Conclusion

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6. Conclusion

When Bakhtin talked about polyphony and dialogism, it was the novelistic discourse

that he had in mind. Any book's vocabulary should be fundamentally dialogic, that is

to say, it should be distinguished by the continuous play of multiple discourses,

without any of them actually taking authorial power. Roy’s select essays have been

multi-voiced in the sense that she explores in them alternative perspectives by using

multiple genres written from different points of view to augment her point. Genres

like dialogues, reports, satire, and parody have been incorporated into the traditional

essay. There was a scope to look at Roy’s nonfiction from the dialogic view point.

The natural urge of humans to transgress the sacrosanct boundaries charted out

in the past hangs like an Albatross around our necks though we may boast of living in

a globalized world. It goes without saying that Indian masses too have demystified the

inter-racial marriages, live-in-relationships, and other issues of sexuality once

considered illicit. The depiction of such themes and their deliberations in academia

are no more considered profane. Hence, it is the guts, grit and gumption of Arundhati

Roy, who as a writer of realist fiction, doesn’t dodge her responsibility but instead

reiterates her vision and imagination of tomorrow.

The objective of this thesis was to explore ‘the social’ as literary. ‘The social’

encompasses all traditions, conventions, systems, institutional beliefs and

consequences. There are multiple voices raised by her which include the issues of

casteism, discrimination, human exploitation, political corruption, and among others.

She focuses on the down trodden condition of the marginalized sections of the

society. Thus, human issues are being presented as a literary narrative. The God of

Small Things is a masterpiece of Arundhati Roy. The novel deconstructs the

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patriarchal machinery focused on caste-discrimination and complicity with some

political powers under a tumultuous social context, the writer portrays the human

experienced it’s psyche. The novel voices the subalterns’ secret and subdued feelings.

It’s an enrapturing view of social life in India. In this barbaric, oppressive and

oppressive society, it also portrays the constant battle of women and caste system to

inscribe their personalities.

The God of Small Things consists of multiple themes, some of the major

themes are: (a) change from uncorrupted innocence to a broken soul, cultural

problems i. e. the Indian caste system, India’s march towards globalization,

modernization and development, love laws and boundaries created by society in terms

of love and companionship, the way grief flows throughout the novel directly or

indirectly, in the novel, history supports the way that the omnipresent author moves

back and forth in time throughout the novel, there is constant mocking of the

patriarchal form of society: the matriarch authority constantly supporting the patriarch

of the family to run the show, fear that leads to loss of identity, constant need to

preserve memories, underlying focus and connection with small things, the constant

reminders and repetitions, communism in Kerala: it’s metaphorical “red” and its

literal beliefs. Throughout the novel, Roy connects all these themes together, forming

a beautifully composed literary narrative that touches all the strong, difficult concepts

of today’s society.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness lacks by way of pleasure-value, it makes up

for with its influence-value. It might not deserve the Booker, but paradoxically, this is

the book’s strength. By eschewing complexity or esoteric literary devices, Roy has

done a considerable favor to her country because there is definitely a rung of non-

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trolling middle-class right-wingers and fence-sitters who might pick up the book out

of curiosity, if not for the love of fiction.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a complete satire aiming to attack the

ways of patriarch society and where a transgender beg for their place, women are

raped and bound to seize their lips, abandoned lives of dalits and Hindus and Muslims

war. The blind administration taking all of the biased advantages from those events.

The actual victims are the citizens. Roy always captures real events in her texts and

this so-called fiction is no less. The story takes us through the lanes between the

graveyards to Valley, forest to protest field, and silent tears to demonstration.

Each and every word of her work has a purpose. Her remarks about the

political situation always attracted controversy because very few writers use the

medium of literature to speak the truth. She never thought of popularity or awards or

rejections. But she always attempts to sooth the wounds of the excluded crowd. She

tries to see through their eyes, aims to console them, help them and stand with them.

