914 Rushdie, salman
He uses his socially sanctioned gender privilege
to prevent Mammachi from exercising her concert-
quality musical talents, and he routinely beats her
with a heavy metal vase to make himself feel better.
Although Mammachi is talented, she is also
proud, but not because of those talents. Her pride
follows the conventional norms of a mother’s pride
in her son. Mammachi is extremely proud of her
son, Chacko, the Rhodes scholar, not because of
his scholarship but because he stands up for her,
intervening and stopping the routine physical abuse
she suffers at Pappachi’s hands. Her pride on this
account makes it selfish, utilitarian, and ultimately
sexist.
Mammachi’s pride also comes from being the
torchbearer of her family’s progressive ideas. She
allows Velutha, an untouchable, to do the work of
touchables in her factory, sheerly mercenary on her
part because she needs Velutha’s handyman talents
to run the factory machinery. She thinks Velutha
owes her and her family for recognizing and nurtur-
ing his talents and allowing him to work in their
factory. Unfortunately, her pride in spotting Velu-
tha’s talent does not extend to recognizing him as a
suitable sexual companion for her daughter, Ammu,
a recognition that would have made her truly pro-
gressive and prevented the disaster that follows.
Chacko, like his mother, is proud of being pro-
gressive and believing in the liberal ideas of classless
societies with empowered people. But these are
abstract ideas that he verbalizes in his “read aloud
voice,” not ones that have any material reality in
his conduct and dealings with the disenfranchised.
Nonetheless, what he is most proud of is his white
ex-wife, Margaret, and their daughter, Sophie Mol,
a pride that makes him believe that his child is
a cut above his sister’s dark-hued children. Baby
Kochamma’s pride follows along the same racial
lines. Her sense of pride comes from her belief that
she is a cultured, sophisticated person with high-
class taste, a taste for fair-skinned, green-eyed, Irish
priests, like Reverend Mulligan, and Europeans like
Miss Mittens. She is also proud of her tiny, delicate
feet, a mark of high-class refinement.
The destructive nature of pride is most visible
in Mammachi, who has enough gumption to run a
successful food-processing business but not enough
self-respect to put a stop to her routine physical
abuse. However, it is not lack of self-respect that
causes this imbalance but the differential gender
hierarchy of patriarchy. Similarly, socially sanctioned
caste hierarchy dictates who is owed the most alle-
giance, something Vellya Paapen has learned so well
that he betrays his own son, Velutha, to his benefac-
tor, Mammachi.
Thus, in The God of Small Things, who and what
a character can be proud of is socially determined,
revealing that feelings of pride have little to do with
talents, abilities, and contributions to society and
humanity and more to do with a hierarchy that is
determined by gender, social class, caste, and race
ideologies. Additionally, pride blinds characters to
the reality of their lives and masks their deepest
insecurities about the socially privileged positions
they occupy. The least talented and least active
people in this text (Pappachi, Baby Kochamma,
and Chacko) are the most proud, while the most
talented and active person (Velutha) has the least
pride. Although Velutha has no pride, he has self-
respect, a sense of self derived from the practice
and deployment of his talents in fixing machinery,
creating furniture, ingenious contraptions, dramas,
and stories that make life bearable for marginalized
returned daughters and unloved children.
Sukanya B. SenapatiruSHDiE, SaLmaN Midnight’s
Children (1981)
The winner of numerous awards, including the
1981 Booker Prize, Midnight’s Children, by Salman
Rushdie (b. 1947), is a complicated, funny, fan-
tastic, fictional history of modern India. It is nar-
rated by Saleem Sinai, the most celebrated of the
“Midnight’s Children” of the title—1,001 children
born in the first 24 hours after Indian declared her
independence from Great Britain. Saleem and his
counterpart, Shiva, are the most powerful of these
children, having been born at the stroke of midnight.
Their powers are monumental. Saleem can read
minds; indeed, he can allow all 1,001 of the children
to communicate within his mind. Shiva can destroy
anything he wants to destroy, calling to mind his
namesake, the Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer. The