Arundhati Roy

Drawing upon research into Indian property law, this essay offers a new perspective on both the feminist interventions and the aesthetic innovations of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. This essay is the first to show how The God of Small Things' feminist critique is established primarily through attacking Indian property law, which has historically excluded women from its purview. Whereas previous criticism has focused on Roy's exploration of female social ostracism, this essay addresses the precarious political, juridical, and economic status of women in the novel. The God of Small Things' feminist legal critique is not only perceptive and timely, but it also offers a crucial insight into the political stakes of the novel's aesthetic form. I use political and legal theory to identify India's property law and juridical economy as “possessive,” or exclusionary, and to explain the contrasting significance of the novel's nonpossessive, relational aesthetics. Through its literary innovations, particularly its recursive narrative structure and metaphors of connection, The God of Small Things reconfigures the legal and political logic authorizing female dispossession. If India's gendered property law has systematically dispossessed women, The God of Small Things works to counter such exclusions by establishing an alternative structural logic. Roy's formal strategies are, I conclude, politically significant, as they delineate the possible form of a nonpossessive, relational juridicopolitical economy.

“Art needs three things to sell, it is Entertainment, Entertainment and Entertainment” Dialogue from the movie, 'The Dirty Picture' (2009). Exactly the current trend of Indian writing in English is apt for the quote. Recently even the standard and literary authors have also been influenced by the commercialisation culture of literature. In other ways they were forced by the publishers to spice it up their works by adding some erotic elements or characters. It is a kind of joy that the reader gains from that part, which is very well understood and used for marketing gimmicks. Upamanyu Chatterjee, Chetan Bhagat & Novoneel Chakraborty etc has started using this strategy of making erotic elements as a stage that helps for the „take off‟ of their works. This transition is happening because of us, yes the readers. We are responsible for this kind of so-called transition towards eroticism. This paper takes into account and makes a study of novels written by Upamanyu Chatterjee which are recently published and categorised as
"Contemporary Indian writing in English‟ and could be placed under this phase of transition. Why this eroticise culture is trending in the recent days? The Study tries to get a reasonable answer.

The aim of this essay is to explore how gender issues are represented and subverted in these pieces of literature, more specifically, within four novels: Atonement , The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Swing time and The Return. Some particular topics related to gender studies will be developed, for instance, traditional gender stereotypes, motherhood and the role of women, non-binary gender, parental roles, female voices and sexuality.
In order to do so, we will consult different authors such as Ritu Tyagi, Inakalia Assumis and Gayatri  Chakravorty Spivak.

Even if Roy employs some magic realist elements drawn upon her Booker-winning debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), the use of fantasy and realism in her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), is less concerned with an aesthetic function than with anti-global one. In the novel, tropes of vulnerability affect individuals and environments alike, promoting not only a poetic of loss but also a radical critique of such social questions as anti-globalisation, environmentalism, anti-nuclear campaigns and land rights in Kashmir. This article then explores the juxtaposition of Bharati fantasy and historical realism in Roy’s last novel and it investigates the ways in which a hybrid narrative format manages to convey a complex and rich plot of contemporary India, where gender questions, caste discriminations, wounded landscapes and religious conflicts animate a tale of decay and hope. By resorting to Hindu epics, on the one hand, and to the intellectual activism typical of her non-fiction works, on the other, Roy issues both a warning and an invitation to take into account the contradictions of present-day postcolonial India.

Keywords: anti-globalisation, postcolonialism, Bharati fantasy, historical realism, Arundhati Roy

A major contributor to the unique reading experience that Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things lends itself to, is its language. In fact, to say that the novel has an excess of language will not be an understatement. The narrator is chatty, even garrulous, wanting to say and share everything. Yet, what this paper intends to study through a narrative textual analysis of the work, is not the effusiveness of its language, the many linguistic techniques, innovations and experiments that Roy engages in, but the role of silence in the novel, the character it assumes, silence as a politically constituted construct, and the discourse it leads to, shapes and displaces. Sometimes through a studied silence, sometimes through an enforced silence and sometimes through a deliberate and pregnant silence, the narrator seems to be indicating that not every action can be accounted for, through words. Not every relationship can be contained in the constricting spaces of words. By not choosing to describe or rationalize or validate and by taking recourse to silence, the narrator seems to be engaging in the powerful discourse of silence, turning a handicap into a weapon to contest the discursive laws and structures of power. Silence thus stands discursively produced, an archival repository of meaning and memory.

