Essay builder · Arundhati Roy
Build your five-paragraph essay one sentence at a time. Each box tells you what that sentence must do, and the hints give you evidence from the novel. Your writing saves on this computer as you type.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in Shillong, in northeast India. Her mother, Mary Roy, came from a Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem, Kerala; her father was a Bengali tea plantation manager. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she grew up in Ayemenem, the village where the novel is set. She later studied architecture in New Delhi.
Her mother's life is inside the novel. Under an old Kerala law, a Syrian Christian daughter could inherit only a quarter of her brother's share, or 5,000 rupees (about US$409 in 1986), whichever was less. Mary Roy challenged the law, and in 1986 India's Supreme Court struck it down. When you read that Ammu has "no Locusts Stand I" (no legal right to the family property), you are reading about this law.
The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since then Roy has written mainly about politics, from the far left. She is anti-capitalist: in Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014) she argues that a few corporations and rich families control India's land, water and politics. In 2010 she travelled with Maoist guerrillas in the forests of central India, and back in Delhi she defended their armed struggle: "It ought to be an armed movement." She argues that caste is India's deepest injustice, and she strongly criticizes Hindu nationalism and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Supporters see her as a voice for people with no power; critics say she excuses political violence.
The same ideas shape the novel. Roy favours the group over the single person: the twins think of themselves as one "Me," a family's private pain is tied to History, caste and politics, and the "Small Things" are always crushed by the "Big Things." Yet the lovers are destroyed by a group, so ask yourself whether Roy is praising collective life or warning against it.
Why this matters for the novel: Roy is on the left, but she does not spare the left. In the novel, Comrade Pillai of Kerala's Communist Party refuses to help Velutha because he is an Untouchable, and when the novel appeared, Kerala's Communist chief minister attacked it. Roy's point is that caste and family loyalty can be stronger than any political promise of equality. Watch for this as you read: the family, the church, the police and the party all protect the old order, and the weakest person pays.
Copy the question your school gave you, word for word. Every sentence you write must help answer it.
The story moves between December 1969 (the twins are 7) and 1993 (they are 31). Almost everything important happens in two weeks of 1969:
Page numbers on this page come from the class PDF. Your book's pages may be different: check the chapter, then find the page in your own copy.
Only your own sentences, joined into five paragraphs. The counter shows how many of the 25 sentences you have written. Read it aloud once: does every paragraph answer the question?
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