Carter is currently employed as a freelance writer. In this essay, Carter considers the social malaise present in Roy's version of contemporary Indian society as a function of Western influence.
Permeating Arundahti Roy's The God of Small Things is an India devoid of a sense of history, one that has laid waste to the Western world. It is a desolation foreshadowing what lies, even eats away at, the core of the novel—when a people, in this case, the people of India, lose their sense of history, the results are devastating to all. In the opening chapter of her work, Roy introduces the reader to world of what was. Relationships are broken, gardens go asunder, homes lay waste, victims of abject filth fueled by apathy and neglect. It is a circumstance Roy paints aptly and repeatedly from.....
