INTRODUCTION:

Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, is one of great repute and won the Booker Prize in 1997. It has been hailed for bringing together various themes of thought, like feminist, ecocritical, Marxist and psychological genres among others. Skilfully written in terms of sensual vocabulary and interesting narrative technique, Roy has artistically created the world of the twins, Estha and Rahel, tracing their life from their childhood in Ayemenem, Kerala, India and in the course of their lives, how they are forcefully separated and finally to their adulthood, where they return home and are united. The various events and experiences that shape the lives of the twins with respect to their relationship with their environment and the people they encounter is the crux of the story.

Nature has a powerful role to play in this novel, holding its sway on most characters, particularly the protagonists, twins Estha and Rahel. Roy skilfully portrays the shift of nature from the 1960s Ayemenem to its contemporary times by parallelly tracing the growth of the twins from childhood to adulthood. The solastalgia experienced by the twins in returning home to a changed Ayemenem overcomes any feeling of nostalgia which were hoped to be fulfilled. The research will aim to uncover elements of solastalgia observed in the novel while linking them to markers of trauma and psychological dysfunction. The novel will be analysed to observe and understand changes in spatial realms and the human emotional response to them. In addition, markers of trauma, particularly in its connection to nature, will be explored to reveal how the Anthropocene has affected how humans respond to the changes in nature brought on by it.

Nostalgia is a deep and fierce desire to return home to a familiar space, to overcome the feeling of homesickness. It is also sometimes treated as a medical condition, having mild physical and psychological afflictions to even severe heart palpitations. Nostalgia is often triggered by being away for a prolonged time from one’s own home environment. The emotional, psychological bond created in connection to a physical space is important in understanding nostalgia. To appropriately contextualise solastalgia, addressing nostalgia is imperative.

In observation of nostalgia in the novel, the description of the environment Rahel wishes to return to is important. Rahel returns to Ayemenem from America after a divorce and leaving behind a job she never really cherished. She really only needed a reason to come home. To note the author’s perspective of the reason as to why the relationship of Rahel and McCaslin failed is crucial. Rahel had a sense of “enforced optimism”, primarily stemming from a self-imposed forced forgetfulness of a twin she left behind in India. “…a hollow where Estha’s words had been. He [McCaslin] couldn’t be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.” (Roy 19) Contextualising nostalgia here is to understand that the place alone doesn’t hold sway in Rahel’s life. Rather the emotional bond to the twin, coupled with the sense of space, truly portrays the feeling of nostalgia. When she learned that Estha had returned to Ayemenem after being with his father in Calcutta, she was determined to return to her brother and the familiar surroundings of her childhood space. “Then Baby Kochamma wrote to say that Estha had been re-Returned. Rahel gave up her job at the gas station and left America gladly. To return to Ayemenem. To Estha in the rain.” (Roy 20) The feeling of nostalgia that Rahel feels can be seen here as an association of the sense of ‘home’ in the person of Estha interconnected with the space of Ayemenem, which she indicates is characterised by rainfall. Nostalgia has been a ‘grey area’ disorder often seen as both a positive and negative psychological condition. Nostalgia here becomes a marker of trauma caused by separation from Estha. An association of the physical space of Ayemenem and the psychological bond to Estha is truly the start of assuaging Rahel’s feeling of nostalgia.

“As a portmanteau concept, 'solastalgia’ adds to physical longing for a territory of the heart’s desire. It is a psychological dislocation because one’s home environment is under continuous onslaught There is homesickness; it is nostalgia for one’s formerly healthy ecological home.” (Radwan 108) Solastalgia, coined by Glenn Albrecht, derives its essence from the meaning of nostalgia. While nostalgia refers to the desire to return to a familiar space, solastalgia refers to the response of humans when they expect familiarity but are met with negative environmental change. This change is often the result of anthropogenic activities of humans, industrial or urban development, climate change or even natural disasters. Solastalgia sets in when there is a feeling of loss, a grief of losing something that was positive in the yesteryear of human experience.

