Communistic Perspective on feminist Arundati Roy

                      

  

 COMMUNISM IN “THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS.”

                                                                                                                         

                                                                                 The aim of communism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Communism (rather than ‘Marxism’), is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world or of forces beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in. it looks for concrete, scientific, logical explanations of the world of observable fact. Communism also built upon the socialist thinking, which was produced in France at the time of French revolution, and it inverted some of the ideas of early economic self-interest would bring economic and social benefits to the whole of society. (Peter Barry-The Beginning Theory.156,157). 

“Marxist attitude towards art, and has exploded the myth that art can be a weapon of social, political and economic propaganda or that it can be produced to order. It is an illuminating study of the impact on art and literature of one of the greatest social upheavals of the modern age. In the present era, “ideology is used in a variety of non-Marxist ways, ranging from a derogatory name for any set of political ideas that are held dogmatically and applied inflexibly, to a neutral name for ways of perceiving and thinking that are specific to an individual’s race, sex nationality or ethnic groups. The prominent thing to say about the communalism versus English literature rather than the communalism in literature through the social perspective of modern writer, Arundhati Roy’s The god of small things. In this fictional work, she illustrates the communalism in god’s own country, Kerala and its partial communism concurs with “bourgeoisie.” Even though she claims this novel as her semi autobiography, she highlights the intolerable partial communism is pursue by the Machiavellian character, comrade, K.N.M. Pillai:   

“Though his part in the whole thing had by no means been a small one, Comrade Pillai didn’t hold himself in any way personally responsible for what had happened. He dismissed the whole business as the Inevitable Consequence of Necessary Politics. The old omelette-and-eggs thing. But then, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai was essentially a political man. A professional omeletteer. He walked through the world like a chameleon. Never revealing himself, never appearing not to. Emerging through chaos unscathed.” (The god of small things.8)

Even velutha is a card- holder of communist party, comrade K.N.M. Pillai served to him as a slow poison for velutha’s downfall because of his caste identity:

“That Paravan is going to cause trouble for you,” he said. “Take it from me… get him a job somewhere else. Send him off.” Chacko was puzzled at the turn the conversation had taken. He had only intended to find out what was happening, where things stood. He had expected to encounter antagonism, even confrontation, and instead was being offered s1y, misguided collusion.

“Send him away? But why?! have no objections to him being a card-holder. I was just curious, that’s all… I thought perhaps you had been speaking to him,” Chacko said. “But I’m sure he’s just experimenting, testing his wings; he’s a sensible fellow, comrade. I trust him…”

“Not like that,’ Comrade Pillai said. “He may be very well okay as a person. But other workers are not happy with him. Already they are coming to me with complaints. You see, comrade, from local standpoint, these caste issues are very deep-rooted.

“You say my workers are coming to you with complaints…”

 “Oh yes, correct” Comrade Pillai said.

“Anything specific?”  

“Nothing specifically as such,” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said. “But see, comrade, any benefits that you give him, naturally others are resenting it. They see it as a partiality. After all, whatever job he does, carpenter or electrician or whatever it is, for them he is just a Paravan. It is a conditioning they have from birth. This I myself have told them is wrong. But frankly speaking, comrade, Change is one thing. Acceptance is another. You should be cautious. Better for him you send him off.”

 “My dear fellow,” Chacko said, “that’s impossible. He’s invaluable. He practically runs the factory—and we can’t solve the problem by sending all the Paravans away. Surely we have to learn to deal with this nonsense.”(The God of small things.131)   

 This novel brings the barbarism of bourgeoisie about untouchability and the brutal suffering to death of an individual, Velutha who is belonged to that particular low class community: she viewed his class sarcastically as:

She said (among other things), How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed, they have a particular smell, these Paravans! And she shuddered theatrically, like a child being force-fed spinach. She preferred an Irish-Jesuit smell to a particular Paravan smell. (The God of Small Things By Arundhati Roy. 38)  and,

In the days that followed, Baby Kochamma focused all her fury at her public humiliation on Velutha. She sharpened it like a pencil. In her mind, he grew to represent the march. And the man who had forced her to wave the Marxist Party flag. And the man who christened her Modalali Mariakutty. And all the men who had laughed at her. She began to hate him.(pg.no.39)

