ISSN: 2456-8104 http://www.jrspelt.com Issue 5, Vol. 2, 2018 _____________________________________________________________________________________ Empire Speaks Back: Appropriating the language of the colonizer in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Prof. Abraham Panavelil Abraham 1 Empire Speaks Back: Appropriating the language of the colonizer in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things Prof. Abraham Panavelil Abraham (abraham@unizwa.edu.om ) University of Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman Abstract In India, which is a multilingual nation, as are many South Asian countries, English is a lingua franca that is often used for communication between peoples of various linguistic backgrounds. It functions in close interaction with the local languages in multi lingual contexts and is strongly influenced by the local languages. Postcolonial Indian English writers like Arundhati Roy play with the English language, by moving away from the rules and regulations that govern the English language in order to express the local, social and cultural meanings. It is not surprising that the varieties of English used by these writers are formally and functionally quite different from those used by the native speakers. In her Booker winning novel The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy makes use of the English language in her own style, making new compound words, phrases, sentence structure etc. and thereby appropriating the language to reflect the rhythm, and syntax of indigenous language. In this process, she creates a postcolonial non-native English that questions and subverts the language of the colonizer and develops a hybrid conscience that establishes an Indian identity. This paper is an attempt to trace the efforts of Roy in depicting a touching story of exploitation and discrimination that explores how small things affect people’s behavior and their lives in a very poignant way by engaging and negotiating with the language of the colonizer before settling into a multiplied, fragmented, hybridized and indigenized form of English. Keywords: colonization, language, postcolonial, hybridity, identity “The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own---English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up- like Sanskrit or Persian was before-but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the language world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which