I define “solastalgia” as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory.It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place.It is tied to the gradual erosion of identity created by the sense of belonging to a particular loved place (Albrecht 39)

Rahel’s strong sense of place in Ayemenem is subverted when she returns here as an adult. Wishing to be greeted by the familiar natural surroundings to fulfil her nostalgia, she is met by the long-term effects of anthropogenic activities in the town.“Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.” (Roy 124) All of the nature that she sees reminds her of the way nature has been exploited in Ayemenem, not how it actually used to be. “Downriver, a saltwater barrage had been built, in exchange for votes from the influential paddy-farmer lobby So now they had two harvests a year instead of one. More rice—for the price of a river.” (Roy 124). Her feeling of solastalgia is observed to be embedded in her subconscious, not only slowly robbing and rusting away the joy felt in returning to her familiar childhood space, but also establishing a sense of fear in experiencing an alien dimension to her familiar place. As she walks around Ayemenem, contemplating the changes she sees, she is greeted by children who converse with her. “Then someone threw a small stone at her, and her childhood fled, flailing its thin arms.” (Roy 127) Her otherwise familiar space, now creates a sense of fear, which causes a loss of self-confidence and a sense of desolation of seeing the negative changes in her home environment. A clear emotional response in the form of solastalgia is observed when Rahel perceives the negative transformation of the nature she cherished in Ayemenem In the novel, the character, Estha faces different challenges to that of his twin sister. Estha’s withdrawal from most human contact after being forcefully taken away from Ayemenem portrays the underlying separation anxiety. He was facing the trauma of separation from three vital units of his childhood life, his mother Ammu, his twin, Rahel and his familiar countryside surroundings of Ayemenem. It is clearly portrayed in the slow change in the character of Estha after his shift to his father and stepmother’s home in the urban locale of Calcutta. “Research suggests that childhood separation anxiety disorder may significantly limit interaction and involvement with peers, which risks future social impairment and isolation.” (Poopal 861) He was quiet at school and never involved himself in group activities. He refused to go to college and started doing household work by himself. He had a quiet way about him, taciturn and withdrawn. “Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world.” (Roy 12)

The second marker of trauma is associated with Estha’s caring of his dog, Khubchand after his return to Ayemenem as an adult. The return was more to do with an abandonment by his father, who convinced himself that he could no longer be there or take care of his son, after being offered a job as a Chief of Security in a ceramics factory in Australia. The second trauma marker can be understood with more clarity with the acknowledgement of biophilia. The term, ‘biophilia’ was popularized by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in the 1960s. The term brings together the root words, ‘bio’ which means ‘life’ and ‘philia’, which means ‘friendly towards’. The Biophilia Hypothesis is a pioneering theory put forth by American ecologist, Edward O. Wilson which studies the fundamental relationship between humans and other natural species, with the goal of understanding the value placed on them. One of its characteristics is to gauge the parameters of the psychological and moral effect on humans as they parallelly evolve with species in the natural environment. The biophilic paradigm is seen in the incident in the novel, where Estha decides to care for Khubchand, his old mongrel, which was in the last stages of life. “When Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel, decided to stage a miserable, long drawn-out death, Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as though his own life somehow depended on it.” (Roy 12) The second marker of trauma is portrayed in the psychological tying of his own life to that of his dog’s, which leads to the impending trauma of grief and loss that Estha would experience after the dog’s death. “humans are equipped with brains and minds, which presume contact with nature and only with this contact can they develop normally. With the loss of direct contact with other species or life in general, psychic deprivation and degradation of the human mind occur.” (Krčmářová 4) The philosophical and deep musings of Estha are also attached to the dog’s life, with the indicator that this might slowly diminish along with the physical death of Khubchand.

As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And once a bird that flew across. To Estha—steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man—the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog’s balls. It made him smile out loud. (Roy 12)

Estha’s behaviour of walking on his lonesome all around Ayemenem pointed to the consequence of the traumas experienced in his life. However, his walking around Ayemenem increased by length day by day.“After Khubchand died, Estha started his walking. He walked for hours on end. Initially he patrolled only the neighborhood, but gradually went farther and farther afield.” (Roy 12) The emphasis on the start of walking after Khubchand’s death indicates a search for a new sense of purpose or meaning, which sadly evades him. Estha’s daily routine of walking becomes well known to almost all in the small town, how he was quiet, minding his own business and never really conversed with anyone. “Estha Mon!” he [Comrade Pillai] would call out, in his high, piping voice, frayed and fibrous now, like sugarcane stripped of its bark. “Good morning! Your daily constitutional?” Estha would walk past, not rude, not polite. Just quiet. (Roy 14) It is important to note that there seems to be palpable reason as to why Estha chose to do his walking around Ayemenem, in the outdoors where he would frequently meet residents of the town (like the instance when he passes by Comrade Pillai), but it is clear he never welcomed conversation. But he continues these walks because the nature he experienced in his childhood has clearly changed in his adulthood, yet Estha hopes to experience some sense of fulfilment of his nostalgia after being away from his childhood town for twenty-three years. He wished to experience the Ayemenem of his childhood. But it is clear from his constant walking and with no changes in his behaviour that his feeling of nostalgia is not fulfilled. Rather, it is solastalgia that sets in the mind of Estha, “the lived experience of distressing, negative environmental change.” (Albrecht).

