Emily DeGarie, “Environmental Exploitation and the Subaltern in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” 2nd Place.
The issue of environmental destruction is one that is not limited to postcolonial countries, yet it undoubtedly has a greater effect in countries that have experienced colonization than in the Western world because of the exploitation of resources that is inherent to colonization. In the Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things (1999), novelist and activist Arundhati Roy does not shy away from displaying the way that capitalist-neocolonialist interests and the tourism industry negatively affect India’s natural environment and its vulnerable citizens. The pollution and alteration of the environment in the fictional town of Ayemenem is almost incidental to the story, as Roy’s novel largely tackles the confluence of the caste system and “love laws” with the patriarchal influence of colonization. However, by portraying Velutha, an “Untouchable” (Dalit), as the titular “god of small things,” a man who is symbolic of the Ayemenem river and its natural surroundings, Roy reveals how the environment, like the lower-caste Velutha, is metaphorically subaltern, subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes and defenseless against its own decimation while also highlighting how the subaltern community bears the brunt of this destruction.
The God of Small Things is a complex and layered narrative and a brief summary is offered here to contextualize the argument and analysis that follows. Roy’s novel follows the multigenerational upper-caste upper-class Syrian Christian Ipe family, circling around a brief two-week period in 1969 leading up to the night that Rahel and her twin brother, Estha, witness the traumatic deaths of their cousin, Sophie Mol, and Velutha, a member of the Paravan (fisherman)—‘Untouchable’—caste, who the children consider to be a friend. In the prelude to the deaths, the twins’ mother, Ammu, begins a love affair with Velutha, a relationship prohibited by the unwritten “love laws” that preclude “Untouchables” from having relationships with the upper caste. The discovery of Ammu’s affair causes shock and humiliation to the more traditional and elitist members of the family—Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, and Chacko—Ammu’s aunt, mother, and brother respectively, and they lock Ammu in her room. In her rage, unthinkingly, Ammu blames Rahel and Estha for the situation, and the twins decide to run away across the river to the “History House” (an abandoned rubber estate/plantation) with Sophie Mol. In the attempt, the boat capsizes, and Sophie Mol drowns. In order to protect their family’s reputation, Baby Kochamma decides to use Velutha as a scapegoat, reporting to the police that he had raped Ammu, killed Sophie Mol, and kidnapped Rahel and Estha. The police subsequently break into the “History House” where the twins stayed overnight, unaware that Velutha was asleep there as well, and Velutha is beaten to the brink of death. Manipulated by Baby Kochamma in the police station, Estha identifies Velutha as responsible for the crimes of which he has been accused. Interspersed with the retelling of these events is the reunion of Rahel and Estha in 1993, revealing how this traumatic night continues to haunt the family. As the events of the novel circulate around Velutha, it is vital to consider the concept of subalternity, and how multiple oppressions within India compound the exploitation of Dalits.
In postcolonial studies, subaltern is a term that refers to the people—whether women, the poor or the peasants, the lower castes, the disabled—whose voices have been suppressed in a historical narrative written and dominated by the elite. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, a member of the Subaltern Studies collective of South Asian scholars, states in “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” that “Official documents of the British government of India—and traditions of imperial history writing—always portrayed colonial rule as being beneficial to India and her people. They applauded the British for bringing to the subcontinent political unity, modern educational institutions, modern industries, modern nationalism, a rule of law, and so forth” (11). These official documents laud imperialism; ignore Indian citizens’ own achievements in politics, education, and industry; and disregard the immense harm the colonization of India caused. This harm included:
the penetration of the colonial state into the local structures of power in India, a move prompted by the financial self-interest of the raj rather than by any altruistic motives—that eventually, and by degrees, drew Indian elites into the colonial governmental process . . . the involvement of Indians in colonial institutions set off a scramble among the indigenous elites who combined—opportunistically and around factions formed along ‘vertical’ lines of patronage (in contradistinction to the so-called horizontal affiliations of class, that is)—to jockey for power and privilege within the limited opportunities for self-rule provided by the British. (Chakrabarty 12)
This struggle for power among the elite, who were driven by their own self-interest and greed, further suppressed an already suppressed group of people and enacted discriminatory policies that left lower castes with fewer avenues to advocate for themselves or participate in the political system. As Chakrabarty puts it, “nationalist leaders would suppress with a heavy hand peasants’ or workers’ tendency to exceed the self-imposed limits of the nationalist political agenda by protesting the oppression meted out to them not only by the British but by the indigenous ruling groups as well” (13). This oppression by the British and by indigenous/native ruling groups is seen in The God of Small Things as the lower-caste/Dalit worker Velutha navigates a world in which people from his caste suffer from the compounded effects of European colonization and the elitism of the upper-caste Indians with whom he interacts, as well as the neocolonial government structures that enable that elitism.
