The Title of The God of Small Things: A Subversive Salvo

To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God’s a big thing

and God’s in control. The god of small things . . . whether it’s the way chil-

dren see things or whether it’s the insect life in the book, or the fish or the

stars—there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. (Roy,

qtd. in Feng and Liu)

The title of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things1 has provoked con-

tradictory responses. For A. N. Dwivedi, “‘the small things’ in the title of

the novel suggests the fulfilment of sexual hunger, the satiety of physical desires” (“Reversing” 9). S. P. Swain pushes prurience to the extreme in

equating the “‘Small Things’ of life” with “the balls, the breast and the soft

dark triangle” (149). Conversely, J. P. Tripathi thinks the “small things” are

“the form of showing affections, doing little things to please others, selflessly

or selfishly even” (29). As for the “God” of the title, M. K. Naik asserts that

“It is Velutha who gives the novel its title: ‘The God of Small Things’; it is he

who is that kind of a ‘god’” (66). Aijaz Ahmad justifies Velutha’s deification:

“Velutha is the untouchable carpenter, the maker of little wonders in carved

wood and thus ‘the god of small things’” (38). M. Mani Meitei goes to the

other extreme in reducing Velutha to “the post-Darwinian Freudian God

of primitive instinct” (257–58). In pointed contrast, Urbashi Barat elevates

Velutha to the membership of “the Little Gods of the Hindu tradition, the

deities of folklore and of everyday worship” (71).

Admittedly, the eponymous phrase recurs throughout the novel as a met-

aphor for Velutha. It also refers to the power relations between institutions

and individuals. According to Amar Nath Prasad, “the book shows a mal-

adjustment between ‘The God of Big Things’ (Pappachi, Baby Kochamma,

Mammachi, Chacko, Comrade Pillai, and Inspector Thomas Mathew) and

‘The God of Small Things’ (Ammu, Velutha, Rahel, Estha, Sophie Mol)”

(161). Nazma Malik too stresses the contradictory relations between the

inherently violent modern Indian and Western hierarchies and institutions

(the big things), which deny the freedom and dignity of the “small things”

to maintain themselves (164). “Roy’s ‘god of small things,’” insists Tabish

Khair, “is consciously poised against the God of Big Things, whom she

identifies with the collective, the ‘community’” (142–43). That the novel’s

title points to its thematic dialectic is almost a critical consensus. No won-

der Jon Mee too finds that it suggests “the dislocations between the ‘Small

God’ of individual lives and the ‘Big God’ of the nation” (335).

The author, surprisingly, has confessed that “[t]he novel didn’t have a

title until the very last minute. I didn’t know what to call it, there were lots

of ideas and suggestions but I remember printing out the manuscript and

just printing out the title at the last minute” (Roy, qtd. in Feng and Liu).

The text is replete with the phrase “the God of Small Things,” which also

serves as the title of a very important chapter. If, however, the novel owes

its strikingly appropriate title to a momentary afterthought on the part

of the novelist, as Roy claims, it dramatizes the well-established hiatus

between an artist’s conscious and unconscious mind, and it suggests that

the unconscious predominates in the act of creation.

The narrator calls the policemen who are out to arrest the falsely accused

Velutha “history’s henchmen” (GST 308). Their brutality toward the utterly

defenseless Paravan is so gratuitous that she invokes the fundamental laws

of human nature to explain it as

[i]mpelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal.

Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s transgressive reunion through the self’s integration with its lost body is

enabling and empowering for them.

The fullest embodiment of Roy’s idea of Small God—with his charac-

teristic insignificance and insouciance, with his instinct for friendship and

love—is, of course, Velutha. Ammu finds in him her dream man and anoints

him “The God of Small Things” (330). As a marginalized Paravan and a fac-

tory hand, Velutha is a social lightweight, a man of no consequence. Hence

he leaves no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors. He

is the “God of Loss” (330). His love for Ammu causes the loss of his job, his

life, Ammu’s home, her children, and, finally, her life as well. It also causes

the loss of the twins’ childhoods. He is, however, many gods rolled into one.

His angelic smile earns him the sobriquet “The God of Sudden Smiles”; he

is also “The God of Goose Bumps” (330). On the night of Sophie’s arrival,

the beautifully dressed Ammu sits facing Velutha. “She touched him lightly

with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin” (339). Last of all,

he is the God of Small Things. Velutha and Ammu do not desire anything

beyond their self-fulfilling, secret love. They have nowhere to go and noth-

ing to look forward to except the hope of meeting “tomorrow.” As a result,

“they [stick] to the small things” (339). Roy presents a contrast between

the grand narratives of Christianity and Marxism and the little narratives of

the individual’s instinct, life’s little stories. The novel ends with the lovers

imparadised in each other’s arms and with “Tomorrow” as the last word. It

therefore seems to mitigate, if not negate, the lovers’ fate as victims by pro-

jecting them as two self-realized human beings with unspoiled happiness.

The novel is an elaborate exercise in the Derridean inversion of such

binaries as Big God and Small God, center and periphery, and high and

low. However, Roy packs all her iconoclasm into her title by privileging

her Small God over society’s Big God and above all by making a god of

a subversive lover.