The Politics of Transgression: History, Society, and the Individual in Postcolonial Literature

In two postcolonial novels, The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Secrets by Nuruddin Farah, both authors use the politics of families to paint a vivid picture of the social, cultural and political conditions of their nations. Roy and Farah both write about families where significant acts of moral and sexual transgressions take place often leading to the ruin and death of various characters in their stories. The transgressions in both the books also act as devices to portray the state of flux between history’s impositions and individual desires. However, while both authors use transgressions to signify socially symbolic acts, Roy uses transgression in The God of Small Things as a symbol of revolt by the weak and marginalized individuals against the ideals imposed on them by Indian history and society, whereas Farah uses transgressions in Secrets to showcase the moral degradation of the individual which is mirrored in the disintegration of the Somali nation and thus implies that humanity is defined by its maintenance of certain historic taboos.

In the essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, Fredric Jameson argues that all third world texts are to be read as “national allegories” because “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society”¹. For Jameson, the denial of a “placeless individuality” to the third-world leads to “the allegorical nature of third-world culture, where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself”(86). We can see how the Jamesonian allegory finds its way in The God of Small Things where Roy uses her characters as national allegories to critique an India where the weak and unprotected, namely the women, children, untouchables and nature, are suppressed and suffer tremendously due to the “social machine” that “intrudes into the smallest and deepest core of their being and changes their lives”². Similarly in Secrets, Farah uses his character’s identities as inexplicably tied to that of the Somali nation, and where the collapse of the individual leads to the “collapse of the collective”(190). Farah’s characters also serve to critique the historical and social practices of the Somali people, who fail to protect and respect their women, children and nature and have thus led to the destruction of the Somali nation.

The God Of Small Things is a book about the tragic ruin of a family, brought on by the culmination of a series of small events that lead to big repercussions for the protagonists of the novel, dizygotic twins Estha and Rahel and their mother Ammu. The book, which won author Arundhati Roy the 1997 Booker Prize, delves into the lives of the small and marginalized who, unwilling to fit into the roles and boundaries laid down for them by society and history, inadvertently bring about their own destruction. Despite being a story that revolves around the loss of dreams, hopes and eventually lives, Roy employs beautiful and evocative language loaded with imagery, wordplay, humor and irony to juxtapose the grotesque conclusions that meet the protagonists of the novel. However, apart from the eloquent language of the book, it is the acts of transgressions of the weak and marginalized and not their conclusions, that are important, for in these acts lies a rejection of the historic ideals that society imposes on the individual- a rejection of “The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much”(33).

Roy personifies patriarchal norms in the Indian society in the form of abusive, manic and tyrant males that suppress the hopes and lives of the women around them. Ammu’s desires and her innate nature transgresses on the fate imposed upon her by her family and society and it is through her character that Roy gives us a critique of patriarchal traditions embedded in even an elite and educated family in India. The daughter of an abusive, “ill-tempered father and a bitter, long suffering mother”, Ammu has no means of achieving freedom as she lacks both a college education, which her father felt was “an unnecessary expense for a girl” and a “suitable dowry”(38-9). Ammu’s desperation to escape a life in her parents’ house leads her to marrying the first man who proposes to her for she believes that “anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem”(39). Yet, once again Ammu’s dreams are ruined as not only does her husband turn out to be a “full-blown alcoholic” but also later becomes abusive towards her and her children, causing her to return to Ayemenem, “unwelcomed”, because as the daughter, she has no “Locusts Stand I” on her paternal property (42,56). Even though Ammu lacks a college education or any formal exposure to the intellectual world, she is “just that sort of animal” who fights against the injustice she perceives in the world (180). It is Ammu’s “lofty sense of injustice and the mulish reckless streak that develops in Someone small who has been bullied all their lives by someone Big”, that lead her to transgress on social mores and norms by falling in love with Velutha, an untouchable, thus transgressing both moral and caste boundaries marked by society and history (40).

Velutha too provokes the wrath of society and history because he challenges societal beliefs regarding the caste system. Even though he is an untouchable, Velutha has not only gained an education but is a trained and “accomplished carpenter” which arouses the jealousy of other touchable workers in the pickle factory (75). In turn, Velutha is paid less than all other workers by Mammachi even as she comments that his “remarkable facility with his hands” could have made him “an engineer” had he not been a “Paravan”(75). Not only does Velutha rebel in the private sphere against the future that history and society have in store for him, but he is also a cardholder of the Communist party, “a Naxalite”(77). Velutha’s talents and intelligence cross the boundaries laid down by Indian history and society where untouchables are seen as dispensable, unskilled laborers like Velutha’s father Vellya Paapen, who are born to only serve the touchables. Not only does Velutha transgress social boundaries by his “lack of hesitation” and “unwarranted assurance” considered “insolence” in a Paravan, it is this “sureness” that leads to his friendship with Estha and Rahel and later forbidden relationship he has with Ammu (78).

