The God of Small Things and a plausible reason for its Booker Prize

I was and I still am an ardent admirer of Arundhati Roy and her thoughts. I recently read Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small things”. If I can hazard a guess, I understood how it managed to get the Booker. Iam not an authority to comment on the aesthetic richness of a work of literature. But I could sense the political undercurrent of that novel. It was released in 1997. It was about 7 yrs after the collapse of Communism the world over. The book portrays the communist government in Kerala in a bad light by criticizing it and by privileging Dalit identity politics over it. Thus she has reflected the current trend which prioritizes caste and other primordial identities as a tool for political mobilization over the rather vague categorization of “class”. We cannot expect a rigorous analysis of societal problems in a piece of literature. That task belongs to the domain of social science. So, one can just accept her work as a beautiful critical reflection of Kerala society in the late 1960s. But I have one problem with her book.

Any piece of criticism of the system is welcome. Like for example, the current standing of Arundhati Roy as an independent critique of the system at the global, national and the local level is welcome. But any criticism will serve a political purpose. The communist experiment which started in 1917 in Russia and which spread all over the world and which collapsed around 1990 is one of the most radical attempt at reordering society on a more humane and rational basis. The broad causes for its downfall is well documented and well accepted. The entire attempt at achieving communism has to be understood as an experiment that went wrong. Then only the lessons of that experiment can be incorporated in any further experiments that could be conducted to evolve an alternative to capitalism. So, any criticism of the communist governments of the pre-1990 era, has to have a sympathetic understanding of what the entire, grandiose project of communism sought to attempt at. So, Arundhati Roy’s work should have been far more sympathetic to the communist government in Kerala.

She portrays the left government of Kerala in the 1960s as being unsympathetic to the cause of Dalits. But at that same period in Tamilnadu, the communists organized a vast number of landless labourers in Tanjore district. This resulted in the murder of 44 dalit labourers by a local landlord setting fire to a Dalit hamlet when people were sleeping in their huts. So, even though the communists did not use the “Dalit” cultural identity of the Dalits, they had used the class identity of these dalits being landless labourers for their political mobilization and struggle.

So, The God of Small Things, inadvertently becomes part of the neo-liberal project of creating an impression that communism is just another oppressive political system which did not mark any point of departure from the other existing systems. For this very purpose, it might have been bestowed the prestigious Booker Prize.