Arundhati Roy can be termed as the refined writer of this decade. Through her

writing and participating in many programs related to the marginalized, she

wholeheartedly attempts to make the society a better living place than it is. She

upholds the rights of minorities and talks for the voiceless people. Her novels The

Ministry of Utmost Happiness and The God of Small Things hold the unbearable

truths of society such as wretched condition of minorities, humiliated life of

transgender, Dalits (untouchables), mediocre government, life of Naxals, rape,

murder. The stories are about the marginalized group of people who are victims of

injustice, inequality and prejudice. Her fictions are not only a genre; rather it seems a

universe where she puts her thoughts about the wrong happenings going on in the

society.

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 In both of the novels, Roy depicts the humiliations and distress of the

minorities at the hands of the upper sections of the society. She is not centred on one

problem and injustice that is going on in society; rather she focuses on different

notions of discriminations towards the marginalized. As we see, she shows the ill

treatments upon Hindus in India, at the same time she portrays the clashes in between

Muslims. Her representation is not blind, as she does not prioritize one minority over

another; as an invested writer, Roy is more focused in exposing human vises and

rescuing suffering humanity. Both of the novels, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

and The God of Small Things have emotional tenor about social injustice that bears

direct relationship to the level of prejudice. Roy delineates the voiceless people who

encounter all that tyranny. To portray that, Roy has to encounter speaking truth to

power while sifting the facts from the fiction of progress. Very intensely in the novels

Roy portrays the obsession of Indian society with class system, untouchability, and all

kinds of filth that create hatred and trigger violence. Roy specifically, depicts the race

and caste issue to show the inhuman acts toward them caused by the upper castes.

Each character in the novels has its own story. Roy explores each side of societal

issues. She unfolds that the fight is not against any particular individual, it is rather

the followers of a particular religious faith, which is a micro-narrative. All the points

that Roy takes as a concern of society, really needs to be noticed and recognized.

Collective efforts can bring changes for the betterment of our society.

There has been a lot of criticism that propped up after the publication of The

Ministry of Utmost Happiness due to the incoherency in the narrative pattern. The

narrative starts at the unusual setting of a necropolis, to depict the long litany of

necropolitics created by the corrupted pseudo-democratic setup of India, under the

clutches of globalization, materialization, industrialization, westernization and the

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other long list of existing political scams. By the order of structure, the novel starts

with the story of Anjum, a trans-woman, precisely a woman trapped in a man’s body.

The time gap is adjusted to tell the story of Anjum right from her birth to the events

that led her to the first setting of the graveyard. Through this part of the narrative, Roy

moulds the one half of the dystopian sphere by etching the caste craze, media politics,

gender politics, globalization, islamophobia etc. that rules the democratic India, which

cracked the whole set up and demolished the “the ministry of utmost happiness”.

This is a direct blow to writers who create junk works just for the commercial

popularity of these works, and is a question towards popular fiction versus serious

fiction. Roy is also harping on the influential and educative value of literature, like

how Arnold believed that poetry could have redemptive powers and urged his readers

to promote good literature by touchstone method to refine literature to attain this goal.

The ungrammatical sentence used in the above story shows how the role of a writer

and literature itself has been degraded in the contemporary scenario where even art is

approached with a materialistic instinct.

Roy’s fiction has been especially explored for its feminist and post-colonial

implications. It is also a commonly held view that she articulates the marginalized in

various sectors of the human community as well as the natural environment in her

oeuvre - both fiction and nonfiction. But what makes her work special is that she

authenticates her ideologies by a multi-voiced representation of the same. Her works

are not monologues. A careful reading of her corpus reveals a number of unmerged

voices with individual standing that engage in a dialogue. Reading beneath the surface

of the literature on Roy reveals that her works can never be studied in isolation. No

single view point can be taken as the only one, but the success of her novel lies in the

dialogic relationship between all these critiques.

