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Cindy L. Taylor, M.A.
“Brave Monster”: How Caliban is Reinvented in The God of Small Things
“She’s trying to boast,” Arundhati Roy’s young protagonist tells his sister, in the 1997 novel The
God of Small Things. The boy, Estha, is speaking of his Grandaunt, known as ‘Baby” Kochamma,
who has just quizzed their young cousin Sophie Mol, freshly arrived to the Kerala region of India
from England, on her knowledge of Shakespeare. Roy tells us,
She said that Sophie Mol was so beautiful that she reminded her of a wood-sprite. Of
Ariel. “D’you know who Ariel was?” Baby Kochamma asked Sophie Mol. “Ariel in
The Tempest?” Sophie Mol said she didn’t. “’Where the bee sucks there suck I’?...’In
a cowslip’s bell I lie’?”
If we had not yet guessed Baby Kochamma’s project, Roy soon illuminates it for us: “All this
was of course primarily to announce her credentials to Margaret Kochamma. To set herself apart
from the Sweeper Class.” Roy thereby introduces a clear allusion to her novel’s postcolonial themes:
namely the complex relationship between the British colonizers and contemporary Western
colonization of world culture, layered atop the already dizzying complexities of India’s ancient
structures of the culturally sanctioned caste system. Added to this complexity are the unique
intricacies of the Kerala region in which the tale is set, where Christianity, Hinduism, and
Communism all play a part in local culture and the balance of power.
Roy’s contemporary internationally acclaimed novel, a complex and lyrical story centered around
boy-and-girl twins, Estha and Rahel, and the tragedies of their high-caste Indian family, may not
seem to lend itself to a natural comparison with the Bard’s magical drama, but it was Roy’s use of
direct quotations from The Tempest, such as the one mentioned in the opening, that inspired me to
seek out further comparisons. It is the more subtle allusions to shared themes that inspired me to
delve into a specific comparison: Might Roy’s pivotal Untouchable character, Velutha, be viewed as
a modern Caliban? Or, perhaps more accurately, a postcolonial Caliban? What comparisons can be
made between the two characters, and what suggestions exist in Roy’s text that might validate such a
comparison? Though not generally seen as the protagonists of their respective stories, I believe that
Caliban and Velutha each plays a vital, pivotal role in his own narrative. Despite his relatively few
lines as compared with Prospero, as Frank Kermode observed, “Caliban is the ground of the play”. In
the same way, although Velutha is not one of the primary protagonists of Roy’s novel, he is
nonetheless the pivot around which the drama of History turns, entering into a seemingly simple act
of human passion with a woman “above” his caste, with disastrous consequences. From his position
in society as an Untouchable of the Paravan ethnicity, for this act Velutha is mantled with the role of
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the villain, in fact the monster, of the piece. He ultimately looses not only his humanity, but his life to
this process, as he is brutally punished for this “crime”.
The complex and multi-faceted nature of postcolonial perspectives are surely a primary theme
in The God of Small Things, and I assert that a comparison of the characters Caliban and Velutha
helps to illuminate some of those themes. While it is hardly an original act to place a postcolonial
spotlight on The Tempest, it is my project to examine ways in which not only the play itself informed
Roy’s novel, but ways in which the history of representation – and mis-representation – of Caliban
may have influenced Roy’s narrative and specifically, the development of the character Velutha. The
“Sweeper Class” from which Baby Kochamma wishes to distinguish herself and her family can be
embodied by either Caliban, or Velutha, in a postcolonial context. The subaltern, in both cases, acts
outside of his acceptable sphere and, in both narratives, is reminded that he remains on the lowest
rung of society and is ultimately voiceless. I will describe in a moment some of the key points in each
text, and selected theory and criticism, that have led me to make this comparison. I believe that
Velutha – through Roy’s construction, if not the character’s own words - is used by the author to
redeem Caliban from history and art’s harsh assessment. She does so by first humanizing the
repressed character (in opposition to the monster and animal imagery by which Caliban is
characterized), and then elevating Velutha by alluding to him as a god: “The God of Loss. The God
of Small Things.” It is Velutha’s fate to then fall, in a stunning de-apotheosis, down rapidly past the
human level and ultimately to be treated as an animal, a parasite, and a monster.
