Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part G (2025)

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) offers one of the most incisive literary examinations of trauma, caste, and systemic violence in contemporary Indian fiction. Although not typically categorized as a “medical novel,” its preoccupation with the wounded, stigmatized, and marginalized body positions it centrally within the concerns of postcolonial medical humanities. This article reads Roy’s text as a critique of the social and political anatomy of suffering, showing how biomedical institutions, legal structures, and systems of caste and gender discipline bodies into silence. By tracing the embodied trauma of characters such as Estha, Ammu, and Velutha, the essay demonstrates how illness, injury, and psychological wounds are never merely biological events but deeply entangled with oppressive social orders. The article also argues that the postcolonial Indian medical system—shaped by colonial epistemologies of hygiene, propriety, and respectability—functions as a disciplinary framework that selectively recognizes or denies suffering based on caste and gender. Ultimately, the novel challenges the presumed neutrality of medicine, revealing how care becomes a site of violence, exclusion, and abandonment for marginalized subjects.