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Class Structure in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
• Paper : 13 The New Literatures
• Roll No : 26
• M.A. Part ii Sem iv
• Year : 2013-15
• Submitted to : Smt.S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar University
Prepared by : Sejal Chauhan
Date: 10/3/2015
The God of Small Things
1997
The White Tiger
2008
Booker prize winning Indian
novels
Point of view
Treatment of class structure
in India
The God of a Small Things The White Tiger
The God of a Small Things
• Portrayals of the Marxist
movement
• The Syrian Christian
community in Kerala
• The incest motif than for
its social criticism
• Reinforcing Western
steretypes
• About Indian poverty
• Low life
Both novels strongly attacked by
many Indian readers
The White Tiger
Different
genre structure
Narrative technique
tone
• Roy is angry
• white Tiger is satiric
Victims
Velutha
Un touchable or Paravan
At the bottom of the
economic ladder
Balram
Halwai
From a backward village
Of class disparities and discrimination in society
Fate
Men In society
written
status
characters
Velutha
Means white in
MalayalamThe white tiger
Balram
Are not simply individuals but representative of a social or moral
class
Two classes/castes
The God of a Small
ThingsThe White Tiger
Oppressors and the
oppressedHave and have nots
• Velutha is punished by death for going against the social order
by his sexual involvement with a woman higher in caste
• It shows that caste is engrained within the human psyche
• Balram on the otherhand also dares to break this social order
• Its moral codes but he does so by murdering his master and
robbing his money
• However ,unlike Velutha, he is not punished
• Rather , he becomes a successful entrepreneur in Banglore.
• Adiga attempts to suggest that part of Balram’s problem is that
he belongs to a very low caste
• Velutha’s fate is ordained because of both caste and
socioeconomic class, Balram’s is or rather should be , because
of his poverty alone.
• Through Balram’s letters , Adiga acquints his readers with the
continuing dichotomy between the rich and the poor
• And attributes the sleaze and the filth, the amorality and crime
to this.
• Balram declares that the murder was an act of social justice
and class welfare.
• He is deprived of the reader’s sympathy.
• Velutha, on the other hand , is successful in gaining the
reader’s sympathy.
• Conclusion :-
• Both novels have pessimistic view of the social realities of contemporary India.
• Roy suggests that these realities are eternal and are a part of human nature.
• Adiga appears to suggests that material success is attained only by breaking the social and even moral barriers.
• Where Roy suggests that these social realities are found everywhere in the world, albeit in different forms
• Adiga portrays only the darkside of modernity in India.