I assert that some of the clues to comparison between the Paravan Velutha and the slave
Caliban may begin best with a comparison of the physical characteristics of the two characters, which
reveals a good deal about how each is constructed. In a text reading of the Tempest, the emphasis on
Caliban’s identity begins even before the first line of the play itself, when the Names of the Actors
identifies the character as “A savage and deformed slave”. Soon after, the project of casting Caliban
as “Other” (than human) begins. According to Vaughn and Vaughn’s count, in Shakespeare’s
Caliban: A Cultural History, Caliban is referred to no less than 40 times in the play by the epithet
“monster”. Interestingly, it is only fellow subordinates Trinculo and Stephano who choose to call
Caliban by this moniker, while his master Prospero prefers to allude to him in terms of his
supernatural parentage, or his perceived moral characteristics: “hag-born”, “Hagseed”, “malice”, “a
devil, a born devil”, and “demidevil”, to name a few examples.
At other times, Prospero chooses to abuse Caliban by enumerating his physical deformities; at
still others, by constructing him as less than human through zoomorphism, as when Prospero calls
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him a “freckled whelp”, a “thing most brutish”, “the beast Caliban”, or “tortoise”, and along with his
co-conspirators, “calflike”. Of course, Prospero is not the only character to expound on Caliban’s
resemblance to members of the animal kingdom, as when Trinculo asks, “What have we here, a man
or a fish?”. Later in the same scene, both Trinculo and Stephano plan to capture and use Caliban as a
side-show attraction, if they can “keep him tame”. In addition to numerous other references to
Caliban as a fish, he is also called a cat, and his speech is described as “howling”. Even Caliban, in
the last act, refers to himself as “a thrice-double ass” .
In fact, Shakespeare causes so many of his characters to construct Caliban as a beast that
many subsequent critics, illustrators, adaptors, and producers of The Tempest have (mistakenly, as
Vaughn and Vaughn argue) conceived the character as physically resembling a fish, an ape, or even a
monstrous turtle. At other times, Caliban is simply called a slave, or variants thereof: “poisonous
slave”, or “abhorred slave”, to give just two examples.
“It has long been recognized that The Tempest bears traces of the contemporary British
investment in colonial expansion,” Paul Brown comments in his essay, “’This Thing of Darkness I
Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism”. Brown goes on to discuss the
discourses of “masterlessness” and “savagism” and the usefulness of such constructions to further the
colonizer’s “attempts to dominate, restrict, and exploit the other even as that other offers allurements
which might erode the order” of polite society. Vaughn and Vaughn also posit ways in which
Shakespeare may have been influenced by Wild Man imagery in creating Caliban, “He is, in sum, a
borderline figure in a borderline environment, the body of a man with habits of an animal living in an
animal’s world.” The process of dehumanizing zoomorphism is thus used to distance the colonized
from the colonizer. Further, the constructed “other” offers a rallying point, an easily delineated and
described threat that provides a focus against which the colonizers may unite. Or, as Christopher
Lane quotes Octave Mannoni, the black man “is the white man’s fear of himself”. The more
unfamiliar in appearance and practices this “other” seems to be, the easier it is to construct him as a
focus of fear, rage, and revenge. This wild man as latent threat is created and then controlled in The
Tempest: In The God of Small Things, he is conjured, humanized, loved, even apotheosized…and
then devalued, controlled, and destroyed.
If Velutha can be seen as Roy’s revivification of Caliban, then we can see her project to cast
him in a new light from his first appearance in The God of Small Things. Now quite human, the
subaltern character has even donned a shirt (against long-standing rules established for Untouchables
such as himself), and marches in a Communist rally, with “angry veins in his neck”. Nor does
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Velutha suffer from the misshapen physiognomy of Shakespeare’s native man. Despite the strict
social division between their castes, he is viewed as beautiful and desirable through the eyes of
Ammu, the mother of the twins who form the core of the novel. “He had high cheekbones and a
white, sudden smile”, and “a swimmer’s body. A swimmer-carpenter’s body. Contoured and hard.”
