Chacko : The Marxist Jester

Chacko:The Marxist Jester
The Oppression of Colonized India









This paper looks at the work of Arundhati Roy The God Of Small Things. The goal is to show that the oppression of colonized India is illustrated in this novel.
Another goal of this research is to prove that Chacko, one of thecharacters of the novel, who autoproclames himself as a Marxist. But as it would be shown in this paper he is no more than a jester, a Marxist jester who betrays its own employers, takes profit of his position as a boss and betrays the ideas and the ideals of the Marxist ideology which, precisely is nowadays one of the political forces that governs in Kerala.The post colonial experience has made the goal of harmonious family relationships much more difficult, due to the families fragmenting throughout the old country and immigration to the land of the colonizer. Children and adult children alike lose perspective on their homeland and the struggles within their mother country. They become awe-struck by the development of the colonizers land, and asa result become confused with where their loyalties should lie. In Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things, the Kochamma family is a family of tragic situations and tragic people. Not all their problems stem from colonization; in fact it is their own cultural traditions that lead to much of the tragedy; however it can be argued that the underlying theme within the novel is one of a peopleoppressed by the colonization of India by England, and how a society already consumed with prejudices based on class (or caste, as the Indian would refer to it) and colour begins to turn on itself, and devalues its own people, culture and heritage.
The Kochamma family lives, works and plays together. They do not, however, communicate with each other, nor do they comfort each otheror attempt to understand one another. This is the greatest downfall of the family. Colonization plays a role in how some members begin to perceive each other and India as a whole; as well it lays the foundation for the sense of the worthlessness each member of the family feels at different times. Although the English have left India when this story takes place, their presence can still be felt.“Englishness” and whiteness is held in high regard, and it is something to emulate and work towards. The Indians, who had always had a class system and a disregard for darker skin, become more obsessed with this, and the whiter a person’s skin, the more value they believe that person has. When Indians began interracial marriages with white English people, the breakdown of the familybegan immediately, as the new white spouse, and their subsequent offspring have a higher value in Indian society, and within their own Indian families.
In the Kochamma family, the eldest son studies as an oxford scholar in England, and marries a white woman: “Anybody could see that Chacko was a proud and happy man to have a wife like Margaret. White. In a flowered, printed frock with legsunderneath.” (Roy 1997: 136).
Chacko got all the family's love and attention. He went on to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, which has made him a little full of himself. We can consider a number of the characters in the novel to be kind of elitist: Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, and Chacko are all people who seem to think they're better or more important than others. But Chacko is the only onewith the credentials to back it up.
Chacko occupies kind of a weird space in society. He's taken over the family's factory, Paradise Pickles and Preserves; therefore, on the one hand, we can see him as a “Boss”. On the other hand, he calls himself a Marxist, which basically means that he believes that the workers of the world. The labouring class, should unite, rise up against the middle and...