ABSTRACT

To me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God’s a big thing and God’s in control. The god of small things [ . . . ] whether it’s the way the children see things or whether it’s the insect life in the book, or the fi sh or the stars-there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. This small activity that goes on is the under life of the book. All sorts of boundaries are transgressed upon. At the end of the fi rst chapter I say little events and ordinary things are just smashed and reconstituted, imbued with new meaning to become the bleached bones of the story. It’s a story that examines things very closely but also from a very, very distant point, almost from geological time and you look at it and see a pattern there. A pattern [ . . . ] of how in these small events and in these small lives the world intrudes. And because of this, because of people being unprotected, the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest core of their being and changes their life. (WordsWorth Interview)1

Roy has been accused of apoliticism at times, writing “another narrative of postmodern immorality, perversity and irresponsibility” (Kumar 17).2 Yet, what her answer illustrates is something very different: not a rejection of considerating of larger political issues, but rather a situation of these debates on the small scale. Such an approach, rather than diluting the political elements of the text, may in fact be seen to concentrate them, as they are seen to penetrate into the very heart of the lives of the individuals that Roy presents to us; as small things are “imbued with new meaning,” they provide a perfect example of Bhabha’s advocating of “a shift of attention from the political as a pedagogical, ideological practice to politics as the stressed necessity of everyday life-politics as a performativity” (15).3