Likewise, Velutha’s moral character is not malformed, as was that of Shakespeare’s Wild
Man. Instead, the twins and Ammu frequently observe and appreciate his kindness, generosity, hard
work, and talents. However, because of her own social circumstances, Ammu is in a position to posit
a more complex character beneath the even demeanor of the Untouchable: “She hoped that under his
careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that
she so raged against.”
Once established as fully human, Roy goes one step further in redeeming her natural man—
she casts him as a god. Ammu’s dreams are the origin of the supernatural references to Velutha.
Alluding to the not-too-distant past in which Paravans such as he were required to brush away their
footprints when they walked, Ammu imagines Velutha as “leaving no footprints in sand, no ripples in
water, no image in mirrors”. Her subconscious speculates as to who this preternatural being could be,
“The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles?” Roy
goes on to refer to him as The God of Loss and/or the God of Small Things on no less than six
occasions throughout the text. It is perhaps Ammu’s anglicized imagination that places him in the
multi-branched pantheon of Hindu gods, and therefore allows him to remain “Other”, but here in a
divine sense. One might even say it is Ammu’s elevation of Velutha beyond the merely human that
leads her to make the decision to become intimate with him despite courting disastrous consequences,
no less so than does the colonizer’s failure to recognize humanity in the colonized.
It is only in the reactionary aftermath of what Roy calls “the Terror” – the discovery of his
inter-caste relations with Ammu and the resulting brutal retaliation of society - that we are again
confronted by the project to dehumanize Velutha. Fully committed to the endemic caste system of his
homeland, even Velutha’s own father calls his son “a monster”, and offers to kill him. Zoomorphism
is used to denigrate the subaltern just as in The Tempest. When she is told of her daughter’s affair
with Velutha, Ammu’s mother Mammachi calls his father a “drunken dog”, while she likens
Paravans to animals in so many words, and Velutha himself is said to behave “like a dog with a bitch
on heat”. To Velutha himself, Mammachi says, “I’ll have you castrated like the pariah dog that you
are!” Baby Kochamma also recognizes the power of such dehumanizing language when she
defensively lies to the police, claiming that Velutha told Mammachi that “the days are gone…when
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you can kick us around like dogs”. When the police come to find him, Velutha is described as “lonely
as a wolf”.
When the Touchable Police find Velutha, the modes of dehumanization move beyond the
animal realm. He is not attacked as a human subject, or even as a dog would be, but is rather
positioned as the inanimate object of the policemen’s “steady brutality” as if they were – in Roy’s
imagery – opening a bottle, shutting a tap, or “cracking an egg to make an omelette”. Having been
steeped in the notion that no ties of common humanity united themselves and the Paravan, the police
were combating an enemy that was even less than an animal: they were “battling an epidemic”,
“inoculating a community against an outbreak”. When the young boy, Estha, again sees his
Untouchable friend, the dehumanization has already taken root. Velutha’s pulverized body is easily
constructed as sub-human, now sunk to the level of the vegetable: “his head looked like a pumpkin,
too large and heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with a monstrous upside-down
smile.”
Additionally, both The Tempest and The God of Small Things employ evocative sensual
imagery – such as odor and color to construct their characters and differential between the powerful
and the subordinate.
Shakespeare’s denigration of Caliban is furthered by describing his uncivilized odor. The
references to Caliban’s “fishiness” abound, as when Trinculo observes upon first meeting with him,
“he smells like a fish; a very ancient/ and fishlike smell…” He and Stephano go on to revive the
malodorous analogy numerous times in the succeeding passages, as in Act 3, in which Caliban is
referenced as a “debauched fish”, and “half a fish, half a monster”.
