1. The God of Small Things (1997)
Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things (1997)

2. India! The Golden Jubilee

3. The New Yorker (June 1997)

4. The shape of a future of Indian literature
“…what we are witnessing is not a school or a trend, but something bigger in scope… Midnight on August 14th will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence. … Many of the issues remain unsolved today: Partition, Hindu nationalism, religious communalism, poverty. And something else is unresolved, too, but in a hopeful, even exhilarating, way: the shape of a future of Indian literature.” (Bill Buford, “Declarations of Independence”, The New Yorker, June 23, 1997)

5. Consuming India
“Image of India as object of metropolitan fascination: an India which, while it cannot be fully comprehended, can certainly be consumed.” (Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, 2001)
The Rushdie effect—valorisation of novels that are “post-national”, that celebrate hybridity, migrancy, cosmopolitanism; neglect of realist, nation-centred works of a previous generation of writers (Pranav Jani, Decentering Rushdie, 2010)
Neil Lazarus argues that postcolonial literary scholars have tended to look at a very narrow canon of writers, when in fact postcolonial literature is much more diverse and complex. He writes, deliberately overstating the case: “there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie.” (“The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism”)
Timothy Brennan’s critique of “new cosmopolitan writing”: “Several younger writers have entered a genre of third world metropolitan fiction whose conventions have given their novels the unfortunate feel of ready-mades”. (At Home in the World)

6. Village stories

7. Hindi fiction

8. Malayalam Fiction

9. Linguistic mapping

10. Elite writers, many realities
“Let us quickly concede what must be conceded… most of (these) writers come from the educated classes of India… It does not follow, however,…that writers with the privilege of a good education will automatically write novels that seek to portray the lives of the bourgeoisie. …there has been, during this half-century, a genuine attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as possible, rural as well as urban, sacred as well as profane.” (Salman Rushdie, “Introduction”, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing )

11. Inversion of god
‘The god of small things is the inversion of God… whether it’s the way the children see things or whether it’s the insect life in the book, or the fish or the stars – there is a not accepting of what we think of as adult boundaries. This small activity that goes on is the underlife of the book. All sorts of boundaries are transgressed upon… It’s a story that examines things very closely but also from a very, very distant point, almost from geological time and you look at it and see a pattern there. A pattern… of how in these small events and in these small lives the world intrudes. And because of this, because of people being unprotected… the world and the social machine intrudes into the smallest, deepest core of their being and changes their life’ (Arundhati Roy, interview, 1997).

12. From The Greater Common Good
Big Dams are to a Nation's 'Development' what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons Governments use to control their own people… They represent the severing of the link, not just the link - the understanding - between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

13. Novel’s Timeline
  : 1st Communist Party govt. elected in Kerala
1960—CP loses to Congress; Chacko leaves for Oxford
1967—Communists re-elected
1969—Sophie Mol arrives in Ayamenem
1990s—the present of the novel

14. Anglophiles
Chacko told the twins that though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace steps because their footprints had been swept away. (52)

15. God’s own country

16. Consuming Kerala

17. Kathakali dancer