In the novel, we see how Velutha, as a working-class Dalit, is variously subject to the coercion of various members of the ruling class/elite. Although Velutha’s labor is indispensable to the Ipe family’s home and pickle factory—“He looked after the plumbing and all the electrical gadgets in the house” and “knew more about the machines in the factory than anyone else”—he is still treated poorly because he is a Paravan (Roy 72). We are told that, despite his expertise, “Mammachi paid Velutha less than she would a Touchable carpenter but more than she would a Paravan,” thinking, “he ought to be grateful that he was allowed on the factory premises at all, and allowed to touch things that Touchables touched” (74). Others in the Ipe family have their own personal biases against Paravans as well. At one point, Baby Kochamma remarks, “They have a particular smell, these Paravans,” and even those who appreciate Velutha (such as Ammu, Estha, and Rahel), still benefit from the privileged status of their family, which depends on the caste system (243). To try and better his circumstances, as well as the lives of all Paravans and workers, Velutha becomes a member of the Communist Party, which ostensibly advocates for all workers’ rights, but this only results in further discrimination. Comrade Pillai, who leads the local chapter of the Party, even tries to expel Velutha from the Party because of the resentment the upper-caste factory works feel toward a highly competent and intelligent Dalit worker. Although the Party prides itself on its work to improve pay and conditions for the factory workers in Mammachi’s pickle factory, it is Velutha who is paid the least and treated the worst, and the Party abandons him due to his caste, even though it is one of the few routes available to Velutha to advocate for himself. Beyond the discrimination in his interpersonal relationships and in the political system, the governmental system discriminates and mistreats Velutha due to his caste as well. The excessive brutality of the upper-caste policemen who go to arrest him displays the deep-seated systemic bias against “Untouchables;” they feel the need to make an example of him for desiring an upper-caste woman. Despite the fact that he was sleeping when they found him, they beat him so severely that “His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed,” “Four of his ribs were splintered,” “His lower intestine was ruptured and hemorrhaged,” “His spine was damaged in two places,” and “Both his kneecaps were shattered” (294). The ability of the police to do this to him without impunity was in part because they did not see him, a Dalit man, as human, “If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago” (293). In this way, the Ipe family, the Communist Party, and the police are representative of a society structured in a way that exploits Dalits such as Velutha, profiting from their labor before destroying them without a second thought.
Throughout the novel, Velutha is depicted as the personification of the river that flows through Ayemenem, and as a subaltern who must struggle to advocate for himself at every turn; his own destruction combined with the river’s subsequent destruction is indicative of the way that colonialism, capitalism, and globalization exploit both the subaltern and the environment for capital gains. Velutha and the river are often shown as encapsulating all nature. When Ammu sees Velutha on the night that their affair begins, “he rose from the dark river and walked up the stone steps, [and] she saw that the world they stood in was his. That he belonged to it. That it belonged to him. The water. The mud. The trees. The fish. The stars” (316). Ammu’s vision of Velutha directly reflects the dream the twins have of the river, “With the sky and trees in it” and “the broken yellow moon in it,” showing how Velutha and the river hold not just themselves, but the entirety of the natural world within their bodies (117). Velutha recognizes that he is a part of nature, appreciative of it without desiring to ravage it for its resources. Unlike the casteist-classist-misogynist-colonialist elite, Velutha does not have an extractive relationship with the environment.
It is no coincidence that Roy depicts Velutha as a personification of the natural environment; his destruction parallels that of the river, each exploited to the point of ruination at the whims of the dominant class who disregard both subalterns’ humanity and the environment in which they live. In “Subalternity and Scale in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” Jane Poyner connects how Velutha’s lack of impact on the environment is indicative of his lack of power, stating, “Velutha’s lack of footprints, of his not disturbing the water or casting an image in a mirror (figuratively identity-bearing), connotes Dalits’ lack of political agency. According to such a reading, though profoundly disturbing the family’s equilibrium, resisting being interpellated as Paravan and expressing himself through his political activism, Velutha is rendered symbolically voiceless” (Poyner 66). It is appropriate that after Velutha’s death, the river is reduced to “no more than a swollen drain;” if Velutha is “the figurative steward of Kerala’s natural environment” as Poyner states, then his death begets the death of the river, and both pay the ultimate price for attempting to exist free from exploitation (Poyner 61).
