Precarious Agency: Structural Oppression and Gendered Resistance in The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is not merely a tale of individual suffering, but a nuanced meditation on how oppression permeates daily life through caste, patriarchy, and familial complicity. Central to the novel is a question that resonates deeply within feminist and postcolonial discourse: how do entrenched systems of domination, rooted in law, custom, and emotional conditioning, shape and restrict women’s lives? By examining the intergenerational trajectories of Mammachi, Ammu, and Rahel, the novel lays bare how women’s bodies are turned into battlegrounds of control, resistance, and, occasionally, symbolic revolution. This article draws on Yarran Hominh’s conception of oppression as a « systematic whole » composed of institutional, normative, and cultural structures to explore how gendered subjugation operates in the Ipe family home. Far from being a neutral setting, the Ayemenem household is revealed as a site where silence is enforced and dissent punished. Mammachi’s acceptance of abuse, Ammu’s transgressive love for a Dalit man, and Rahel’s marginalisation as a divorced woman all reveal how each generation confronts and reconfigures the structures that confine them. Rather than heroic defiance, Roy privileges subtle forms of feminist resistance: quiet gestures, acts of memory, and emotional dissonance. Ammu’s affair and Rahel’s scandalous divorce stand as ruptures in the social fabric, punished yet persistent. While Roy offers no utopian resolution, the novel affirms the survival of small, unruly acts. Through this, The God of Small Things crafts a grammar of endurance, imagining a fragile but tenacious politics of hope.