ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the problematic figure of the witness in the work of Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh, both major authors in South Asian literature whose respective novels, The God of Small Things and The Hungry Tide, refract the trauma of lower-caste (Dalit) characters through the focalization of more privileged subjects. Taking up Nurit Bird-David’s concept of dividual relationships—that is, animist modes of being that focus primarily on relatedness between beings in hunter-gatherer South Indian locales—I explore how nonwestern and postcolonial forms of relationality infuse the act of witnessing trauma in these novels with ethical meaning. If, in The God of Small Things, the image of the boat contains the trauma of the children, its reappearance at novel’s end constitutes a bridge toward a dividual and animist understanding of trauma, in the figure of Velutha, the Dalit worker murdered by the police for the “crime” of being intimate with an upper-caste woman. We view trauma, then, through a relational frame, in which disparate traumatic events are animated into new and only partially recognizable shapes. This vision is creative work, creative labor, the labor of witnessing trauma without becoming its prisoner. The Hungry Tide, conversely, registers the ambivalence of touching postcolonial trauma in its metaphoric, ethical, and physical dimensions. This ambivalence illustrates a Derridian interdependency of the senses: sight touching with its presence, touch causing blindness, sight as speech and speech as touch, scent announcing the danger of a soon-to-be-fatal touch. What emerges, fascinatingly, is a crisis of representation, in which Ghosh’s novel gestures to an animist reading of postcolonial trauma but cannot transcend its preoccupation with ventriloquizing the Dalit trauma subject. Ultimately, both novels posit a fundamental interconnectedness between humans and their environment that reframes the process of working through trauma as creative work: transformative animist engagement with both constructed objects and organic nonhuman matter.
