Gender, Power, and Patriarchy in The God of Small Things: A Critical Study of Arundhati Roy's Work

Abstract

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) has attracted three fairly distinct strands of feminist and postcolonial criticism: readings that catalogue the forms of gender oppression the novel depicts, readings that foreground the intersection of gender with caste, and readings that foreground the intersection of gender with race and colonial history. What these strands rarely do together is connect the novel's content-level critique of patriarchy to the formal strategies, particularly its non-linear, fragmented narrative structure, through which Roy stages that critique. This article addresses that gap through a close reading of four female characters who occupy structurally distinct positions relative to patriarchal power—Ammu, Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, and Rahel—read alongside Velutha as a case where caste and gender-based punishment converge. The analysis draws on a defined set of selection criteria and coding categories adapted from existing feminist and postcolonial scholarship on the novel, and it deliberately engages a published counter-reading that questions whether gender is in fact the primary axis of subordination in the text. The discussion finds that patriarchy in the novel operates simultaneously as a family practice, a property regime, and a caste-linked disciplinary system, and that Roy's fragmented narrative form is best read not as ornamental but as a formal correlate of this critique, restoring narrative authority to characters the plot itself silences. The article closes by situating these findings against comparative and more recent scholarship on the novel and by identifying which of its claims remain interpretive rather than empirically demonstrated.