82. Zeenath Mohamed Kunhi

Abstract 82
Zeenath Mohamed Kunhi    

THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS  - A CARNIVAL SQUARE    

Abstract 

The common thread that runs through Arundhati Roy’s fiction and non-fiction is nothing but the voice of dissent. The writer’s commitment to her cause is made clear in one of her essays when she states that the only thing “worth globalizing is dissent.” While she blatantly lashes out at the perpetrators of injustice in her essays, she uses various subversive techniques creatively to voice her dissent in her only novel The God of Small Things. Her novel has been subjected to multiple modes of analysis, of which the feminist studies and post colonial analyses stand out. The innovative language of the novel is also a much discussed area.  It has been revealed that the ground breaking text is definitely a mode of subversion. This can be studied in terms of écriture feminine from a feminist view point or decolonization of English, viewed from a post colonial angle. But the subversive devices that promote such studies fall under the broader framework of Bakhtinian carnivalism. While a carnival square permits the intermingling of people of all social and political strata without any restrictions, the carnival square of a text, as Bakhtin puts it allows for the incorporation of various discourses that enter into a dialogue, including the profane and the indecent, toppling all sorts of hierarchies. The God of Small Things acts as a carnival square where people of various classes, castes, ages and languages are ridiculed in an atmosphere of a carnivalized language because carnival is not only the signifier but also the signified. It can be the subject or the means of representation of the text. It is also to be noted that to Bakhtin, the grotesque, is the expression in literature of the carnival spirit and incorporates all those gross realities of non-canonicalism that “jolts us out of our normal expectations and epistemological complacency.”  My paper is an attempt to show how the Bakhtinian concepts of ‘carnivalism’ and ‘the grotesque’ function as voices of dissent in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.