A major contributor to the unique reading experience that Arundhati Roy's novel <em>The God of Small Things </em>lends itself to, is its language. In fact, to say that the novel has an excess of language will not be an understatement. The narrator is chatty, even garrulous, wanting to say and share everything. Yet, what this paper intends to study through a narrative textual analysis of the work, is not the effusiveness of its language, the many linguistic techniques, innovations and experiments that Roy engages in, but the role of silence in the novel, the character it assumes, silence as a politically constituted construct, and the discourse it leads to, shapes and displaces. Sometimes through a studied silence, sometimes through an enforced silence and sometimes through a deliberate and pregnant silence, the narrator seems to be indicating that not every action can be accounted for, through words. Not every relationship can be contained in the constricting spaces ...

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that interrogates the overlapping systems of oppression operating within the institutionalized practices of society to create discrimination or inequality. Arundhati Roy's approach to representing the marginalised and disenfranchised in her fiction is in line with the ubiquitous understanding of intersectionality as an examination of the simultaneity of oppression. This paper seeks
to explore how Roy has devised a new technique to challenge the social, political and cultural structures of oppression through the intersecting universes of her fictional worlds in The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). She investigates the social conflicts and relational clashes that inflict and drive the present-day Indian subcontinent. The topography of her narratives spans across
the neglected aspects of the cultural landscape where all the dispersed identities merge into one another elucidating the vastness between the corrupt and the conscience keepers of the society. By using the critical technique of intersectionality in her novels, Roy suggests how each system of oppression overlaps another, and that it is impossible to get rid of one kind of oppression without attacking another.

Arundhati Roy’un Küçük Şeylerin Tanrısı adlı romanı egemenlik ilişkilerinin her türüne karşı radikal bir tavır sergiler. Her türden hiyerarşik yapılanmanın sınırlarını sorgulayarak tersyüz eden romanda; kast, sınıf, cinsiyet rolleri ve ırk hiyerarşisine kaynaklık eden sınırlara karşılık Roy, resmettiği sınır tanımaz karakterlerle, kronolojik anlatıya aykırı anlatı stratejisiyle ve sömürgecinin dili olan İngilizceyi norm dışı kullanmasıyla farklı bir alternatifi gündeme getirir. Her türlü ayrımın ortadan kalktığı bu yeni varoluş algısında, yalnızca insanlar arasındaki değil, insanla doğa arasındaki sınırlar da kaybolur. Roy büyük anlatılarda ses ve söz verilmeyen ezilenlerin dili olmayı hedefler bu romanda. Dünyayı insan dünyasının ezilenleri olan alt kastların, kadının, çocuğun gözünden görmekle kalmaz, dili olmayan doğanın da sesini duymaya çağırır okurunu. Bu makale, Küçük Şeylerin Tanrısı’nı; doğanın, ezilenler alanının en altındaki öğesi olduğunu, doğayla kadının ezilmelerinin eşzamanlılığını ve paralelliğini ve insanın doğaya tahakkümünün diğer tüm tahakküm biçimlerinin kaynağı olduğunu vurgulayan ekofeminist bir bakış açısıyla irdeleyerek, bunları romandaki izdüşüm ve örnekleriyle tartışmak amacını taşımaktadır

This paper is an attempt at understanding the formation of 'masculinity' apropos conflicting childhood memory with reference, first, to Esthappen in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and, second, to the young men in Bangladesh. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the 'unusual' present as well as the split/shared memory of Esthappen to explore how he gradually develops a marginalized self and eventually stops claiming 'masculinity.' The formation and evolution of a person's childhood memories go through a culturally predetermined gendering process. It is not rare that a person, like Estha, fails to survive the gendering of memory and is, thus, led to cling to an always-traumatic childhood to look back upon. The second section, referencing differing versions of 'masculinity' and Jan Assmann's idea of 'Cultural Memory,' concentrates on the young men in Bangladesh who, like Estha, have experienced stunted development of subjectivity. Acknowledging the fact that these young men live in a different spatio-temporal and socio-cultural scenario, the section shows, based on a number of interview-based case studies, how culturally predetermined gendering works on the development of male subjectivity. The third section places Roy's Estha and the young men in Bangladesh, the fiction and the fact, face to face to show how unconventional dealing with childhood memory may lead a male individual to resist or fail in conforming to the mainstream ideas of masculinity.

