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.