Conversely, Roy redeems Velutha from the indignity of these descriptions by showing in no
uncertain terms that it is the rancor of prejudice, not the man himself, that stinks. In the estimation of
those who love him (the twins and Ammu), Velutha’s house has the appealing aroma of delicious fish
curry and wood-smoke. It is only through the ugly prejudices of Baby Kochamma that we are given
descriptions of “that particular Paravan smell”, as she asks, “how could she [Ammu] stand the
smell?” upon finding out that her niece has become Velutha’s lover. Ammu herself does not find this
smell offensive, “she smelled the river on him…” we are told, “Ammu put out her tongue and tasted
it.”
Color is also used in The Tempest to differentiate between the classes of individuals and, in
colonial fashion, “dark” is constructed as evil and/or uncivilized. In a text-reading of the play, we are
given our first clue as to the complexion of Caliban when we are told, in Act 1, Scene 2, that
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Caliban’s mother was from “Argier”, or in other words, was African. It is less clear if Shakespeare
meant to convey a sense of physical darkness, or only one of spiritual darkness, when Prospero says
near the play’s conclusion, “This thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine.”
Roy, too, references colonial assumptions to show the persistence of class biases as they fall
along the lines of skin color in India. Roy repeatedly refers to Velutha’s dark skin, and calls him a
“black man”. Even Velutha’s name jokingly alludes to the color of his skin, “He was called
Velutha—which means White in Malayalam—because he was so black”. In other places, Velutha’s
dark brown color is alluded to in a favorable and sensual context by comparing his skin to chocolate.
Notably, while apparently dwelling on the physical darkness of the character, many of Roy’s
allusions to dark color are positive and romantically constructed: chocolate, night, the sea. Perhaps
equally notably, those same constructions are focused primarily on the natural world, as when Ammu
dreams of Velutha one afternoon, “black as the night that surrounded him, black as the water he had
crossed”, or when the boy Rahel dwells on the image of his birthmark, “a brown leaf…that made the
monsoons come on time”. It is only when the blatant prejudice of characters like Mammachi emerges
in the text that we see vulgar, negative connotations being associated with Velutha’s dark
complexion: “a Parvan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast…black hips jerking between her
parted legs”. Finally, Estha in his struggle to deal with the death of their beloved friend, notices that
“Blood barely shows on a Black Man.”
In contrast, the characters of “higher” castes in Roy’s novel are described in varying degrees
of “lightness”, each corresponding neatly to his or her rank in the estimation of society, mirrored
within the insular society of the Kochamma family itself. “Her skin was the color of beach sand,” we
are told of Ammu’s niece, Sophie Mol. Ammu, situated somewhere between the half-British Sophie
Mol (whom her family has elevated due to their striving and unrelenting Anglophilia) and Velutha’s
hopelessly debased social position as an Untouchable, is also described as somewhere in between in
color. The contrast is demonstrated when she and Velutha make love for the first time, “Her
brownness against his blackness…her nut-brown breasts…against his ebony chest”.
Both Prospero and the Kochammas have constructed themselves as benefactors in terms of
educating and training their subordinates. Shakespeare has Caliban himself enumerate examples of
the beneficence of his colonizers, including giving him food and water and teaching him their
language. In striking colonial fashion, he then has Caliban curse his “benefactors” for their pains,
“The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!” The idea that Caliban might have already
had a perfectly sufficient language is not acknowledged, as Miranda chides him, “When thou didst
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not, savage,/ Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like/ A thing most brutish, I endowed thy
purposes/ With words that made them known.” Caliban’s capacity to learn his oppressor’s language
is the topic of some astonishment. Stephano marvels, “Where the devil should he learn our
language?”, and later offers to remove any language barrier that remains, through the application of
liquor. Despite the fact that they acknowledge him teachable, both Miranda and Prospero berate
Caliban for having not performed as expected when bestowed with schooling at their civilized hands.
