The Guerilla “God” and the Fire-Spitting “Goddess”: A Reading of Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess as Protest Novels.

Abstract

This paper attempts a comparison between Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” and Meena Kandasamy’s “The Gypsy Goddess” as two fiercely political novels that polemicize against caste oppression and political hypocrisy deploying a host of postmodern structural, narrative and subversive strategies. By relying mainly on a discourse analysis of the narratives, this paper tries to map the similarities and the differences between the two novels in their treatment and emplotment of the caste dialectics as it existed in two different but overlapping socio-cultural settings in South India. The contention is that the two novels, despite the differing cultural locations of their authors, display a wide range of similarities in themes and narrative strategies, and the differing reception that they were accorded has to do with certain firmly entrenched cultural predilections, consumption patterns and even marketing strategies.