Even though velutha served as a true, loyal communist, the caste to which he belonged stopped him from attaining the values he deserved. But the notable thing is to reclaim his rights also as a communist, he could not rebel against the bourgeois:

To keep the others happy, and since she knew that nobody else would hire him as a carpenter, Mammachi paid Velutha less than she would a Touchable carpenter but more than she would a Paravan. Mammachi didn’t encourage him to enter the house (except when she needed something mended or installed). She thought that he ought to be grateful that he was allowed on the factory premises at all, and allowed to touch things that Touchables touched. She said that it was a big step for a Paravan. (pg.no.37)

And the suppressed peoples too accepted the orders of bourgeois’ orders heartily, reveals through the character of Vellya Paapen, father of velutha:

Vellya Paapen feared for his younger son. He couldn’t say what it was that frightened him. It was nothing that he had said. Or done. It was not what he said, but the way he said it. Not what he did, but the way he did it. Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel. While these were qualities that were perfectly acceptable, perhaps even desirable, in Touchables, Vellya Paapen thought that in a Paravan they could (and would, and indeed, should) be construed as insolence. Vellya Paapen tried to caution Velutha. But since he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that bothered him, Velutha misunderstood his muddled concern. To him it appeared as though his father grudged him his brief training and his natural skills. Vellya Paapen’s good intentions quickly degenerated into nagging and bickering and a general air of unpleasantness between father and son (pg.no.37)

 We can say that this fiction also reveals the Marxist feminism through the description of the protagonist, Ammu who opens the gateway to put a full stop for the bourgeois’ inhumanity (rather than tyranny) on the low caste peoples and finally suppressed by them. Arundhati Roy portrays her as a revolutionary character. The peak bourgeoisie and rich Machiavellian antagonist is baby Kochamma, who had abruptly hates communists and their revolutionary traits and its reflection on Ammu, Rahael, and Estha along with their intelligence. so, she perfectly match the features by getting envy on Ammu and her kids that they enjoying a dignitary value even though she is divorced by her husband:

“On the backseat of the Plymouth, between Estha and Rahel, sat Baby Kochamma. Ex-nun, and incumbent baby grandaunt. In the way that the unfortunate sometimes dislike the co-unfortunate, Baby Kochamma disliked the twins, for she considered them doomed, fatherless wail. Worse still, they were Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry. She was keen for them to realize that they (like herself) lived on sufferance in the Ayemenem House, their maternal grandmother’s house, where they really had no right to be. Baby Kochamma resented Ammu, because she saw her quarreling with a fate that she, Baby Kochamma herself, felt she had graciously accepted. The fate of the wretched Man-less woman. The sad, Father Mulligan-less Baby Kochamma. She had managed to persuade herself over the years that her unconsummated love for Father Mulligan had been entirely due to her restraint and her determination to do the right thing. She subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage—Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject. The twins were too young to understand all this, so Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot from a hen. But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the very least.”(God of small-pg. no.22)

As, Kochamma had a love affair with a church's  Father, Mulligan. Roy dared to tear the robes of fake virginity towards religion and she projected the human as a human through the Mulligan character. She narrates the situation as ‘even he is a church father, he is a human being. And being a human, he can trace out the craze of Kochamma about him:

“Father Mulligan was more than merely flattered by the emotion he aroused in the attractive young girl who stood before him with a trembling, kissable mouth and blazing, coal-black eyes. For he was young too, and perhaps not wholly unaware that the solemn explanations with which he dispelled her bogus biblical doubts were completely at odds with the thrilling promise he held out in his effulgent emerald eyes.”(pg.no.11)

So even Kochamma took training to become a nun, she fell in love:

“When she was eighteen, Baby Kochamma fell in love with a handsome young Irish monk, Father Mulligan, who was in Kerala for a year on deputation from his seminary in Madras. He was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently. Father Mulligan, would be invited to stay for lunch. Of the two men, only one recognized the sexual excitement that rose like a tide in the slender girl who hovered around the table long after lunch had been cleared away. At first Baby Kochamma tried to seduce Father Mulligan with weekly exhibitions of staged charity.”(pg.no.11,12)

