The servant's betrayal : the oppression of South Asian servant figures and it's potential solutions in the white tiger and the god of small things

Abstract

The discussion of servants in literature has largely been limited to European servants. South Asian servants are hardly explored as servant figures, and rather, tend to fall under the category of “subaltern,” thus homogenising their oppression with that of every other subaltern. Gayatri Spivak asserts that “for the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference” (from the elite), “there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself” (285). As such, I do not consider servant figures in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, to be absolute subalterns, for they do tend to speak, and are sometimes also heard. They are not always outside hegemonic discourse, and they tend to take up a rather ambiguous position as subalterns. In fact Spivak herself notes that “the working class is oppressed” but not subaltern (qtd. in Kock, 45-6). Thus, in this essay, South Asian servants are discussed within a category of their own, and I explore their distinct oppression, rather than qualify them as homogeneous subalterns.