The God of small things

Within the latest generation of Indian writers in English, Arundhati Roy, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, has probably attracted the most attention worldwide for her novel The God of Small Things. The present study scans the historical and cultural context that has seen the successful emergence of "Indo-Anglian" writing, and discusses the topics of colonialism and neocolonialism as they are approached in the novel. It takes post-colonial theory into consideration in the initial approach of the text, and then concentrates on the structuring paradigms of memory, repression and transgression, as well as the originality of the author's idiosyncratic English.