Mammachi’s house and the “History House”
things linger from the past and are nursed and kept alive,
like the “Loss of Sophie Mol” or the ghost of Kari Saipu.
CHANGE VS. PRESERVATION
▪ “It
is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on
for so much longer than the memory of the life that it
purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol…
slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive.
It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season.
As permanent as a government job.” (p.9)
▪ Other than through its name, the History House also
becomes a symbol of preservation as the resting place of
Rahel’s plastic watch with the time painted on it – a small
example of literally freezing time.
CHANGE VS. PRESERVATION
▪ Despite these attempts at preservation, the pickle jars keep leaking,
and one of the book’s common refrains is “things can change in a
day.”
▪ Ammu gets divorced and then loves an Untouchable, defying gender
roles and the caste system, and the Marxist movement gains power
and overturns the system of landlords and laborers.
▪ Small things like Ammu’s warning that she loves Rahel “a little
less” lead to big events like Rahel and Estha running away, which
in turn leads to Sophie Mol’s death.
SMALL THINGS

▪ Through this lens, Roy dwells on small things like Rahel’s watch,
Estha’s “Two Thoughts,” and the little Marxist flag instead of
straightforwardly describing the plot of the story
▪ Within the narrative itself, Roy often points out that small talk is a
mask for large, hidden feelings. The most important example of this
is in Ammu and Velutha’s relationship at the end of the book.
SMALL THINGS
▪ Instead of speaking of the huge taboo they are breaking or the
impossibility of their future, the two lovers focus on the bugs in the
jungle around them and look no farther than “tomorrow.” While
the “Big Things” eventually reveal themselves, it is the small things
of the novel that make the story so moving and human, and Roy’s
writing style so intimate.
▪ In both the novel’s title and in her writing style, Roy emphasizes
the small moments, objects, and changes that symbolize and lead to
the “Big Things” in life, like death, love, and political upheaval.
PAPPACHI’S MOTH
▪ The actual moth was an insect that Pappachi discovered while he
was Imperial Entomologist, and he believed it to be a new species.
▪ The narrator muses that this moth has haunted the family ever
since, beginning with Pappachi’s bursts of rage and domestic abuse.
▪ In the present day of the novel, Pappachi’s moth becomes an eerie
symbol of fear and unhappiness, particularly for Rahel. When
something bad happens she feels the moth with “unusually dense
dorsal tufts” land on her heart, and when she feels safer or more
loved the moth lets go for a while
PAPPACHI’S MOTH
▪ “D’you know what happens when you hurt people?” Ammu said.
“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what
careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”A cold
moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel’s
heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six
goosebumps on her careless heart. A little less her Ammu loved her.”
(p.54)
PARADISE PICKLES & PRESERVES
▪ The pickle factory next to the Ipe house becomes a plot point as its
laborers flirt with Marxism and rebellion, but the pickles
themselves are symbolic of the theme of preservation.
▪ Within the pickle factory itself, the banana jam Mammachi makes
is also symbolic, as banana jam is illegal to sell because it cannot be
properly categorized as either jam or jelly.
▪ Rahel compares this too much of the family’s conflict, as lines of
religion and caste are blurred and this confusion of categories leads
to tragedy
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE
The story is set in the caste society of India (1969 and
1993), at a time when members of the Untouchable
Paravan caste were not permitted to touch members of
higher castes or enter their houses. The Untouchables were
considered polluted beings. In older times Untouchables
had even had to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping
away their “unclean” footprints.
They had the lowliest jobs and lived in subhuman
conditions. It is exactly what had been experienced by
Velutha, the god of small things, in the novel.
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE
In the novel, the Ipes are considered upper class
family. They are factory owners, the dominating class-
bourgeoisie. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma would not
ever bend down to mix with those of a lower class. The Ipes
are very class-conscious and feel a need to maintain their
status. Discrimination is a way of protecting their
privileged position in society. Even Kochu Maria, who has
been with them for years, will always be a servant of a
lower class.
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE

Velutha in the novel is a great representation of

“proletariat” wherein in he is coined as “Untouchable” in
the story as with his father Vellya Paapen and his brother
Kuttapen. He is a great carpenter; he manages the
operations in Paradise Pickle's factory but is underpaid by
Mamachi (the owner) for the Touchables not to rebel
because Untouchables are not permitted by the society to
take what is not due to them.
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE

On their way to the theater, Ipes encounter a group of

Communist protesters. The protesters surround the car and
force Baby Kochamma to wave a red flag and chant a
Communist slogan, thus humiliating her. Rahel's assertion
that she saw Velutha in the Communist mob causes Baby
Kochamma to associate Velutha with her humiliation at the
protesters' hands, and she begins to harbor a deep hatred
toward him which serves as the start of his tragedy.
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE
This is the beginning of serious encounter by a
proletariat and a bourgeoisie. Series of events happened in
accordance with his fall. His relationship with Ammu has
been revealed. Death of Sophie Mol follows. All these are
believed to be the doings of Velutha, poor Velutha. Baby
Kochamma goes to the police and accuses Velutha of being
responsible for Sophie's death. She claims that Velutha
tried to rape Ammu, threatened the family, and kidnapped
the children. A group of policemen hunt Velutha down,
savagely beat him for crossing caste lines, and arrest him
on the brink of death.
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE

This event gives peak to the story that there is no

justice belonging to the lower class of society. Caste is a
gold to be treasured and preserved by everyone. At the
latter part of the novel, after Sophie's funeral, Ammu goes
to the police to tell the truth about her relationship with
Velutha, that he is no killer and kidnapper. The police
threaten her to make her leave the matter alone foe
nothing will change because he is dead.
MARXIST VIEW: CLASS STRUGGLE
But above all these, there are factors that twist the
message behind the story. Chacko Ipe, the one who runs the
factory is a Marxist. But he never helps Velutha in his
situation; he does nothing to it. Another controversial event
is that Ammu deeply loves Velutha. She made something to
it, she welcomed him in her flesh and gave all his
womanhood.
These might call to the fact that the ancient Hindu
caste system was abolished around 1950, but many Indians
still clung to old traditions and the class divide.