Exploring Marginality: A Medical Humanities Reading of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Muhd Mustafizur Rahman; Mostak Hossain

doi:10.53103/cjess.v6i1.431

Authors

Muhd Mustafizur Rahman Bangladesh Army University of Engineering & Technology, Bangladesh
Mostak Hossain Bangladesh Army University of Engineering & Technology, Bangladesh

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53103/cjess.v6i1.431

Keywords:

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, Medical Humanities, Trauma; Embodiment, Caste, Structural Violence

Abstract

This research offers a critical medical humanities reading of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, arguing that the novel is not only a critique of caste, class and gender, but also a narrative of embodied and psychic marginalisation. Drawing on critical medical humanities, theories of embodiment and vulnerability, trauma studies and intersectionality, the article explores how the “small things” of everyday harm, humiliation, surveillance and emotional neglect accumulate to shape bodies, minds and life chances. Using qualitative, hermeneutic close reading and thematic analysis, it focuses on key episodes between Velutha and Ammu and between the twins, Estha and Rahel, with particular attention to scenes of bodily violence, psychological rejection and institutional betrayal. The discussion is organised around three interlinked domains: (1) the psychic marginalisation of children, in which Estha’s muteness and Rahel’s barrenness illustrate the afterlives of developmental trauma; (2) the embodied vulnerability of caste- and gendered subjects, crystallised in Velutha’s tortured body and Ammu’s social and physical wasting; and (3) the systemic failure of caring institutions—family, church, police, law and medicine—which reproduce, rather than relieve, suffering. The essay argues that The God of Small Things functions as a counter-archive of health and injury, imagining lives that exceed formal diagnostic and curative regimes. It concludes that Roy’s postcolonial fiction should be read as a vital interlocutor for medical humanities, capable of decentring Anglocentric, clinic-centred models of illness and care and foregrounding structural violence and caste-based marginality.

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