The God of Small Things

what is the moral lesson in the book of god's of small thing

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I think that Arundhati Roy's influential work is too evolved and dense for simple moral lessons. Instead she delves into themes that are layered and profound. The entire society around the Ipe family is obsessed with caste and class differences. The English are still an oppressive colonial ghost in the form of self-hatred. Everything English is still seen as brighter and higher class than anything produced by India. The whiter one’s skin, the closer one is to cleanliness and good. The children are painfully aware of this at all times, especially when watching The Sound of Music. Chacko repeatedly reminds the children that the family are Anglophiles. They prefer to speak English, and Chacko goes to English to get a high-class education. He marries an Englishwoman, though she is treated as little better than a prostitute by Mammachi. Mammachi is both jealous of her, and also dissatisfied with her working class background. Not to mention the fact that any Englishwoman who would marry a brown-skinned Indian must have something wrong with her. Sophie Mol is seen as a better person, sight unseen, because she is half-English. While Chacko has “married up,” Ammu has “married down” by marrying a Hindu. Syrian Christians tended to see themselves as higher class than Hindus.