The God of Small Things centers around caste and a chain of other issues. The paper analyses the connection between caste, Velutha and social mobilization in the novel. Meanwhile, the situations of subalterns in India are manifested because they are the significant Cultural "others" in Indian history. This is accompanied by the problem of identity. Under the dominance and influence of colonialism, both Indian people and India have faced identity crises. The paper also reflects on the orientalist perception of India as an exotic, mysterious nation. Yet there leaves some room for justification about whether the Orient is represented correctly in academic research and historical documents. "Postcolonial exoticism," one of the features of Roy's novel, reveals to us the function and significance of cultural translation both within and beyond borders.

This article contributes to studies of the heuristic, metacognitive, and social values of literary works by interrogating ways literary description can induce experi-ential involvement in the reading process through mobilizing what the neuropsychol-ogists Maria Vandekerckhove and Jaak Panksepp call our " affective consciousness, " a form of prereflective reception that arises from bodily experience. Focusing upon Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the article proposes a theoretical framework for interrogating the forms of priming, bias, and insight gained via these physical dimensions of reading. In particular, it examines a narrative technique termed " embodied anchors, " by which Roy conveys her characters' experiences and their interpretations of those experiences through image clusters that function both as metaphors and as physical cues, simultaneously affecting both " basic " and " moral " emotions (as differentiated by the clinical psychologists Bunmi O. Olatunji and Jorge Moll). The article analyzes how these embodied prompts activate readers' preconscious modes of perception, modify cognitive skills, and intensify the effects of reading by anchoring ideational content in readers' bodies, rendering abstract concepts physically tangible, thus providing alternative and parallel means of communicating and manipulating knowledge. This knowledge, it is argued, can be integrated into readers' range of experiences in ways that parallel " real-life " encounters, potentially facilitating profound learning.

Arundhati Roy can be termed as the most refined writer of this decade. She got international fame for her debut novel 'The God of small things.' Her works embodies realism, political and social crisis and empathy for humanity. This paper attempts to understand her mind as a writer and explores the multidimensional and multi layered story of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The fiction holds the unbearable truths of society such as wretched condition of minorities, humiliated life of trans genders, mediocre government, life of naxals, rape, murder and more over the story is about the marginalised group of people who are victim of injustice , inequality and prejudice.

This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in The Oxford History of the Novel, Vol 10,  The Novel in South and South-East Asia since 1945. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press

The chapter examines three key strands of ecology in novels from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, showing how symbolic economies of water, waste, and land mediate political questions around land ownership, agriculture, urbanization, and resource extractivism. The subcontinent has functioned as a testing-ground for large-scale environmental engineering, from the tea plantations, cash crop monocultures, and mass hydraulic schemes and river diversions of the colonial period, to the modernization schemes and Green Revolution in the twentieth-century, to transnational extractivism and bio-piracy in the neoliberal era.  As Roy writes in her searing indictment of the privatization of resources in twenty-first century ‘Shining India’, Indian nature has been relentlessly plundered to fill the bank accounts of national oligarchs and foreign corporations in a deeply asymmetrical exchange: “By caving into this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology” (2011, 26).  Environment, as a web of relations between both human and non-human agents, is not only a prominent thematic presence in the content of  South Asian fiction, but ‘a formal and stylistic presence’ mediating uneven development, ecological imperialism, and environmental degradation (Mukherjee 2010, 11). This chapter analyses the distinctiveness of place and environment in the South Asian novel and broaches  related political questions about land trusteeship and resource insurgency. The rural emphasis on the green fields of rice agriculture in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1955), Sri Lankan tea country in Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge (2002), Himalayan foothills in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), or the mangrove-forests of the Sundarbans in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), is counterbalanced by fictions representing the mass expansion of South Asian megacities, as dispossessed peasantries and evicted tribals are driven off the land by large-scale agri-business, mining, and mega-dams. Urban environments are inextricably bound up with the production of nature in the countryside, and the reduction of certain populations to ‘disposable people’ (Bale 2004) and ‘ecorefugees’ (Guha 2006), stripped of basic environmental rights to water, food, or land. Agricultural modernization and mining have resulted in desertification and pollution, produced severe asymmetries in distribution of and access to water.  Thus, in addition to representations of land, this chapter will analyze representations of hydrological crisis, dams, and water privatization in and Arundhati Roy’s  The God of Small Things (1997), Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2002), I will conclude by exploring the representation of the Bhopal chemical disaster in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), showing how it criticizes the toxification of environments and contests notions of devalued populations and natures as waste or surplus.

