Student Essay on Imagined Communities in the God of Small Things, No Telephone to Heaven, and Burger's Daughter

This essay will examine how the issues of gender, class, race, or nationality complicate the already complex communities portrayed and also how these same issues complicate the tentative imagined community between the novelists and their audience.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson sets forth his theory of the nation, that "it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." The kinds of communities envisioned by the three main novels we have studied thus far are not all that dissimilar. These communities are stifling for the main characters, who all seek some form or another of acceptance: Clare, to feel at home within on culture or another, Rosa to gain the acceptance of herself minus the title of Lionel's daughter, having to live up to the expectations that she'd continue her father's legacy, and Rahel, the love and acceptance of Ammu and the forgiveness of Velutha and Sophie Mol. These communities differ from those that novelists have traditionally portrayed in the past, such as in British or American.....