LAUSR

In this essay I argue that Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things, is deeply influenced by other southern Indian narratives of caste-based atrocity to be found in popular traditions as well as by South Asian rasa aesthetics, with its crucial concept of lila or play. By reading the novel alongside two examples of southern Indian caste atrocity narratives, and by highlighting its use of lila, I contribute some much needed scholarship on caste-based trauma in the Indian subcontinent; I work to broaden (a still western-centric) trauma theory for the postcolonial context; and, just as importantly, I seek to draw scholarly attention to a different way of thinking through recovery or recuperation from trauma. Roy’s novel, I argue, suggests the possibility that those traumatized by caste-based violence might return repetitively to a traumatic past, not in helpless, terrified flashback, but in a group performance that is a social enactment of a different future, a communal world-making that resists the dominant structures of caste-based hierarchy.