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This essay considers the depiction of economic exploitation and patriarchal repression in The God of Small Things, a novel in which commodities serve as the obsessive focus of characters whose subordination to the system of commodity production and exchange has inspired in them a desire for mastery and control. Yet, the essay suggests, it is through characters victimized by the social order that the novel explores potential sites of resistance to capitalist exploitation and patriarchal domination.
Appearing early in the first chapter of The God of Small Things, Ammu's encounter with Police Inspector Thomas Mathew establishes a repeated pattern in the narrative whereby the brutal violence underpinning the social and economic structure of patriarchy and capitalism is displaced onto seemingly innocuous trademark images, icons of popular culture, or objects for mass consumption. More often than not, the appearance of these images, icons, or objects evokes the multiple levels of trauma that, even as they defy representation, provide the centre of gravity for the text's exploration of the progressive commodification of social relations under global capitalism. Providing the dramatic focus of one of the three main timelines in the novel, Ammu's affair with Velutha, along with her desperate attempt to save him after their affair has been discovered, assigns transgressive erotic desire a political role that underscores, as Brinda Bose puts it, "the subversive powers of desire and sexuality in an arena that is rife with the politics of gender divisions and the rules that govern them" (64). However, not all desire in the novel possesses a transgressive character, and Ammu's encounter with Inspector Mathew dramatizes the clash between a set of human desires, sentiments, and aspirations depicted throughout the text as natural, and another set characterized by an "unnatural" impulse to dominate and control life. In each instance where it appears, the desire for domination is associated with oppressive economic and social structures that tend to fix human behaviour and identity in predetermined structures. Although there are many forces in the novel associated with the desire for mastery and control, including the perverted form of Marxism that Roy attributes to those with political power in Kerala, each manifests itself in close association with the subordination of human life and the natural world to the...