“But thy vile race,/ Though thou didst learn, had that in ’t which good natures/ Could not abide to be
with…”, Miranda scolds. Later, Prospero decries the “White Man’s Burden” to Ariel when he
complains of his slave “…on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,/ Humanely
taken, all, all lost, quite lost!” Perhaps these complaints serve as justifications for Prospero’s
assessment of Caliban’s “proper” role: “He does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood, and serves in
offices/ That profit us,” the wizard observes to Miranda in the first act.
Perhaps the actions of both Prospero and the Kochamma family in regards to educating and
training the individuals who are essentially their servants, then taking revenge upon them for
perceived ingratitude and insubordination, illustrate Paul Brown’s assertion that, “colonialist
discourse voices a demand for both order and disorder, producing a disruptive other in order to assert
the superiority of the colonizer”. The Tempest demonstrates how the unfortunate results of this
project come about due to the ill nature of the willfully ignorant Caliban upon whom “nurture”
cannot stick. In contrast, Roy demonstrates how hereditary high-caste families like the Kochammas
access the colonizers’ external hierarchy of knowledge and skills, and therefore retain the power of
divvying out that knowledge – as long as it is expedient for them to do so.
The Kochamma family, too, feels the burdens of noblesse oblige. Despite his literacy attained
in the Paravan school established by the Kochamma family, it remained clear that Velutha had his
“proper work” to do, just as did Caliban. Even becoming a carpenter was considered a trade above
Velutha’s Untouchable status. And yet, Mammachi Kochamma noticed and encouraged Velutha’s
ability to work with wood, while his way with machines led to his acceptance by the Kochammas as a
helpful worker, and the expediency of employing his talents in their home and pickle factory led them
to selectively ignore certain age-old caste rules. The resentments caused by this relaxation of the rules
can be seen as contributing greatly to the tragedy that would follow, not unlike the way in which the
expedient (dressed as a kindly bestowed favor) of Prospero allowing Caliban to share his quarters
contributed to the attempted rape of Miranda.
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It is with this distinction that the differences between the character of Caliban and that of
Velutha are thrown into high relief: while Caliban is shown as a vile would-be rapist forcing himself
on an innocent girl, Velutha is redeemed and elevated by Roy to his proper state as an equal player in
a mutual expression of passion—though one that ends even more tragically.
Prospero accuses his slave of this vile attempt in the first Act of the play, describing how
Caliban sought to “violate the honor” of the innocent Miranda. Lest we think this a false accusation
or trumped-up charge, Shakespeare has Caliban not only accept, but graphically revel in the crime,
“O ho! O ho! Would’t had been done?/ Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/ This isle with
Calibans.” After being freshly reminded of the attempted rape, Miranda calls Caliban an “Abhorred
slave,/ Which any print of goodness wilt not take,/ Being capable of all ill!” and berates him further
for his ingratitude. Sexuality is constructed for Caliban as a primitive urge to procreate, and then
again as a term of power when he offers to “give” the beautiful Miranda to his new lord, Stephano, as
a gift upon the death of her father.
Laura E. Donaldson, in Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building
discusses what she calls the “Miranda Complex”, noting that, while much has been written about
Prospero and Caliban’s relationship as illustrative of the concept of “Self” and “Other”, the Colonizer
versus the Colonized, little has been written of the relationship between Miranda and Caliban. If
Miranda herself has been Colonized due to her gender, then why, Donaldson asks, cannot these two
victims of colonial oppression “see” each other? Caliban, despite being the victim of Prospero’s
whims, is also guilty of his own “quest for mastery” through this attempted crime: “Caliban’s
overdetermined participation in imperialism and masculinism as both victim and victimizer radically
questions any construction of him as the homogenous colonized Other of the Prospero Complex”,
Donaldson states. Roy’s Ammu is also colonized, both by social conventions concerning women and
by the almost palpably imminent colonial heritage of Kerala. But Roy does allow Velutha to see
Ammu—to fully see and accept her, despite his own reservations engendered by the ancient
stratification of the caste system.