Eco-emotions, or Ecological emotions, as the term suggests, draws in ideas of ecology and environment or more specifically, the changes in the natural environment and the emotions associated with it. Acknowledging eco-emotions comes from a place of awareness and the proactive understanding that these emotions directly or indirectly impact the mental well-being of humans who go through them. Eco-emotions are based on personal experiences, documented or otherwise, of scores of people who are currently positioned in the Anthropocene age, in which their private, personal discourses now hold concrete terms related to psychological health like psychoterratic syndrome, eco-shame, climate-change worry, etc. Thus, the stand of American feminist, Carol Hanisch, “the personal is political” holds true in this case as well, in understanding that the personal experiences of humans in the centre of this global environmental crisis should be in a way, politically driven, in the wake of entering the Anthropocene. Both Estha and Rahel experience through the course of the novel, the eco-emotion of ‘Eco-grief’, which relates to grief associated with the loss of ecology in the biophysical environment one loves. It is associated with any kind of environmental or landscape degradation which brings about a kind of loss in identity, a feeling of meaninglessness, distress or sadness. As Estha and Rahel return as adults, each of them walk through a changed Ayemenem, quietly but distinctively portraying this eco-emotion. It is also suggestive that what they experience is a ‘disenfranchised grief’, “a grief that is deemed not socially acceptable so that others tend to disregard the feelings of those who experience them. Therefore, the grief is not given its due voice and its due place, eventually resulting in negative consequences for both the psychic life of individuals and social groups, and maladaptive behaviors.” (Cianconi et al. 215)

Glenn Albrecht, an eminent environmental philosopher is a pioneer in the field of research in solastalgia and its connection to mental well-being. He has introduced notable concepts that create awareness of environmental change and its impacts on mental health. He presented the theory of ‘psychoterratic syndromes’ defined as “Earth-related mental syndromes where people’s mental wellbeing (psyche) is threatened by the severing of healthy links between themselves and their home/territory”.(Cianconi et al. 213) The home environment becomes a physical space of comfort and warmth as well as a psychological space of attachment and dependency. The connection between the emotional and the physical environment becomes the essence of the psychoterratic syndrome. “The psychoterratic deals with the health relationship between the psyche and the biophysical environment (terra = the Earth).” (Albrecht 64)

One of the other prominent characters of the novel, the twins’ mother, Ammu faces a different emotional turmoil than that of her children. She was subjected to physical and emotional abuse in her marriage to Baba and was stunned by society for her return to her parents’ home with her children after the divorce. Resilient and courageous, she forged through a difficult time, protecting her children and herself as best as she can. Roy had no qualms in portraying a flawed character in Ammu; she is projected as a problematic woman by society, particularly for pursuing a forbidden relationship with Velutha, a so-called untouchable. Overall, a well-rounded character whose prevalent role in the twins’ life in a way, both makes and breaks them. Ammu’s relationship with Velutha is a whirlwind romance, secretive and engaging in the novel. Their relationship is in constant threat as they transgress the ‘Love Laws’ put forth by society, “The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” (Roy 33) Completely hopeless that their love would survive the real world, the lovers attach their relationship’s sense of safety and hope to the life of a small spider that lived in the cracks of the walls of the verandah of the History House. They ‘personified’ and attached the physical and emotional ‘safety’ of their relationship to the life of this minute creature they named, Chappu Thamburan.

Without admitting it to each other or themselves, they linked their fates, their futures (their Love, their Madness, their Hope, their Infinnate joy), to his. They checked on him every night (with growing panic as time went by) to see if he had survived the day. They fretted over his frailty. His smallness. The adequacy of his camouflage. His seemingly self-destructive pride. They grew to love his eclectic taste. His shambling dignity. They chose him because they knew that they had to put their faith in fragility. Stick to Smallness. (Roy 339)

Albrecht’s psychoterratic state is displayed here by the place attachment of both Ammu and Velutha to that of the spider. The life-body of the spider that their psyches are emotionally attached to becomes the biophysical environment. “The intensity of people's place attachment can differ depending on the amount of contact people have with a place, the size and location of the place, and whether the place is threatened.” (Anton and Lawrence) There are subsets to this place attachment: one’s identity and dependency on the space. The physical space, no matter big or small, can have a great psychological impact on humans. Roy skilfully juxtaposes the enormity of the psychological place attachment of the lovers and more importantly, the full identity of their love to the minuscule physical space of the spider’s body. Their minds are in constant strife and conflict over the frail life-body of the spider, because any harm to it signifies in their psyche, a severing of their own relationship. The anxiety they experience and the eventual confirmation of what they feared is seen through the violent death of Velutha and the subsequent intense trauma experienced by Ammu that leads to a slow deterioration of her body to death.

Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher and Felix Guattari, French psychoanalyst jointly introduced the concept of ‘the smooth and striated space’ in their seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus, which covers areas of social science, philosophy, and literary theory, amongst others. This distinction has been used in a variety of contexts, like concepts of art, philosophy, body politics and embodiment studies to draw important differences of the spatial realm. The two are in contrast, where the smooth space is nomadic in quality, changing as per the moods, personality and individuality of the person in said space. On the other hand, the striated space is more sedentary in quality, following societal norms and structures. “Striated is seen as a fixed space and carries a sense of border. On the other hand, smooth space is seen as a continuous and open interval.” (Permanasari and Tobing) In The God of Small Things, the History House holds a predominant space in the novel, constantly a presence in the lives of the twins, their mother Ammu and her forbidden lover, Velutha in their time at Ayemenem. The past and present of this place bring out the contrasts of the smooth and the striated space. The History House belonged to an Englishman, who had embraced the Malayali way of life. “Kari Saipu’s house. The black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native.’ Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness”. (Roy 52)

The history of the home holds a dark past where the Englishman killed himself after being forbidden to be with the man he loved. The homophobia prevalent among the family members of his young lover caused a separation which was too much for him to bear. The trauma of his separation forced this decision to end his own life. Fast forward to the time of the twins in their childhood, who see it as a place of mystery and adventure. When the troubles of their lives are much too hard to bear, they turn to the History House as their space of escape, comfort and solace. The house held a special place in their heart, especially because they could be happy and carefree with Velutha, the untouchable in the story who they weren’t supposed to associate themselves with. They found a great friend in him. For the twins, the History House becomes a smooth space while the same house in the past was a striated space for Kari Saipu.

In delving deeper into the concept of smooth and striated space, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the two spaces are frequently intermingling, with the former taking the role of the later and vice versa. “While Deleuze and Guattari consider these two spaces to differ fundamentally in nature, they also believe that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture.” (Hubert) From this quality of the smooth and striated space, there is an understanding created that one experience of the place cannot be distinctly different from another in the same place, as they will be an intermingling of both. In the novel, this intermingling is evident in terms of the space of the History House. For a long time, the twins saw the History House as a space of comfort and belonging, but at one point in time, it intermingled into the striated space, just like the space Kari Saipu experienced (a space of violent death). The twins are unsuspectingly and happily sleeping beside Velutha in the verandah of the History House. They are rudely awakened by “touchable policemen” who strategically surround them and soon separate Velutha from them. He is thrashed to an inch of his life and taken away in cuffs, amid mockery of being a so-called ‘untouchable’ who imagined he could associate with people of a higher caste, let alone fall in love with. The twins watch in terror and horror at their friend who undergoes all this for no actual crime committed. Velutha eventually dies a torturous and painful death in the hands of the police, much to the anguish of Ammu and the twins. It is important to note that Kari Saipu and Velutha both face a traumatic death for forbidden love in the same space of the History House, where the smooth and striated merge.

The God of Small Things is a novel that brings to light a myriad of social, political and environmental issues. A powerful narrative of the lives of its characters, it speaks volumes on each individual’s unique emotional responses when subjected to a society where the ‘Love Laws’ hold dominance. This research has attempted to bring to light various markers of trauma in the novel, specifically in relation to spatial realms and position it within the larger context of solastalgia. The critical analysis of the characters reveals the traumas they were subjected to when beloved home environments change to become spatial markers of environmental degradation or violence.

REFERENCES:

1. Permanasari, Eka and Bonardo Tobing. Analyzing the Smooth and Striated Space in Pasar Ciputat Tangerang Selatan. Journal Tataloka. 2018; 20(3): 10.14710/tataloka. 20.3.331-343. Accessed 2 Sept. 2023.

2. Hubert, Christian. Smooth/striated. Christian Hubert Studio,13Aug.2023,www.christianhubert.com/writing/smoothstriated#:~:text=Instead%20of%20the%20metrical%20forms,in%20fact%2C%20striation%20creates%20homogeneity. Accessed 31 Aug. 2023.

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7. Albrecht, Glenn A. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press, 2019.

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Received on 27.02.2024 Modified on 15.03.2024

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2024;15(2):167-171.

DOI: 10.52711/2321-5828.2024.00025