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 The author’s interest in culture can be questioned by the readers. Culture,

tradition and dignity are certain things which are lacking in the IPE family. Roy had

not focused on its importance through the characters. The native culture is given less

importance and all characters are accustomed to an Anglicized way of living. A blend

of western and eastern culture is the result of post - colonialism. From childhood, the

fraternal twins learned to respect and follow western culture. Especially, Esthappen

and Rahel read story books like Jungle book. The readers can find the melancholic

mood of the characters. A sense of loss and grief is also found in the characters in

different situations like the death of the main characters. The death of Sophie is the

main cause for other problems. It leads to problems like untouchability, alienation and

caste segregation. The death of Ammu is another reason where Rahel and Esthappen

are separated and meet after long years. Velutha’s death is the mourning of

downtrodden people living in the society. Sense of guiltiness is given less significance

in the novel. The characters have illegal marriage affairs. They are not presented

without any guiltiness. Certain ideas about marriage and other things are

misinterpreted by the author.

The change in marriage tradition is another area in which a reader can focus in

the novel. The behavior of the Anglicized community is focused more than the Syrian

Christian tradition in Kerala by the author. Chacko speaks about the novel ‘The Great

Gatsby’; Rahel speaks about ‘Jungle book’ to express his love towards her culture in

England. Christening of the characters by the author has its own complexity. Velutha

means white in Malayalam, he has black complexion. We can find complexities in

naming Velutha as ‘Velutha’. Rahel, Esthappen and other main characters have names

according to Indian culture. Their demeanor and manners shows they are from

England. This creates confusions in the minds of readers. The Ipe family is always

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separated by certain problems. Baby Kochamma is the one reason for the migration

and separation of twin siblings. Migration and separation between twin siblings create

a lot of hurt feelings in their mind. Before they go to different places they were also

hurt by Baby Kochamma in various incidents. In this way, freedom and liberty was

not given to the main characters like Ammu, Rahel, Esthappen and Sophie. They were

suppressed as a result of all Baby Kochamma deeds. Voracious readers can easily

identify how Arundhathi Roy had presented broken family relationships.

The young generation gives less seriousness to Moral value, tradition and

custom. Anglicized community and preference to western culture and tradition is

elaborated in the novel. Youngsters prefer to migrate and settle outside India. The

author focuses on all small and serious issues in the novel. We can say that the title of

the novel, The God of Small Things is an apt one because she deals with everything in

a meticulous manner. The issues in this novel are presented with its seriousness, but

on certain occasion’s author failed to connect those issues with the Syrian Christian

families. The author had dealt with minor and major issues of Syrian Catholic

families, Indian culture, and politics through her characters. These kinds of issues or

problems are dealt mostly in a meticulous manner. The characters are dealing with

certain problems even in a very careful manner. So they can be called as the real ‘God

of Small Things’ The fact that Roy sees language as an instrument of state repression

also holds no water because her own subversive style works against this phenomenon

by eliciting a dialogue between the two and thus, emphasizing the dynamic nature of

language. The dialogics of semantics can be taken to be positive as far as the

progression and dynamism of language is concerned. But in the essay above Roy

points out how even meaning is manipulated to suit the selfish needs of the powerful.

The very concept of democracy loses meaning in the hands of a few power hungry

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rulers. A person’s semantic intent can be gauged only by placing him or her in the

respective cultural, social and political context. Actual meaning is seen to evolve in

the dialogization process of words and contexts.

Roy foregrounds those skeletons in the cupboards of the power hungry. She

tears opens the masks of those who plunder others in the name of civilization and

progress. In the essay “Confronting Empire” Roy states with respect to corporate

globalization: “We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It

now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness”

(31). This seems to be Roy’s agenda in her essays and is unveiled in multiple voices.

In a similar manner, Roy registers her protest against the government and the

court for not taking action against the big factories run by the big industrialists who

have for years polluted rivers, denuded forest, depleted and poisoned groundwater and

destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of people who depend on these resources for

livelihood. She cites the example of the Grasim factory in Kerala, the Orient research

Mill in Madhya Pradesh, the noxious ‘Sunrise Belt’ industries in Gujarat, the uranium

mines in Jadugoda and the aluminum plants in Orissa. She does not stop here but

pauses for answers to questions about the role of a writer or how a writer could

continue writing fiction and shut herself from reality in a situation like this. Many

writers contain themselves by taking ambiguous positions to keep themselves safe

from criticism and the troubles that come along in taking sides.

