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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
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The God of Small Things
1997
The White Tiger
2008
Booker prize winning Indian
novels
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Point of view
Treatment of class structure
in India
The God of a Small Things The White Tiger
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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
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Different
genre structure
Narrative technique
tone
• Roy is angry
• white Tiger is satiric
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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
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Fate
Men In society
written
status
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characters
Velutha
Means white in
MalayalamThe white tiger
Balram
Are not simply individuals but representative of a social or moral
class
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Two classes/castes
The God of a Small
ThingsThe White Tiger
Oppressors and the
oppressedHave and have nots
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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.