Ammu and Velutha’s relationship can be seen as the attempt of both of them to lay a brick against “the smug, ordered world”, in the only way they have any power to (167). Roy describes the start of Velutha and Ammu’s relationship in the following passage:

“Standing in the shade of the rubber tree with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was off-footed, caught off-guard. This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History’s fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old, scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the love laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much”(214).

In the passage above, Roy gives us the moment when Ammu and Velutha realize their desire for each other, which before then had been “obscured by history‘s blinkers”(176). When Ammu sees her daughter lovingly playing with Velutha and in that innocent act breaking a social taboo of touching a Paravan, she realizes that she was jealous of both of them and it is that realization that leads to history being caught “off-footed, off-guard”(214). But when Velutha and Ammu look at each other and Velutha realizes of Ammu’s desire for him “history’s fiends return to claim them”(214). It is the irony of history that it chooses as its “deputy”, Vellya Paapen, Velutha’s own father, whose “Terror” at what his son had touched, “Entered”, “Loved” lead him to reveal Ammu and Velutha’s secret love to Mammachi and even offer to “kill his son with his own bare hands”(199,78). Thus Ammu and Velutha end up paying steep costs for their love, which transgresses on “History’s Plans”(199).

While Ammu and Velutha’s love might have “made the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen” in the 1960’s when the book is based, for most contemporary readers their love is completely understandable and legitimate (242). On the contrary, the scene of Estha and Rahel’s love making challenges a still very widely held historical and social taboo of incest. Estha and Rahel’s love making scene, with its subtle imagery, becomes a way for Estha and Rahel, to overcome the “Quietness and Emptiness” inside of them, to share their “hideous grief” and try to become the people who had “known each other before life began” instead of “strangers who had met in a chance encounter”(328). While the love making of Estha and Rahel is a transgressive act that “once again broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how much”, it also becomes a way for Roy to radically confront her readers with the fact that their own bearings of right and wrong are also steeped in history and society (33).

The History house also plays an important role in the book as it is the place where Estha and Rahel prepare their escape “Because Anything can Happen to Anyone”(198). Sadly, instead of proving to be the safe haven the twins dreamt of it as, it provides the backdrop for the shattering of their world as it is the location where Velutha is almost beaten to death by the Police and thus where Ammu, Velutha, Rahel and Estha’s “dreams are captured and redreamed”(306). When Chacko explains the history of their anglophile family to the twins, he states “history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. ‘To understand history,’ Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells”(52). Roy metaphorically connects Chacko’s anglophile family to a postcolonial India that according to Chacko has been “trapped outside” its own past and has therefore become “pointed in the wrong direction”(53). The History House had been owned by an Englishman, Kari Saipu, who had “gone native” and thus serves as a symbol of the English colonization of India (52). Saipu’s past, like that of the British colonial Raj, is also ridden with transgression as Saipu turns out to be a pedophile who shoots himself when his “young lover’s parents” took “the boy away from him and sent him to school”(52). The history house becomes the symbol of Indian history where Indians have been “locked out” of their past with their “ancestors whispering inside”(52-3). Indian cannot understand their ancestors words because, “Our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures our dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves”(53). The war that Chacko is talking about is India’s freedom, which India has won and yet at the same time lost because of the effects of globalization, which have led to a similar colonization of India by multinational corporations. This is evident in the changes that the History house goes through with time for when Rahel returns to Ayemenen, the History house has been made into a Heritage Hotel, with “Toy histories for rich tourists to play in”(126).

Though Ammu and Velutha’s story meets a tragic end, Roy makes their story one of hope rather than of despair by placing the scene of their lovemaking, their act of rebellion, right at the very end of the novel. Ammu and Velutha’s love making scene is charged in its explicit imagery: “She tasted him, salty in her mouth”, while “He took her nipple in his mouth and cradled her other breast in his calloused palm” while “she guided him into her” (318). This unashamed portrayal of Ammu and Velutha’s lovemaking is the rebellion of the ‘small’ against the “obeisance” of the “Big God”, a way of resisting the lack of agency of the weak and marginalized in society through a bodily act (19). Ammu and Velutha’s “faith in fragiliy” and in “Stick[ing] to Smallness”, is Roy’s way of keeping the struggle of the individual against “Structure. Order. Complete monopoly”, “Human history, masquerading as God’s purpose” alive even in the end (321,309). The book’s last word, Ammu and Velutha’s small promise for a “Tomorrow” is Roy’s way of impressing upon the reader the politics of the novel shrouded in the hope for a brighter future (321).