Her use of the English language as a subversive means of protest has already

been evident while viewing her through the lens of the latest literary theories of

feminism and post-colonial criticism. Her nonfiction writings on the other hand are

power-packed and are more a direct attack on the ‘Big things’. In fact her nonfiction

is an extension of her fiction and engages in a dialogue with each other regarding

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issues of marginality and subversiveness. The ironic tone, parody, satire, rich

metaphors and the great array of rhetorical techniques make it appropriate to the

circumstances and encourage dialogism through heteroglossia of various discourses.

In Roy’s works every phrase is carefully crafted because the sense of the audience is

evident for a dialogic progression. Most of her essays include rhetorical questions

which are aimed directly at the readers to initiate a dialogue.

In fact verbal interchange is the fundamental reality of any language. In the

history of human species, language is born not within the isolated individual, but in

interaction, between two or more human beings. The recent development in

Pragmatics makes this obvious, but highly influential theories of language have

obscured this truth. This is precisely what the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin

also tries to communicate. His dialogic model conforms to the idea that no text exists

in isolation. The dialogic part of work carries on a repetitive dialogue with other

writings of literature, different genres, other authors and even the readers. The essays

that have been selected for eliciting multiple voices are those with greater scope for a

dialogic study. Her visualization of the possibility of a nuclear war, when the enemies

will not be China or America; the foe would be Mother Earth herself and her

elements. When the life-giving elements-the sky, the land, and the wind would

eventually turn against humanity; and how the cities and forests will burn for days on

end, rivers will be filled with poison and wind will fuel the fires. She further goes on

to envisage how after everything burns, the fires will die and smoke will shut out the

whole scene. As the earth gets enveloped in darkness, there will be only nights and no

days. When nuclear winter sets in, the water in the hydrosphere will turn into toxic

ice. Groundwater will get contaminated through radioactive fallout that will seep

through the earth and pollute groundwater. As most of the living beings would perish,

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rats and cockroaches would multiply and dominate, competing with human beings for

subsistence. The worst ones affected would be the ones still alive, holding on to the

cancerous carcasses of their children-burned, bald and ill. All these thoughts,

envisaging and anticipating a catastrophic future as a result of nuclear warfare, entail

profound insight and imagination on the part of the writer.

She also envisages a point when people will be more concerned about piling

bombs than about feeding their own bellies. Roy visualizes a stage when nuclear

technology may soon find its way to the market, and it may be easily accessible to

anybody - businessmen, terrorists, and even the occasional rich writer, like herself.

By attempting to raise a voice against the current injustice, discrimination and

convention of society that attempt to marginalise human beings into nothingness,

suppress and control the identity of individuals within a boundary, she dreams of

changing the world. A devastating resonance of the Subaltern is her excellent novel

The God of Small Things (1997). Many critiques, including such as Gramsci and

Spivak, define this term, limiting it only to the proletariat and women respectively.

Roy depicts an exceptionally traditional Keralite social system, which decides the fate

of every person (small things) as God; gives prison sentences through death and

silence if someone tries to exemplify his laws, customs, and conventions. Both the

major protagonists of the book are survivors of these fantastic myths, both oppressors

and marginalized. In addition, a saga of sorrow may be named, where passion is tied

to loss, death, unfulfillment and isolation.

All her books address political issues, religious issues, war, Capitalism,

Nationalism and the condition of people in this critical point of time. She got famous

for her social activity as well as her participation in many revolts in order to bring

change in the society. She is a writer with a cause behind every action. There is an

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effort to create a better situation for the underprivileged. Today, She is a world

acclaimed author and a successful social activist. She doesn’t believe in artificial

traditions and manmade history. She questions the taboos, patriarchal ways of life, the

authority of political power over people that is reflected in her works. Her works are

the expression of her disgust, anger, dissatisfaction and sympathy.

Holdheim’s claims for the essay are undoubtedly the most nobly ambitious

ones made by any essay critic. However, further exploration of the essay’s position in

the academy in the subsequent period puts these claims in an ironic light. This

happens because of the ambiguity in the use of the term “deconstruction” in the

context of the essay. Holdheim used the term in a moral sense in relation to essay as

genre i.e. in the sense of a broad but invariable orientation towards deconstructing

received opinion that defines the form. His expectations for the recovery of the essay

are based on the belief that deconstruction as a mode or approach guides both the

essay and modern literary theory and hence the essay will find a respectable place

within that theoretical framework.

