Inter-Caste Gender Performativity in Indian Hindu Culture: A Postcolonial Gender Study in Mulk Raj Anan’s “Untouchable” and Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”

Abstract

This paper attempts to evaluate the inter-caste gender performativity in Indian Hindu Culture through Judith Butler's ‘gender performativity’ by analyzing the texts, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Indian Hindu culture, inter-caste relationship is dogmatically and traditionally antagonistic whereas some autobiographical documents kept evidences of consensual and ‘non-theatrical inter-caste relationship’ which crosses the margin of untouchability. Women, the gender subalterns in inter-caste consensual relationship, never possess the certainty of their caste. They never inherently belong to any caste of them, rather, they are traditionally found to be tagged off the caste of the men whoever touched them. The non-consensual inter-caste relationship are always oppressive and non-theatrical keeping women silent by the forceful touch of upper caste men but such relationship does not determine or modify women’s rank. It’s a double standard and both contexts are dominated by upper castes. The non-theatrical context subverts the upper caste notion of the belief in after life punishment of inter-caste touch and the elitist discourse of ‘impurity’. Such relationship proves that the theatrical notion is nothing but a bourgeois-political weapon of the upper caste to oppress the lowers. It is a qualitative research which has been done by closed textual reading method. This paper explores how both the writers are affected by inter-caste gender performativity in Indian Hindu culture and analyses the gender performativity of Hindu castes from four separate contexts: theatrical nontheatrical, public and private spheres. The research proves that both the writers are separately affected by socially prescribed gender performativity having distinctive stand points; and the Indian Hindu castes have conditional gender performativity in both theatrical and nontheatrical contexts.