A Trauma-Theoretical and Postcolonial Research of Memory, Violence and Identity in the God of Small Things

Abstract

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is one of the most powerful and influential ways contemporary Indian English fiction talks about trauma. This paper examines how personal pain, family life and postcolonial history all tangle together inside the novel using trauma studies, psychoanalysis, feminism and postcolonial criticism. The research argues that trauma in the novel functions not merely as an individual psychological condition but as a historically produced and socially transmitted phenomenon emerging from caste oppression, patriarchy, colonial legacy, and institutional violence.  

Through the fractured consciousness of Estha and Rahel, the gendered suffering of Ammu, and the caste-based victimization of Velutha, Roy shows how private emotional wounds are never separate from larger structures of power. The paper further analyzes the Ipe family as a traumatic domestic space where repression, silence, violence, and inherited emotional dysfunction circulate across generations. Simultaneously, the novel exposes the persistence of colonial ideology in postcolonial India through mimicry, Anglophilia, caste hierarchy, and institutional brutality.

By using nonlinear narration, fragmented chronology, child-like awareness, and linguistic play, Roy actually re-enacts traumatic memory right inside the narrative structure itself. Taking support from Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Sigmund Freud and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, this paper argues that Roy turns trauma into both an aesthetic method and a political critique. The research concludes that The God of Small Things presents trauma as cyclical, collective, historical and stubbornly rooted in postcolonial identity making.