Communism and Caste in Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’

On a sky-blue December day in 1967 a communist protest swamps the streets of Kerala, the air ‘red with flags’¹. Ten years before, the communists had won the State Assembly and joined Jawaharlal Nehru’s government, becoming one of the few communist states in India.

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Chacko is a bourgeois, yet communist, businessman of Ayemenem, Kerala, who returns from England with dreams of expanding ‘Paradise Pickles & Preserves’, the family business. Comrade Pillai owns a printing press from which he supplies Chacko with labels. He is Ayemenem’s ‘egg breaker and professional omletteer’, the opportunistic leader of the local communist party who urges revolution on the workers of Paradise Pickles,² yet fears challenging Chako openly.

Pillai hears the workers’ complaints about Velutha, a communist but of the untouchable Paravan caste. The workers resent his literacy and his demands for equality. To them, he is just a Paravan. ‘Send him off,’ Pillai tells Chacko. ‘These caste issues are very deep-rooted.’³ Velutha remains but when he is falsely accused of a murder, Pillai abandons him.

When the Communist Party of India assumed power in Kerala in 1957, it was under the assurance that they would not upset the state of affairs by doing anything ‘drastic’.⁴ Roy reflects this failure of communist ideology in her novel — its failure in challenging the inequalities of caste.

In 1967, although the marchers’ demands for class equality struck terror in every bourgeois heart, Pillai knew, in spite of his empty slogans of ‘Caste is class’⁵, that the people of Kerala could not accept a truly equal society. It was a ‘conditioning they have from birth’.⁶