73 Colour Play in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Shazia Sadaf he God of Small hings is complex in its simplicity. Its language is a tan- talizing play on the familiarly unfamiliar. he monsoon moist, intensely coloured Keralese backdrop is startlingly novel for Western readership. he characters, their names, and issues of class are an immediate chal- lenge to the apathetical reader. he movement is dynamic, yet subjec- tive in tone; the narrative detached, yet painfully moving. For all its seemingly erratic stylistic devices, he God of Small hings emerges as a perfectly harmonious work because of an underlying threadwork of connecting ideas. One such connecting mesh is the use of colour-codes within the novel, which gives it direction and coherence. Colours are used as a suggestive device to help invoke the required feelings in the readers. he importance of colour perception in philosophical studies can be traced as far back as Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding where he theorizes that the perception of colour by each individual may be a subjective experience. Inversely, research has claimed that “coloured light can powerfully affect the human condition” (Humphrey 38). In more recent years theories of colour psychology have gained ground in many subject areas. he term “mental colour” today generally stands for qualitative mental properties of colour experiences. In fact, colour psy- chology has become an effective tool as means of silent manipulation in marketing and advertising fields. Subjectivism in colour theory means that the hues we attribute to physical objects in colour experiences are mental qualitative proper- ties of visual states themselves. Hence the subjectivist claim that all physical objects are colourless. Our personal experiences colour the objects around us. he strategic use of primary colours in he God of Small hings reflects a colour subjectivism that is hard to ignore. In