in this section. The Shadow Lines is a SAHITYA AKADEMI AWARD winning novel written in 1988 by Amitav Ghosh; The God of Small Things is a Booker prize award winning novel written in 1997 by Arundhati Roy. Both these novels are written in different time and settings. The prime theme of Ghosh is borders and how border is to the characters in the novel, for Roy marginalization or prejudice by the society and experience of the characters as victims of social stigmas. There is a continuation in each the novel which starts from Colonization of India and continues to the Post-Colonial reality of other scenarios that is devastating the characters" life. Tridib in The Shadow Lines and Velutha in The God of Small Things have a miserable death that they themselves are not responsible for but the society engraves them with the identity of Tridib being a Hindu and Velutha being an underprivileged person on classifications such as class and caste. Border, Race, Class, Creed, Religion has its own definition leaving behind human as an entity in which all these social stigmas are erupted for human identification. Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh parallel their opinions and associated with each other on many similarities and some dissimilarity.

Kutluk, Asli. “The Position of Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day.” Gender Studies. Vol. 11, Issue Supplement 1 (Dec 2012): 124-130. ISSN (Online) 2286-0134, ISSN (Print) 1583-980X. DOI: 10.2478/v10320-012-0011-z.
<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/genst.2012.11.issue-s1/v10320-012-0011-z/v10320-012-0011 z.xml>.

The aim of this paper is to analyse women’s state in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day. In both novels, women struggle with the world they live in because of their womanhood. Their situation can be discussed briefly in terms of Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

The Indian novel has been a vibrant and energetic expressive space in the 21st century. While the grand postcolonial gestures characteristic of the late-20th-century Indian novel have been in evidence in new novels by established authors such as Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, a slate of new authors has emerged in this period as well, charting a range of new novelistic modes. Some of these authors are Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Githa Hariharan, Samina Ali, Karan Mahajan, and Amitava Kumar. In general, there has been a move away from ambitious literary fiction in the form of the " huge, baggy monster " that led to the publication of several monumental postcolonial novels in the 1980s and 1990s; increasingly the most dynamic and influential Indian writing uses new novelistic forms and literary styles tied to the changing landscape of India's current contemporary social and political problems. The newer generation of authors has also eschewed the aspiration to represent the entirety of life in modern India, and instead aimed to explore much more limited regional and cultural narrative frameworks. If a novel like Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) took its protagonist all over the Indian subcontinent and indexed a large number of important historical controversies in the interest of broad representation, Padma Viswnanathan's The Toss of a Lemon (2008) limits itself to a focus on a single Tamil Brahmin family's orientation to issues of caste and gender, and remains effectively local to Tamil Nadu. There is no central agenda or defining idiom of this emerging literary culture, but three major groupings can be identified that encapsulate the major themes and preoccupations of 21st-century Indian fiction: " New Urban Realism, " " Gender and Secular History, " and " Globalizing India, Reinscribing the Past. "

