Despite winning the 1997 Booker Prize and being regarded a notable postcolonial author, Arundhati Roy declares herself first and foremost a political activist.
Without doubt, topics such as untouchability and incest suggest that for Roy, writing has to be seen as agency and indicate a challenge to more than one system. The process of punishment for an Untouchable’s self-asserted freedom to cross caste boundaries ‘takes place’ within a set of social and religious cultural premises that the author writes against and in front of; thus Roy’s novel is both an aesthetically praised piece of art and a highly socio-political statement inscribed into the most fundamental element of every system, the human body.
In Roy’s novel the human body is portrayed as an originary setting for the struggle for personal as well as social and even metaphysical freedom that is achieved and endangered by the crossing of seemingly fixed frontiers. Accordingly, my paper undertakes to demonstrate how the physical transgression of an individual body in vedic-brahmanical thinking that brings forward the literal ‘embodiment’ of the collective in the Indian caste system can and must be seen as a concomitant violation of the social body, yet at the same time is used by Roy in a double inversion as means of compensation for this infringement.
Hence Roy is not only proclaiming human rights or criticising the Indian caste system but establishing new frames in a novel that makes the necessity of the ongoing discussion of aesthetics vs. politics in postcolonial literature somehow absurd.