Context & Writer's Techniques (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes

Context & Writer's Techniques

Introduction to the novel

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, published in 1997, won the prestigious Booker Prize and established Roy as a significant voice in contemporary literature. The novel is set in 1969 Kerala, India, and explores the aftermath of British colonial rule through the lens of a Syrian Christian family. Roy draws extensively on her own childhood memories of Kerala's riverine landscape and the complex social divisions that defined the region. The narrative examines themes of caste rigidity, forbidden love, political upheaval, and family trauma against the backdrop of postcolonial India's struggles with identity and authority.

Historical context

Postcolonial India and Kerala's political landscape

The novel takes place in 1969, a crucial period in Kerala's history following India's independence from British rule. This was a time when the newly independent nation was still grappling with the legacies of colonialism whilst attempting to forge its own identity. Kerala, a state in southern India, was experiencing significant political and social tensions during this period.

The narrative captures the atmosphere of the post-Naxalite uprising, a communist revolutionary movement that had recently swept through Kerala. This political violence is reflected in the novel's depiction of Communist party activities and the beating of Velutha, a Dalit character. The Emergency period of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties, is foreshadowed through various elements in the story, including Pappachi's moth rage, which symbolises the authoritarian tendencies emerging in Indian politics.

Caste system and social divisions

One of the novel's central concerns is India's caste system and its devastating impact on individuals and communities. The so-called Love Laws prohibited relationships between different castes, particularly between upper-caste Syrian Christians like the Ipe family and lower-caste Dalits (formerly called Untouchables) like Velutha. These rigid social boundaries are embodied in the forbidden relationship between Ammu and Velutha, which violates deeply entrenched social taboos.

Roy presents the conflict between different social classes through contrasting characters: Mammachi's factory represents the Anglophone elite who benefited from colonial education and economic opportunities, whilst Velutha embodies subaltern resistance – the struggle of marginalised people against oppressive social structures. The river itself becomes a metaphor for history as a polluted, contaminated flow that carries the remnants of colonial oppression into the postcolonial present.

Literary context

Influences and innovations

Roy's debut novel engages in dialogue with several important literary traditions. She draws inspiration from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which pioneered the technique of blending historical events with personal narratives, and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which established magical realism as a powerful literary mode for exploring complex historical realities.

However, Roy's approach is distinctive in its focus on Kerala regionalism and its innovative use of postcolonial feminist perspectives. The novel tells its story through the synchronised consciousness of twins Estha and Rahel, creating a unique narrative voice that challenges traditional storytelling methods.

Challenging narrative conventions

Roy's work represents a postmodern approach that questions traditional literary realism. She challenges what she calls History's large things – the grand narratives of politics, war, and empire – by focusing instead on small things: the everyday experiences, emotions, and traumas of ordinary people, particularly women and children. This epistemological shift (a change in how we understand and know the world) aligns with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, which similarly employs non-linear narrative structures and fragmented storytelling to explore themes of trauma and memory.

Writer's techniques

Non-sequential narration

Roy structures the novel using a fragmented, non-linear timeline that constantly moves between different time periods. The main narrative alternates between the present day in 1993, when Rahel returns to Ayemenem as an adult, and the tragic events of 1969 that centred on Sophie Mol's drowning and Velutha's death.

This technique employs both prolepsis (flash-forwards revealing future events) and analepsis (flashbacks to past events). The effect mimics the twins' two-egg unity – their shared consciousness that experiences time not as a straight line but as a simultaneous whole. The narrative voice often states that things are not Two but One, reflecting how past and present, memory and experience, are inseparable.

The river's meandering course serves as a metaphor for this non-chronological narrative structure, suggesting that history and memory flow in complex, interconnected patterns rather than in simple sequences. This fragmented approach effectively conveys the lasting impact of childhood trauma, showing how past events continue to shape present consciousness.

Lyrical hybrid English (Malayalam-English)

One of Roy's most distinctive techniques is her creation of a hybrid language that fuses Malayalam (the language of Kerala) with Standard English. This linguistic innovation serves multiple purposes in the text.

