Gender, Power, and Patriarchy in The God of Small Things: A Critical Study of Arundhati Roy's Work

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things examines how social, familial, and colonial histories converge to shape individual lives in postcolonial Kerala. Among its many concerns, the novel offers a sustained critique of patriarchal authority: it shows how institutionalized gender hierarchy, operating at both the family and the community level, determines who is permitted intimacy, inheritance, mobility, and voice within the Ayemenem household and beyond it.

Patriarchy in the novel is not confined to isolated acts of male domination in the household. It works as a structure distributed across institutions, families, and individuals at once, so that a single act, such as Ammu's relationship with Velutha, draws consequences from family, caste hierarchy, and the state simultaneously. This layered quality is central to why the novel continues to reward feminist and postcolonial analysis nearly three decades after publication, and it is also what makes a single-axis reading of the text—gender alone, or caste alone—difficult to sustain without leaving something out.

Research gap. Existing scholarship on the novel's treatment of gender divides along three lines that rarely meet. One line documents the forms of gender oppression the novel depicts—marginalization, subordination, and violence—largely at the level of theme and character (Jose 159–166; Mardiyani and Tawami 165–174). A second line reads gender specifically through its intersection with caste, showing how Ammu's punishment and Velutha's murder are two faces of one disciplinary system (Mandal; Saeed; Al-Quaderi). A third and more recent line reads gender through its intersection with race and colonial history, extending the intersectional frame beyond caste and class (Ansari, Ahmed, and Anjum). A separate comparative study places Roy's resistant women from two different novels side by side without focusing specifically on how patriarchy itself is structured within either text (Sharma). What is comparatively rare is a study that keeps patriarchy, rather than any single axis of intersection, as its organizing focus, while tracing that patriarchy across family structure, property law, caste discipline, and Roy's own narrative technique within a single, defined method—and rarer still is one that puts a counter-reading, such as Al-Quaderi's argument that gender is not the primary determinant of subalternity in this novel, into direct conversation with its own conclusions rather than citing only supporting scholarship.

This gap matters because a reading of patriarchy that stops at cataloguing its effects on individual characters risks treating the novel's formal choices—its refusal of linear chronology, its withholding and delayed release of information—as incidental rather than as part of the same critique. This article treats the two as connected and asks three questions: (1) how does patriarchal power operate across the family, property, and caste structures the novel depicts; (2) how does Roy's narrative form relate to that critique; and (3) how do these findings hold up against comparative scholarship and against a published counter-reading that questions gender's centrality to the novel's account of subordination. Section 2 reviews the relevant literature, Section 3 states the novelty and objectives of the study, Section 4 sets out the method and selection criteria, Sections 5 and 6 present the findings, and Section 7 discusses their implications and limitations before the conclusion in Section 8.