Ecocritical Sensibility with a Feminine Twist in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

This paper offers an ecofeminist reading of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) that locates the novel’s environmental politics not merely in its themes but in its narrative form. Existing criticism has established the novel’s ecological register  the dying Meenachal River as an index of Kerala’s development (Anand), nature’s “muted revolt” alongside the subaltern (Kunhi and Kunhi), and the ecologies of uneven development (Mukherjee)  but the formal device that fuses the novel’s feminist and ecological critiques has received less sustained attention. This paper argues that the fusion is achieved through what may be called a poetics of the small: the same narrative attention that registers moths, beetles, darter birds, and a poisoned river also registers the crushed lives of Ammu, Rahel, and Velutha, so that woman and nature appear not as naturally akin but as co-victims of a single logic of domination. Reading the novel through the ecofeminist frameworks of Françoise d’Eaubonne, Greta Gaard, Karen Warren, and Vandana Shiva, the paper demonstrates this claim across three sites: the paralleled biographies of Ammu and the Meenachal; the entomological imagery that folds patriarchal law into the world of insects; and the caste and property relations that extend the same logic to Velutha. The novel, it concludes, dramatises the woman–nature association in order to indict the order that produces it.