Topic > Modern Indian History and Historiography - 661

In attempting to define the modern history and identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee draws attention to the numerous paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by the colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create ambiguity in India's national identity. This is also the central argument in Of Many Heroes by Ganesh N. Devy where, tracing the literary historiography of India, he consolidates the fact that all the literary, traditional and historical movements of India have sprouted from the set of its cultures, social and linguistic. multiplicity. Both seem to adhere to UR Anantha Murthy's vision of Indian culture as a mosaic of tradition and modernity. He writes about a heterodox reality in which the intellectual self is in conflict with the emotional one, the rational individual experiences the sad nostalgia of exile from his traditional roots and resolves his dilemmas in the oscillation between faith and non-faith. This article attempts a reading of the transgression of the “Love Laws” in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things not only as a representation of this heterodox modernity in the personal domain as a reflection of the larger national conflict, but also as the dilemmas of a postcolonial writer seeking of for an identity and their difficulties in expressing it. Roy's God of Small Things illustrates the story as "a dominant and oppressive force that saturates virtually all social and cultural spaces, including familial, intimate, and emotional relationships." (Needham 372). Roy herself writes that the book “connects the smallest things to the largest………middle of the paper…unlikely. Civilization is based on the repression of expressions of love, but the desire to transgress is one of its fundamental impulses. Roy seems to tap into this and says, “For me the god of small things is the inversion of God. God is a big thing and God is in control. The god of small things… does not accept what we consider the boundaries of adults.” (Gutheinz 3)In portraying history as a powerful force of order and classification, the novel tends to celebrate its opposite in images of mixture and hybridity. “Edges, boundaries, boundaries, hems, and limits” (Roy 3) are constantly blurred in the text. There are no fixed boundaries separating the world of law makers and the world of lawbreakers, as Roy writes “They all broke the rules. They all crossed forbidden territory” (Roy 31). All members of the Ipe family “transgress” in different ways.