Arundhati Roy’s second and latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — which took her 10 years to write — is crammed full of misfits and outsiders, the flotsam and jetsam of India’s complex, stratified society. The novel is inhabited by cohorts of others: hijras, political rebels, the poor, women who will not “know their place”, and abandoned baby girls. The narrative of Roy’s latest political romance shows these others carving out new spaces for themselves, defying convention, trying possible new lives, and testing out new roles. This article aims to look at the texture of romance in Roy’s novels. Set within the narrative of Roy’s romance with India’s others, the article focuses on the Tilo–Musa romance in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and compares it with the Ammu–Velutha romance in the author’s first novel, The God of Small Things, published in 1997. Romance in Roy’s novels serves multiple purposes, as this article argues and unpacks. Mapping out the patterns of romance which Roy creates in both her novels, this analysis employs the trope of romance as a lens through which to offer a postcolonial reading of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which interpenetrates intimacy and desire and the political. Deconstructing the (remarkably similar) romances at the heart of both of Roy’s novels reveals that her romances may not just be her rebuttal to India’s wrongs, but may even constitute a form of political rescue. We conclude that although Roy is purposeful in identifying and avoiding reorientalist representations, her rejection of abjection and victimhood, and her overt celebration of larger-than-life others, may have subverted the inferiorizing of the other, without, however, decreasing the process of othering.

To listen attentively, to care deeply, to speak fearlessly: these are some of the many virtues of our brave sister, Arundhati Roy. Even if she never writes another book of fiction, she already deserves a place in the history of English-language literature: The God Of Small Things, the winner of 1998's Booker Prize Award, can be easily included in the Olympus of the 20th century's true masterpieces in the realm of novels. Her story-telling talents are such that it's hard not to get hooked on the tale she's telling so compellingly: The God Of Small Things entrances with its language, seduces withs its humour, and then delivers, apart from a delicious verbal banquet, a blood-soaked tragedy.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449855.2018.1507919


Arundhati Roy’s non-fictional writing has been interpreted as the epitome of an emerging “realist impulse” at the heart of postcolonial literature since 2000, and a move away from the reflexive and metaphorical style of her first novel, The God of Small Things. This article reassesses the opposition between fictional and non-fictional writing by addressing Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Rather than endorsing a concept of realism understood as transparent, documentary representation of reality, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness proposes a contradictory and digressive poetics whereby fictional and non-fictional elements coexist. Roy’s critical stance on realism encompasses both her commitment to engage with contemporary history and her questioning of literature’s ability to do justice to suffering. Accordingly, Roy’s second novel reframes the literary concept of realism as an “aesthetic of the inconsolable” aiming to address what is left over from non-fictional accounts of politics and history.

Abstract
My research explores how Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses (2005) investigates the narrow and reductive definition of nationalism promoted during General Zia’s regime. During his period the concept of nationalism and the discourses on history were appropriated to justify his policy of Islamization of every field of national life. Broken verses deconstructs the official Grand narratives that are only interested in depicting reductive and stereotypical version of the history propagated by Zia Regime and its controversial Hadood ordinance that denied freedom to Pakistani women in both public and private Sphere . Shamsie’s novel exposes  fissures and gaps inherent in those reductive discourses; she comes up with more liberating and pluralistic definition of nationalism that  gives a deep insight into the real histories of violence committed against women. Her novel stresses upon the idea that Muslim is as much a cultural Identity as the religious one. I will draw on Goha’s concept on subaltern history, Appardurai’s Fear of Small Number and Roy’s concept of nationalism and anti-nationalism to investigate and deconstruct the Grand National discourse on history and nationalism.  In this research, I will depict how Broken Verses challenges the dominant narrative and makes an attempt to retrieve the lost or unheard female voices, the absences and silences in the mainstream version, the perspective of Subaltern women that are left out of the dominant discourse and buried under the official version of history.
Key words:  Women, Nationalism, History, Subaltern.

One of the most troubling concepts to reach the world stage is this idea that modernity or progress is aimed towards a state of being governed by a set of definitive values, external to a localised setting. What Roy makes clear in her novel is that those aspirational Western values, that inform and progress globalisation, do in fact result in a fractured connection between members of society within Europe's and America's periphery. The so-called colonized mind is therefore an appropriated frame of view which recognises the West as the centre of both power and knowledge. In order to construct this appropriated gaze, the Western world, through colonial dominance, has separated localised references to symbolic cultural connections as well as appropriated world history. Her Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things  (1997) Roy explores an individual’s ability (or lack of ability) to re-inscribe and thus de-legitimize power, by revealing what edifices of power hold our gaze and why. She specifically addresses the temporal fallacy of modern versus backward; to uproot and display the effects of neo-liberal principles of economic growth and development, and how the spread of unregulated capitalism affects supposedly less developed peoples. As will be discussed, for Roy those tarred with the brush of being part of an older world are summarily treated as expendable items on the march towards modernity.

