Make It New

In considering Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), the author observes that time is a central preoccupation in the novel. But how does postcolonialism situate itself in relation to a temporality whose structure, logic, and rhythm have been defined by the West and the experience of colonization? Roy responds to this problem by examining the figure of the Kathakali man, a native storyteller who uses dance, movement, and costume to relate stories derived from the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Like the stories of the Kathakali man, Roy’s own narrative is disjunctive and recursive, generating a temporal scheme that is at once static and dynamic. Such a handling of time enables Roy to construct what the author calls a “postcolonial modernism,” which employs the formal devices of modernism to arrive at a more genuinely postcolonial engagement with the past and its historical traumas.