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