Velutha’s death and the river’s pollution are also representative of the way that the subaltern often bears the consequences of unfettered capitalism’s effect on the environment while contributing to that pollution very little, if at all. As Poyner notes, Velutha’s role in the novel is not just as a personification of the river but also comments on the varying environmental impact that subalterns typically have, stating that the custom of Paravans to “[sweep] away their footprints” signifies “environmental pollution . . . the ‘carbon footprint,’ in common parlance, and humans’ impact on the natural environment” (62). Indeed, the pollution seen in the novel stems from large companies that control the rice paddy lobby and the tourist industry, highlighting how “the poorest communities in the world, typically postcolonial subjects, are typically the worst hit by the impact of environmental change and disaster” while also being “likely to produce smaller ‘footprints’ than their richer, typically Western, counterparts” (63). It is appropriate, then, that Velutha is described as “The God of Loss. The God of Small Things,” because not only is he inseparable from and appreciative of the ‘small things’ of nature —the plants and trees and sky and insects—but the effect he has on the environment is entirely non-destructive when compared to the entities that exploit the environment. As Youngsuk Chae states in “Postcolonial ecofeminism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” “his world belongs to nature, which is interconnected with small living things,” while the destruction of the environment is typically wrought by the ‘big things’—big government, big industries, and big money (524). After Velutha’s death, the pollution of the river and its ongoing effect on the subaltern are all too clear in the difference between the river in 1969 and 1993, during which time the environment of Ayemenem is radically changed in a way that profits the elite at the expense of the quality of life for the subaltern.
During Rahel and Estha’s childhood, the river functions as a wellspring of nature and life. When “They dreamed of their river . . . It was warm, the water. Graygreen. Like rippled silk. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it” (Roy 117). It encompasses all things natural and unspoiled, beautiful and holding life within its waters. When Rahel returns in 1993, the river is shrunken, a site of refuse and garbage because, “Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby” (118). It is now a “slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea,” while “Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface” (119). Due to the desire for capitalistic development on the part of the paddy-farmer lobby, the river has been destroyed and polluted, no longer livable for the fish that once occupied its waters. Though it is riddled with garbage and pollutants and “sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish,” on the other side, “the steep mud banks changed abruptly into low mud walls of shanty hutments” (118, 119). Not only do the dead fish show how life has been razed from the river, the presence of the shanty hutments shows how this change has had its largest detrimental effects on the most vulnerable groups, who have no choice but to use the river to clean themselves, their clothes, and their pots in “unadulterated factory effluents” (119). The river has been further polluted by the tourism industry that has displaced the poor people who lived near the “History House,” now remodeled as the Heritage Hotel, which caters primarily to rich tourists from the Global North. The History House was built on an abandoned British rubber estate plantation, a reminder and remainder of colonialist ravaging of natural resources to serve British economic-political interests. Roy shows us how this sort of capitalist extraction-exploitation of land and labor continues in postcolonial India by the neocolonial elite. The rich guests of the hotel “arrived by speedboat, opening up a V of foam on the water, leaving behind a rainbow film of gasoline” (119). Though this tourism contributes to the pollution of the river, it ignores the people who must live with the consequences, having “built a tall wall to screen off the slum” (119). The changing of the river reflects the exploitation of the environment to enrich the powerful and further displace the poor and vulnerable, an exploitation that has been approved by the profit-driven government. As Chae states, “The postcolonial Indian government’s development plans for the betterment of society helped to enrich privileged economic groups by maximizing inequity and economic injustice against the disenfranchised and dispossessed” (524). In other words, those who control the tourist industry and paddy farms are increasing their own financial gain while decreasing the subalterns’ resources and further pushing them into an impoverished state. While once they could have fished in the river to supplement their meals, as Velutha did, the fish have all died and they now must find food elsewhere.
By focusing the novel around Velutha’s subalternity, Roy makes a deliberate commentary on how the exploitation of the environment parallels those systems that work to exploit the subaltern, making them victims of a society that values the bottom line above all else. The subaltern is left out of the greater narrative with few options to advocate for themselves. In describing Velutha and the river in the same terms and showcasing their mutual destruction by the (neo)colonial elite, Roy extends Velutha’s brutal silencing and lack of autonomy to the environment itself, showing how it and Velutha are each essentially rendered voiceless, each a victim of a narrative controlled by those in power who profit from the exploitation of the lower castes and the environment. Velutha sweeping away his footprints, both metaphorically and literally, also represents how he and the lower castes leave behind no carbon footprint while simultaneously being the group most affected by the destruction of the environment around them.
Works Cited
Chae, Youngsuk. “Postcolonial Ecofeminism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 51, no. 5, 2015, pp. 519–30.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 1, 200, pp. 9–32.
Poyner, Jane. “Subalternity and Scale in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 53–69.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. HarperPerennial. 1998.