Roy performs a great transformation in revealing the beauty and terror of Ammu and
Velutha’s passion: She transforms the rape scenarios of innumerable colonizers into a star-crossed
Song of Solomon. It begins with Ammu’s awakening to Velutha as a Man (not a boy, not a Paravan),
proceeds to her dreams of him, his own desire for her, and ultimately to the sublime but doomed acts
that bring ruin to so many. Roy allows us an intimate view of the scene:
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She went to him and laid the length of her body against his. He just stood there. He
didn’t touch her. He was shivering. Partly with cold. Partly terror. Partly aching desire.
Despite his fear his body was prepared to take the bait. It wanted her. Urgently. His
wetness wet her. She put her arms round him.
But despite the eloquent descriptions of passion that follow, theirs is not a purely physical
relationship. Without the possibility of that love ever finding any other expression than the one they
had given it during few stolen nights, both were nonetheless determined to grasp those moments
fully. Perhaps it is an endorsement of the realism and sensuality with which Roy imbues these scenes,
rather than any prurient content, that resulted in an obscenity charge being brought against the author
in her native country shortly after publication of the book.
My research has documented the assertion that Arundhati Roy, in The God of Small Things,
has given clues to an undeclared re-casting of Shakespeare’s Caliban in a postcolonial guise. And yet,
the author’s intention regarding this matter is unlikely to be discovered, as Roy has stated in an
interview with Salon magazine specifically in reference to The God of Small Things, “There are
some things that I don't do… Like try to make claims of what influenced my book.” However, she
directly quotes from The Tempest twice, in the context of the assumption of the colonizer’s culture
by the upper-caste Indian protagonists. Of course, it is not Caliban with whom they are said to
identify: “’Where the bee sucks, there suck I,’ Estha and Rahel would go about saying,” quoting the
wood-sprite Ariel, not Caliban, not Prospero. Just as Caliban identifies the seat of Prospero’s power
within his books, just so the English Colonizer’s literary cannon is accessed as a source of power by
the Kochammas in their efforts to retain the age-old hegemony History has afforded them.
I have enumerated the overt references that Roy tasks her own characters with drawing to
Shakespeare’s work. This has laid a foundation for my discovery of further, unspoken parallels
between elements of characterizations found in The Tempest and Roy’s contemporary novel. More
specifically, I have suggested ways in which Velutha may be viewed as a surrogate used to redeem
Caliban from the harsh assessments of history and representation – first by vividly exposing the
undeserved vilification and dehumanization to which the subaltern is subjected, then by
apotheosizing him as “The God of Small Things”. He has emerged as a mythic, almost divine, yet
eminently tragic symbol of the power of oppression, culture, and History. Like Caliban, Velutha has a
great deal of work to do, yet few lines to speak.
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Works Consulted
Bhabha, Homi K. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency”. The Cultural
Studies Reader. Simon During, Ed. London; New York: Routledge, 1999.
Boemer, Elleke. “East is East and South is South: The Cases of Sarohini Naidu and Arundhati Roy”.
Women: A Cultural Review. Vol. 11, Spring/Summer 2000, Issue ½, p. 61-70.
Brown, Paul. “’This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of
Colonialism”. The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Gerald Graff and James
Phelan, Eds. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
Carson, Penelope. “Christianity, Colonialism, and Hindu in Kerala: Integration, Adaptation, or
Confrontation?” Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500.
Robert Eric Frykenberg, Ed. Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2003.
Donaldson, Laura E. Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building. Chapel Hill,
North Carolina; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Jana, Reena. “Winds, Rivers, and Rain”. Salon. September 30, 1997.
Lane, Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and Colonial Redux: Why Monnoni’s “Prospero complex” Still
Haunts Us.” Journal of Modern Literature. Summer 2002, Vol. 25, p127-150.
Paxton, Nancy L. Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination,
1830 – 1947. New Brunswick, New Jersey; London: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Perennial, 1998.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Gerald Graff and James
Phelan, Eds. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty and Sneja Gunew. “Questions of Multiculturalism”. The Cultural
Studies Reader. Simon During, Ed. London; New York: Routledge, 1999.
Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. New
York; Melborne: Cambridge UP, 1991.