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Chapter Two The Struggle to Break Through Social Constraints
2. 1Ammu’s Challenging of Male-dominated Power system
“Women are not born; they are created”(Beauvoir 273). Women in Indian societyare created by a combination of caste and classical Hindu doctrines. First of all, thecaste system penetrates every aspect of Indian social life with its powerful vitality. Ithas influenced and dominated women’s lives through family and marriage and has puta heavy chain on Indian women that were once attached. Moreover, the Hindu classicThe Law of Manu stipulates that women must “In childhood a female must be subjectto her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a womanmust never be independent” (Buhler 86). Both the caste system and Hinduism“legitimize” the subordination of women from a patriarchal perspective. Being bornas a woman in India is their greatest misfortune.
Under the influence of strong religious beliefs, rigid caste system, deep-rootedpatriarchal ideology, and western hegemonism, Indian women gradually lostthemselves. After they accept new ideas, they are bound to awaken, rebel, and make avoice. As Beauvoir says, “the fundamental condition for the improvement of women’ssituation is the awakening of women’s self-consciousness as human subjects”(56). Asa generation of awakened women in the family, Ammu has a sobering awareness ofher situation. She is always breaking, resisting, and confirming the value andsignificance of her existence in a self-selected way. Throughout her life, she keeps on cross social taboos until the very end. In an era of gender inequality, a woman’s mostbeneficial resistance and counterattack is her marriage. In The God of Small Things,Ammu breaks the “Law of Love” and “the laws that lay down who should be lovedand how.And how much”(31).
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2.2Velutha’s RebellionAgainst Class Difference
Over the last few decades, India has made unprecedented progress in severalareas. Despite this, the caste system shows no sign of weakening. Instead, it exhibitsextraordinary resilience, flexibility, and amorphousness. Despite the diversity ofsocial and economic systems, such discrimination has permeated them, andcaste-based discrimination, including untouchability, continues unabated. Dalits arestill at the bottom of the social ladder. State intervention and affirmativediscrimination policies, such as reserved quotas, paradoxically reinforces casteidentity rather than weaken it. Velutha, as the name suggests, is a paradox of existence.
Deleuze calls the new organization adapting to change “face” and “face members”must accept the territorialization of “face”-locking their subject in a closed “blackholes” and placing themselves on “white walls,” thus wholly losing themselves. Thebest way for the subject to master his or her destiny is to break free from the shacklesof “face”(A Thousand Plateaus 188). According to Deleuze, the traditional “facepolitics” is a kind of binary politics that is not conducive to the play of subjectivity, sowhat we have to do is to dismantle the “face political” and advocate the emergence ofa new kind of political subject in order to break the political duality and liberateindividuality and pluralism. Dismantling the “face” begins with positive oraffirmative deterritorialization, where Velutha is not concerned with secular interestsand does not accept the principle of order. Overall, he is trying to get rid of the “face”and regains the initiative through a three-dimensional deterritorialization campaign.
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Chapter Three The Creation of New Life Forms························39
3.1Ammu’s Establishment of Female Free Life Space·····