Spatiality has emerged as a significant component in analyzing gendered experiences, and cultural expressions reveal this complex yet dynamic relationship in several ways. While some forms of art approach it in a direct, straightforward manner, literature does it, perhaps, in aesthetically diverse ways. Arundhati Roy has foregrounded the space and gender relationship in several ways, with language emerging as the most intricate tool to depict this relationship. Her second and latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) is a novel that has space as a prominent character and the gender identities, depicted in this novel, are challenging and interesting, especially in the context of modern India. From the transgender identity of the protagonist who resides in the heterotopic space of a cemetery to the female characters who sustain themselves in the conflict-ridden Kashmir valley, the novel experiments with possibilities using linguistic styles as the most appropriate and significant tool. Roy's experiments with form, with regards to gendered spatial experiences, will be explored in this paper. I will work within the framework of thirdspace and heterotopia as postulated by Soja and Foucault. This paper will analyse the depiction of gender within social spaces using the tools of Cultural Studies.

The spectre of global warming has shaken mankind like never before. Uncontrolled urbanization and industrialization coupled with emissions from vehicles, air-conditioners, etc. on the one hand and senseless deforestation and exploitation of natural resources on the other have brought us face-to-face with a daunting scenario. It is but appropriate that the literary world should take up cudgels and make reading public including the young generation aware of the urgency to take corrective measures. Leading Indian writers have produced literary works that underline their concern in this regard. My paper explores the domain of Indian English Fiction and critically studies works by eminent authors like Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy and some not-so-eminent ones and concludes common concern even as these deal with life in different areas affected by different types of problems in different milieu.

(International Baccalaureate Extended Essay)

Though set in different cultural circumstances, the narrations of both Arundhati Roy’s "The God of Small Things" and Olga Tokarczuk’s "Primeval and Other Times" (though very distinct from each other) are strongly based around the physical locations in which the plots take place. These physical locations are conveyed in different ways, such as through the usage of vivid descriptions or, on the contrary, through parallels, minimalistic symbolism or metonymies. At the same time, both novels concentrate on the importance of cultural and moral values, and the complicated psyche of human beings. Both Roy and Tokarczuk show distinctions between bigger, universal locations (culture, religion, as well as literal, physical geopolitical places) and smaller, much more personal ones – with the latter also taking the form of human relations.
This essay aims to investigate the following research question: How and in what ways are physical locations used to convey relations between human beings with each other and higher powers, as well as the ways the past influences the present? The investigation will be based on finding similar themes and motifs in "The God…" and "Primeval…" that, although very different in their narrative structure and their temporal and spatial setting (set, respectively, in Kerala, India, and Poland), both comment on the relationship between individuals and the locations in which they are placed.

Cognitive scientists and philosophers increasingly argue that one’s culture wires one’s brain (Feldman Barrett 2017: 177). In this article, I explore some ways by which individuals can nonetheless intervene and impact this wiring, for instance by engaging in personification in play: that is, inhabiting or acting out various subject positions in a socially interactive dynamic. My exploration of role-play is set within a wider interest in models of intersubjective communication and in recent reformulations of notions of ‘authenticity’ as fundamentally ‘reciprocal’ (Zahavi 2001, Rokotnitz 2014) and ‘relational’ (Gallagher, Morgan and Rokotnitz 2018). For this purpose, I consult resources from psychology and the cognitive sciences, particularly regarding the growing evidential basis for conceiving of emotions as constructed by predictive processing mechanisms (Feldman Barrett 2017). I anchor this discussion in examples from three fictional works: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1996), Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), and Joe Hempson and Mae Martin’s Feel Good (2020–21). Drawing together science, philosophy, and fiction from both sides of the Atlantic, this article aims to enrich and complicate notions of subjectivity, choice, and playfulness, providing contextual constellations against which to test the evolving discussion of emotions, agency, and authenticity. (Care has been taken to avoid plot-spoilers, unless such details are germane to the argument).

