Subalternity in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

The book based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis studies subalternity or marginalization in Arundhati Roy’s maiden novel, The God of Small Things focusing on gender, class and caste. The author of the book studies The God of Small Things through a postcolonial lens akin to that of the Subaltern Studies Collective founded by Dr, Ranajit Guha, the late Indian social scientist and historian and concludes that to Roy caste is the most important exclusionary category in India is caste and not gender or class. Roy depicts this fictionally in The God of Small Things and is a practitioner of what can be called ＂sociological imagination＂. While it is difficult to categorize Arundhati Roy as a theoretician her intuitive insight fictionally presented will provide food for thought for many interested in the subcontinent.