Reconceptualising Family in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses

  • Radhika Gupta King’s College London
Keywords: Family and alterity, feminist politics, postcolonial writing, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie

Abstract

Both Arundhati Roy and Kamila Shamsie, as profound South-Asian women writers, have often been associated with postcolonial politics or feminist agendas. However, this paper attempts to recontextualise their works, The God of Small Things and Broken Verses, respectively, to uncover the particularities of their politics. While enmeshed in the ideas about the nation, patriarchy, and colonialism, these texts deal with the specificities of individual families. Yet, the representation of the family, in these works, is not conventional as these authors attempt to either reveal the interstitial spaces within the family, or try to restructure a normative bond, or finally, even reject the family to accommodate individual desires. Ultimately, their postcolonial or feminist politics do not overshadow the multiplicity of a family: as an ever-evolving and diversified entity.

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Author Biography

Radhika Gupta, King’s College London

Radhika Gupta is a postgraduate in Modern Literature and Culture from King’s College London. She completed her Bachelor’s in English Literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include Feminist Studies, Postcolonial Writings, and Nineteenth-Century English Fiction. Her postgraduate thesis involved the study of Jane Austen’s novels from the perspective of a modern lens.

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Published
2022-11-15
How to Cite
Gupta, R. “Reconceptualising Family in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses”. Contemporary Literary Review India, Vol. 9, no. 4, Nov. 2022, pp. 71-86, https://literaryjournal.in/index.php/clri/article/view/1132.
Section
Research Papers