Roy creates neologisms – newly invented words – such as Angliss (a child's mispronunciation of English) and grower growl, which capture the way children process language. She uses portmanteau words like LayTerNity, combining later and eternity to suggest how time stretches endlessly in a child's perception. The phrase Not That Way! becomes a recurring motif in the children's vocabulary, highlighting moments of transgression and forbidden behaviour.

The language includes Malayalam-influenced sentence structures and child-grammar that deliberately breaks Standard English conventions. Roy employs alliteration and assonance, as seen in the description the river smelled of shit and fish, which creates a visceral sensory impression. This linguistic fusion achieves what postcolonial theorists call defamiliarisation – making colonial language strange and new by infusing it with indigenous elements. By doing so, Roy challenges the dominance of Standard English and asserts the validity of Kerala's local culture and modes of expression.

Multiple focalizations

Roy employs what narratologists call zero focalization through an omniscient third-person narrator who can access the inner thoughts and feelings of multiple characters. However, the narrative consistently shifts its focus between different consciousness centres, particularly Rahel, Estha, and Baby Kochamma.

This technique creates what critics describe as multiple focalizations, allowing readers to experience events from various perspectives. The narrative voice blends external description with internal psychological states, moving fluidly between what characters see, think, and feel. The twins are often referred to collectively as They, emphasising their merged psychological identity despite being separate individuals.

Sensory hyperbole and synesthesia

Roy's prose is characterised by vivid, often exaggerated sensory descriptions that assault the reader's senses. She writes that History smells of piss and shit and the bodies of the dead, using visceral, bodily language to defamiliarise official historical narratives. This technique parodies the imperial gaze – the way colonial literature often presented sanitised, romanticised views of colonised peoples and places.

Synesthesia is a literary device where one type of sensory description is expressed through another sense – for example, describing sounds in terms of colours, or smells in terms of textures. Roy uses this technique extensively to create a rich, immersive sensory world.

The focus on small things – ants crawling across surfaces, moths fluttering at windows, the texture of dust – foregrounds details that grand historical narratives typically ignore. These minute observations privilege the perspectives of marginalised characters, particularly children and lower-caste individuals like Velutha, whose experiences are often overlooked in conventional histories.

Repetition and anadiplosis

Roy employs anadiplosis, a rhetorical device where the last word or phrase of one sentence becomes the first word or phrase of the next, creating a chain-like effect. This technique appears in leitmotifs – recurring phrases that echo throughout the text like musical themes.

The most significant repeated phrase is Things Can Change... Things Cannot, which appears cyclically throughout the novel. This repetition emphasises the inescapability of trauma and the way certain events permanently alter lives. The contradiction within the phrase itself – asserting both possibility and impossibility – reflects the novel's exploration of fate and free will.

Chapter titles also employ structural repetition, with The God of Loss appearing multiple times and foreshadowing the novel's central themes of absence, death, and what is irretrievably lost. These repeated elements create a sense of inevitability, suggesting that the tragic events of 1969 were always destined to unfold in the way they did.

Symbolism and metaphor

Roy constructs an elaborate system of symbols that carry thematic weight throughout the novel. The river functions as a central symbol, representing what Roy calls the History House – a repository of colonial memories and polluted legacies. The river is described as contaminated, much like Kerala's postcolonial present is contaminated by the violence and injustices of the past.

Oru Basha represents Velutha's forbidden touch – the physical contact between different castes that violates social taboos. The moth, particularly Pappachi's moth (an insect he discovered but which was named after someone else), symbolises his rage and frustration, which eventually manifests as domestic violence. This rage becomes incarnate (takes physical form) in his abusive behaviour towards his wife Mammachi.

Kathakali, the traditional Kerala dance-drama with its elaborate costumes and stylised movements, functions as a metaphor for the novel's narrative technique. Just as kathakali performers enact mythological stories through cyclical, repetitive movements, Roy's narrative performs the story of the Ipe family through repeated motifs and circular storytelling. The kathakali's performance mirrors the novel's own structure, suggesting that trauma, like myth, must be enacted and re-enacted to be understood.