ABSTRACT
Given Arundhati Roy’s stature within today’s international movements against corporate globalization and naked imperialism, it is shocking to remember that her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997), was initially met with a wave of criticism and even hostility from prominent sections of the Indian Left, particularly those associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]). Indian communists emphatically and publicly denounced the novel for explicitly mocking E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the late CPI(M) leader, for depicting communists as being unmindful of caste oppression, and for peddling “bourgeois decadence” through its representations of “sexual anarchy” (“EMS Attacks”).2 Leading the charge against Roy, E.M.S. himself declared that the novel’s critique of communism was central to why it was “welcomed by the captains of the industry of bourgeois literature in the world” (Jose). Similarly, thenKerala Chief Minister, E.K. Nayanar, attributed the novel’s winning of the Booker Prize to its Western-oriented, “anti-Communist venom” (“Nayanar Pours Scorn”). Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad’s article in the August 1997 issue of the CPI(M)-friendly Frontline magazine, by far the most nuanced of such critiques, had already taken Roy to task for reproducing the “hostility toward the Communist movement [that] is now fairly common among radical sections of the intelligentsia, in India and abroad” (103).3 Specifi cally, Ahmad criticized what he regarded as the conservative implications of the novel’s representation of sexuality “as the fi nal realm of both Pleasure and of Truth” (104) and “a suffi cient mode for overcoming real social oppressions” (107).