Borders were created to perpetuate and reinforce differences that determine the inclusion and exclusion of people and reinstate the distinction between " us " and " them ". Prominent theorist and researcher in border studies, Gloria Anzaldúa uses the border between the United States of America and Mexico in her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, as a " metaphor for all types of crossings-between geopolitical boundaries, sexual transgressions, social dislocations… " (Anzaldúa 2007:6) She defines a border " as a dividing line " (25) that is imagined and drawn out to " define places that are safe and unsafe. " (25) The setting of Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things (1997) reveals a society governed by borders. The caste-based border divides individuals into two distinct worlds while the gendered border lies between what society expects and what the individuals desire. However, borders are " artefacts of history and are subjected to change over time. " (Cadaval 1993: 17-25) Borders have become a far more complex concept and are not seen as a stagnant " line in the sand " (Donan & Wilson 1999: 15) but " a metaphor for cultural and other borderlands. " (Anzaldúa 15) A borderland is a space between two borders that allows a blending of two cultures creating a new world, a third space. So, the question that motivates this research is: To what extent is Arundhati Roy able to portray borders and create a borderland in her novel, The God of Small Things?

Providing spiritual ‘safe spaces’, the Sufi shrine-world throughout the Indian Subcontinent is generally open to those who do not identify with conventional gender categories. Ajmer Sharif Shrine (dargāh) in the northern Indian town of Ajmer in Rajasthan is renowned for being particularly ‘inclusive’. It accepts all pilgrims without discrimination, including the so-called ‘third gender’, often referred to as hijras or kinnars, terms that transgress the socially-defined binary gender divide. Marginalized, and often socially stigmatized, these groups are naturally drawn towards liminal spaces such as Sufi dargāhs which encourage the transcendence of socio-religious boundaries. This paper explores certain typological aspects of traditional Sufi ritual and belief that make it particularly receptive to hijras, and the way in which hijras in turn appropriate and reconfigure Sufi religious belief to negotiate the tension between the liminality of their lived experience and the exclusive duality of the society around them. As well as utilizing fieldwork undertaken at the 808th ʿurs festival in 2020, the paper also draws upon the experiences of the fictional protagonist Anjum of Arundhati Roy’s second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, together with those of Mona Ahmed (1937–2017), the inspiration behind Roy’s novel and the most famous hijra of Delhi.

This article adopts a transmodern approach to Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and it contends that Roy's fusion of anti-global activism, typical of her non-fiction writings, and literary imagination, reminiscent of Indian epic texts, can provide an interesting instance of a transmodern intellectual perspective. In particular, by examining gender troubles, ethnic conflicts and vulnerable ecology, my article argues that Roy's second novel refracts the decolonial/postcolonial debate by means of a hybrid narrative form. This interplay between creative writing and intellectual activism can be said to chime with transmodern ethics in that it promotes attentiveness to the perspective of the most marginalised.

The spectre of global warming has shaken mankind like never before. Uncontrolled urbanization and industrialization coupled with emissions from vehicles, air-conditioners, etc. on the one hand and senseless deforestation and exploitation of natural resources on the other have brought us face-to-face with a daunting scenario. It is but appropriate that the literary world should take up cudgels and make reading public including the young generation aware of the urgency to take corrective measures. Leading Indian writers have produced literary works that underline their concern in this regard. My paper explores the domain of Indian English Fiction and critically studies works by eminent authors like Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy and some not-so-eminent ones and concludes common concern even as these deal with life in different areas affected by different types of problems in different milieu.

This paper deals with how Indian nationalism and sense of nationhood has interchangeably been positioned as both an enabling and a disempowering discourse.

The topics are hermeneutically being discussed from the perspective of three relevant novels that address different forms of discursivity in terms of nationalism: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.

This paper seeks to make a critical comparative study between two awarded novels, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus. Magic realism is important as an aesthetic for women’s fiction, especially for Third World women. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Isabel Allende, Arundhati Roy ―among so many other― make use of this technique in order to represent the reality of the experience of dislocation. Imagination plays a powerful role both in escaping the cruel realities of racial/gender discrimination and in creating the possibility of overturning those conditions. From our point of view, it is interesting to relate Arundhati’s and Allende’s use of magic realism through allegory, symbols, fantasy, and the inclusion of oral narrative.