With the passing of time, Marxists began to be concerned with questions such as the “carry-over value” of literature, i.e., whether the literature which was created during the old bourgeois society could be of any use in the new proletariat set-up, or the new socio-economic organization would need a few art and literature of its own. Trotsky had to face such problems.  He was himself a writer and he had to face such problems, which had not bothered Marx and Engels. “Marx had assumed the value of Shakespeare and the Greeks are more or less left it at that. But what, the writers in Russia were now asking, was to be the value of the literature and art of the ages of barbarism and oppression in the dawn of socialist freedom? What in particular was to be the status of the culture of that bourgeois society from which socialism had just emerge and of which it still bore the unforgotten scars?(Edmund Wilson- the triple thinkers. Essay no.9) Similar to this, Roy announces a horrible things that a partly bourgeois owner of paradise pickles and preservatives, Mr. Chako who announces as a Marxist and trying to be in one with the communists:

“Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously. He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea. Once he even took a group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They went by bus and returned by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and flowers in their hair. Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade. Comrade! An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood.”(pg.no.31)

  Would there be a new proletarian literature, with new language, new style, and new form, to give expression to the emotions and ideas of the new proletarian dictatorship?” young proletarians wanted to monopolize literature and art and use it to promote the ends of the new socio- economic set up, but Lenin had discouraged such trends for he believed that art could be produced not only by official dictation, but only by natural, “evolution, as a development of those reserves of knowledge which society worked for under the oppression of capitalism, of the land lords, of the officials.” The god of small things also has a wide range of speculation based on the above elements as the tea estate manager Hollick suggests to Ammu’s husband:

“You’re a very lucky man, you know, wonderful family, beautiful children, such an attractive wife…” He lit a cigarette and allowed the match to burn until he couldn’t hold it anymore. “An extremely attractive wife…”

“The weeping stopped. Puzzled brown eyes looked into lurid, red-veined, green ones. Over coffee, Mr. Hollick proposed that Baba go away for a while. For a holiday. To a clinic perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the period of time that he was away, Mr. Hollick suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be “looked after.” Already there were a number of ragged, light-skinned children on the estate that Hollick had bequeathed on tea-pickers whom he fancied. This was his first incursion into management circles.” ( God of-pg.no.20)  

Arundhati Roy theoritizes interestingly about the evolution of communism in god’s own country why the Communist Party was so much more successful in Kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in India, except perhaps in West Bengal. There were several competing theories. One was that it had to do with the large population of Christians in the state. Twenty percent of Kerala’s population were Syrian Christians, who believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins whom St. Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he traveled East after the Resurrection. Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments. The trouble with this theory was that in Kerala the Syrian Christians were, by and large, the wealthy, estate-owning (pickle factory-running), feudal lords, for whom communism represented a fate worse than death. They had always voted for the Congress Party. A second theory claimed that it had to do with the comparatively high level of literacy in the state. Perhaps. Except that the high literacy level was largely because of the Communist movement and she reveals the secret of the keralite partial communism as,

“The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.”(pg.no.32)

There has been much talk of a ‘proletarian literature’ growing up along with the socialist revolution. But such a proletarian literature has remained a myth, for eighty per cent of the people are illiterate and the writer has no means of communicating with them. What has actually happened is that the earlier and accepted classics have been held out not merely as examples of “bourgeois decay”, but also as mediums of great education values. The leftists followed the recommendation of Trotsky and tried to build their literature on the classics and on the bourgeois culture of other countries and on the table revolutionary writers who had learned their trade before the revolution.(Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers Essay no.9)

Literature as a Tool of Communist Propaganda they used the literature, removed the last brakes from a precipitate descent, in the artistic as well as the political field, into a nightmare of informing and repression. The practice of deliberate falsification of social and political history which began at the time of the Stalin-Trotsky crisis and which has now attained proportions so fantastic that the government does not seem to hesitate to pass the sponge every month or so over everything that the people have previously been told and to present them with a new and contradictory version of their history, their duty, and the characters and the characters and careers of their leaders-this practice cannot fail in the end to corrupt every department of intellectual life, till the serious, the humane, the clear-seeing must simply, if they can, remain silent  Art and literature thus degenerated into mere journalism, into mere tools if propaganda to be used by the government for its own socio-economic purposes.