10 Desire and Domestic Friction Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Can one discuss The God of Small Things without addressing the Roy phenomenon that, as Graham Huggan tells us, paradigmatically exemplifies how the production and dissemination of Indian Writing in English colludes with the construction and marketing of ‘Indo-chic’? On Huggan’s reading, Roy stands in metonymically for the majority of Indian writers in English – as an object of, or more likely an accomplice in, the exoticisation and transnational commodification of ‘India’: ‘Indo-chic’, and Roy’s contribution to it, are not simply to be seen as naive Western constructs; they are products of the globalisation of Western-capitalist consumer culture, in which ‘India’ functions not just as a polyvalent cultural sign but as a highly mobile cultural good.1 Already in 2000, Saadia Toor had argued that in the course of the hype around The God of Small Things, “the concrete, identifiable author becomes a commodity”, and she links this process with the cultural logic of a ‘New Orientalism’ which – unlike in Huggan’s account – is to a large extent employed by elite Indian diasporics as consumers of ‘Indo-chic’: It is impossible to abstract the sale of GOST [The God of Small Things] from the publicity posters of Roy; it is Roy that carries the ‘aura’ [...] in this case, not so much her artistic production. In fact, one could argue that the cultural commodity being produced, circulated and ‘consumed’ is also not GOST but Roy as the authentic postcolonial female subject, embodying the (post)modern pastiche that makes Indo-chic simultaneously ‘new’ and ‘Orientalist’.2 The Roy phenomenon, to be sure, is not primarily textual but paratextual in nature,3 comprising as it does the marketing of the book as a tangible object,

1 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 67. 2 Saadia Toor, “Indo-Chic: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Post-Liberalization India”. SOAS Literary Review 2 (July 2000): 1—36; 26. 3 Rashmi Varma’s brief footnote on the Roy phenomenon in his inspiring article on the figure of the tribal in Indian Writing in English forms an exception as it addresses the textual practice of The God of Small Things as an example for how “contemporary Indian writing

260 Genres of Modernity the promotion of a mythical author persona, the accretion of the novel’s nimbus by international awards from London and an obscenity suit from Thiruvanantapuram. Loved from the beginning like the unfortunate Sophie Mol, The God of Small Things itself tends to be obscured, paradoxically, by the very limelight shed on the novel: “The hype and the promotion [ponders Makarand Paranjape] has attained such discursive power and penetration that any independent evaluation of the book calls for a special level of clarity and candour”.4 With good reason, Huggan, Toor, and any good cultural materialist would retort that all hope for an “independent evaluation” is necessarily futile; that it could only be performed – as Spivak does à propos the Rushdie affair – when bracketed as an “attempt [to do] the impossible”: in Spivak’s case, “a reading of The Satanic Verses as if nothing has happened since 1988”.5 Why, however, should one have to read Roy ‘as if nothing had happened since 1998’, when the global hype around The God of Small Things was on its height, and when Roy herself appeared to be not much more than an extraordinarily photogenic icon readily available for exoticisation? If Roy’s image, as Bernd-Peter Lange argues, has undergone significant transformations “from that of a bestselling novelist into that of a political polemicist”,6 the Roy phenomenon itself has proved to be a bit more complex than the permanent (and highly predictable) reiteration of its implication in the global culture industry can account for. While focusing on the function of the author as public persona but reducing that function (along with the embodied subject performing it) to complicity, as commodity, in the production and marketing of Indo-chic, this argument runs the risk of occluding the dynamics at work in the interplay of commodification/cooptation and Roy’s attempts to make subversive usage of the celebrity status thrust upon her. When Toor, à propos the Roy phenomenon, claims that “the question of authorial intention becomes moot when there is a field of meaning already constructed for Indian cultural

makes productive use of the tribal in order to appropriate the figure for th[e] new hegemony of a neoliberal economic agenda in the era of globalization”. Despite this analytical proposition, Varma’s article primarily demonstrates how Roy and other writers offer counter-hegemonic representations of the tribal. Rashmi Varma, “Developing Fictions: The ‘Tribal’ in the New Indian Writing in English”. World Bank Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Foreword John Berger. Afterword Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis & London (U of Minnesota P) 2003: 216—233; 217; 231. 4 Paranjape, Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel, 119. 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Reading the Satanic Verses”. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London & New York (Routledge) 1993: 217—241; 219. 6 Bernd-Peter Lange, “Mediating Indian English Writing: The Case of Arundhati Roy”. Mediating Indian Writing in English: German Perspectives. Ed. Bernd-Peter Lange & Mala Pandurang. New Delhi (Rawat) & Münster (Lit) 2005: 65—85; 80.