In a similar manner she trivializes the ideas of deterrent theory and terms it as

a perilous joke where iodine pills are prescribed as a prophylactic for nuclear

irradiation. Roy pays her tribute to the endless mass resistance movements, peace

organizations and social and human right activist leaders who have courageously

opposed the use of nuclear arms. Roy gives out an apocalyptic view on the future

nuclear-weapons and its markets spreading like the several tentacles of the octopus.

Now that India and Pakistan are nuclear countries, it will not take long for the octopus

to extend its infectious arms towards other nations like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nepal

Bhutan or any other second and third world countries. She foresees a time when

nuclear technology will be available in the market and to survive the steep

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competition, prices would come down and the availability of arms would be a normal

case. As a result there will be constant fear among the public and possibly one country

will be threatening the other. So, this man-made uncontrolled fear psyche will engulf

the human system and that they will die several deaths before real death due to

nuclear warfare.

Roy’s shrilling voice of protest against the nuclear test finds its manifestation

in her writing. In her opinion, the nuclear bomb is a betrayal on the part of the

governments on the people. It is one of the most anti-democratic, anti national, anti-

human, outright evil things that man has invented. She questions the man in power

and wonders at his right to destroy everything that is human which includes the earth,

the skies, the mountains, the rivers, the cities and the villages. She vouches for

humility on their part by not challenging God because nuclear bombs are a kind of

challenge to the creator Himself.

Roy projects herself as an ambassador of peace with justice through her

nonfiction writings. She criticized both the Congress Party and the BJP for their keen

enthusiasm in pursuing nuclear weapons. The Government taught its people how to

wage war against the very elements of nature. Weapons of mass destruction aim at the

culmination of human society. Atom bombs have no feelings; they don’t have any

space and time: Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use

them or not. They will destroy us either way. Roy’s “The End of Imagination'' has

achieved the intended meaning. It could spread the message wide and clear that the

nuclear weapons are harmful and they should be eradicated at any cost. Roy laments

the death of her imaginative world in “The End of Imagination '' and considers the

bomb as ‘Man’s challenge to God’.

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 Thus Roy opened up a new paradigm of writing: activism that stretched into a

fortuitous literary representation of lived experience of reality of immediate societies.

How this merging of domains of activism and literature manifest in her writing is a

saga of roles she has been playing. She has been an active participant in public rallies

against construction of Sardar Sarovar Dam Project. She has made financial

contributions also towards this movement. She has personally gone on fact finding

journeys to the jungles of Chhattisgarh to meet the Maoists who are at the standoff

with the government to fight for their rights. For authors dealing with social and

political reform, her expansionist works have established a standard. One could

summarize Roy’s progression in her interventionist writings as writer-activist in the

following ways: Firstly a critical sense her response to sensitive social and political

issues, which got further transmuted into polyphony of voice, set a dialogic tone in

her activist and literary writings, constituting her authorial agency. Secondly, all of

Roy’s work so far documents the historical and political achievement accomplished

by Indian women activists. This is an area of a situated and responsible writing on her

part that puts her in a lineage of activism through writing. For instance, her essays not

only depict and critique gendered oppression; they also problematize the association

between feminist, liberalist ideologies, modernity and activism. Roy does not confirm

her into any rigid ideology. She problematizes the restricted associations with

feminism, liberalism, activism and modernity.

Further insight created after this research suggests that essays selected for

analysis are capable of the inclusion of multiple genres and stylization processes to

save them from mononlogism. Her entire work can also be put to the hermeneutics of

suspicion. Her nonfiction, in fact, can be categorized under what is called creative

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nonfiction because of her apt and clever use of language and its effectiveness in

driving home her point. The aesthetic value of her nonfiction fits into what Walter

Pater calls “the literature of fact”. What sets this creative writer apart is that her

polemic prose is substantiated by facts, statistics and data of analyzing magnitude that

she had carefully researched before writing each article.

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