Critical Lens In The God Of Small Things By Arundhati Roy

A story can be seen and interpreted in many different ways, and the use of critical lens help the reader get a deeper understanding of what is actually happening in the story. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy can be interpreted using many of the critical lenses, but mostly the cultural, historical and feminists lens. The setting of the story is a small town in India named Ayemenem, in the 1960’s. During this time, the Sino-Indian war was just beginning, and there were many riots and communists marches occurring. This war had a great impact on the story itself, and majorly affected the main characters.
Ammu is the one of the most influential female characters in the story. She is a middle class woman, who is divorced with two children, Estha and Rachel. On returning to her father’s home, she is not welcomed by her family. Although she is well educated and independent, her older brother Chacko continues to patronize her, and treat her as though she is nothing. She is also held down by family tradition, and shunned when she decides to go against them. Ammun falls in love with a character named Velutha, which violates the laws of social class in her small Indian town. Someone who is in the upper class must only associate with people of the same class, not someone who is lower than they are. Her rebellion against social and religious traditions changes the expectations of women as a whole throughout the book, and makes it seem like they are allowed to do anything that a man can do. Her “quest for self realization is an attempt at renaming and re knowing the world as she has seen it, but it is ultimately doomed from the very beginning because of the environment in which she has had to find safety in with her children af...

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...re. Women are to obey and be submissive. It also against Indian culture to have a divorce, because it brings great disgrace to the family of the divorcee. Both of Pappachi and Mammachi’s children have failed marriages and had to get a divorce. They were both left with children from the marriages, which made the situation even worse. This family strictly followed the Indian culture.
Overall, the women in this story played a very important role in the outcome of the story, and they were very prominent throughout the novel. They did their best to get the rights that they thought they deserved. The women of the story really help to push the story along. Indian culture also played a very important part, because it is what the characters in the story based their lives of off. They were so use to social norms that they didn’t think that their way of living was wrong.