Searching For The Road To A Prosperous India

As Arundhati Roy’s first and only novel, The God of Small Things brought her the Booker Prize in 1997, which received critics’ great attention around the world as well as readers’high praise. Roy takes her hometown Kerala as the background to tell the stories of the Anglophiles (represented by Chacko and Baby Baby Kochamma), Mammachi, Pappachi and British colonizer Kari Saibu. She wants to take them as the examples to warn Indians that they should draw lessons from Kerala in order to search for a prosperous country.The thesis analyzes The God of Small Things from the perspective of globalization and localization. It considers that Roy states the great dangers caused by globalization in Kerala. Globalization not only leads to the misunderstandings in thoughts but also jeopardizes local traditional culture in Kerala. Compared to globalization, Kerala’s localization is in more stagnant stage. The circumstances in Kerala are made much worse by the Mammachi’s failure of insistence on economic localization and Kari Saibu’s flunk of cultural localization as well as Pappachi’s loss of religious belongingness. Therefore, Roy contemplates that Indian prosperity should learn from Kerala’s failures. India needs to understand globalization correctly and realize the reality of localization clearly so as to foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses. Only in this way does a prosperous India succeed.The main parts of the thesis consist of three chapters. Chapter two is used as the introduction and summaries of the theory of globalization and localization. Chapter three takes Chacko who is a typical Anglophile as the example so as to pinpoint that the ignorance of the real condition of the factory as well as Kerala’s economy leads to the failure of Plagiarism. In addition, Baby Kochamma who is overwhelmed by the American culture is another example for Roy to find out that foreign culture takes the advantage of globalization to form a severe shock to the traditional culture and may eventually cause its extinction. Chapter four took examples of Mammachi who persisted in Indian small-peasant economy, the failure of British Kari Kari Saibu who tried to self-identity in localization and Pappachi’s loss of religious belongingness on the purpose of finding out what correct localization is.