> And, I'm glad you said something about the content of the book
> since Dolan did say she was a plagiarist.
Some people -- like Dolan -- make it sound as if she wrote only about the evils of Empire, chalking up all problems in India and elsewhere to them, to the delight of Westerners who love getting scolded by pretty women from the Third World, but The God of Small Things is nothing of the sort. It's essentially a criticism of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s approach to the problems of caste and gender oppressions and capitalist development. Whether CPI (M) has been really as soft on them as Roy has the reader believe is a matter of political judgment. (Roy takes a novelistic equivalent of sledgehammer to the party. Just by reading the novel, you never know why the party won and held power in Kerala for long periods.) In any case, though, that's the central point of the novel. Discussing the novel without discussing it is like discussing Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist without discussing Apartheid, discussing Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children without discussing the Partition, the Emergency, the Pakistani massacres in Bangladesh, etc.
Indian leftists got the central point of The God of Small Things and reacted to it variously:
<blockquote>Why then has the novel provoked the outrage of the CPI(M) establishment, literary and otherwise? While one stated reason is Roy’s ill-judged allegation - in a passage describing the ravages of tourism - that EMS Namboodiripad’s ancestral home has been turned into a hotel where ex-communists serve as waiters, the underlying reasons are clearly broader and more complex. It seems that ironically Roy’s very affinity for the left - in the form of the Naxalite movement as she perceives it - is one of these reasons. Notwithstanding Ahmed’s claim that this is where the book’s ‘realism’ breaks down, The God of Small Things is unusual in its specific and accurate location of its story at a particular point in Indian Communism’s history - the period of the emergence of the ML movement from among cadres of the CPI(M) itself. Despite - or because of - Roy’s concrete references to Naxalism, she has been dubbed an ‘anti- Communist radical’ by Ahmed while commentators like writer Ranga Rao (The Hindu 23 Nov 1997) describe her (with more sympathy) as possessing ‘the non-governmental organisation spirit’. Quite apart from the continuing virulent hostility in ‘official’ CPI(M) circles towards the Marxist-Leninist stream, the key question here is whether the left should relinquish - or banish - the concerns which dominate Roy’s book, all of which are essentially issues of power - to the domain of NGOs. Is it not the left which, even while building an organised and ideologically coherent movement, must continue to symbolise, as it does for Roy’s characters, the desire of all the oppressed within bourgeois society for subversion, for turning the world upside down? Surely it is only those for whom, having gained some power within the bourgeois framework, holding on to this power has become the sole raison d’etre, who feel threatened by this, and are compelled to brand it ‘anti-left’.
Interestingly, Roy’s critics have chosen to pass over her most coherent, though bitter, critique of Communist rule in Kerala which makes it quite clear that it is not Marxism, but the practices of the CPI(M) in that particular state, which she is at odds with. ‘The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy’ (pp66-67).
<http://cpiml.org/liberation/year_1998/january/books.htm></blockquote>
Dwayne wrote:
> There is, for example, Subuhi Jiwani's criticism (and speaking of
> recursive temporal fields and re-posted material...this will be the
> second time in as many weeks I point this essay out - not, I hasten
> to add, to bestow upon it my nigh worthless stamp of approval but
> as an example of the 'against Roy' genre):
>
> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2003/2003-June/014763.html>
Many of Roy's occasional essays say nothing new -- to me; nor do I care for her style (in the novel as well as the essay). But that's neither here nor there -- it only says something about what I know already and what I like and don't like, not about merits or demerits of her work. One thing I appreciate about her work on the political side of the things is that she unequivocally opposed the Afghanistan War even before it began -- whereas many liberals and even some leftists were ambivalent about it -- and she also has clearly opposed an increasing alliance of New Delhi with Washington. Clarity on these two points is a plus in my book, whether or not she had anything new to say about US foreign policy.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org>