© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com. Role of Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in Indigenous Communicative Contexts: A Study of The God of Small Things Sangeeta Mukherjee 1 & Devi Archana Mohanty 2 1 Senior Assistant Professor, VIT University, Tamil Nadu, India. Orcid: 0000-0002-5488- 2876. Email: sangeetamukherjee70@gmail.com 2 Assistant Professor, NIET, Greater Noida, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-7103-7079. Email: devi1archana@gmail.com Abstract Communicative strategies like code-switching and code-mixing have interested researchers the world over. These strategies have traversed from real life situations to creative writings to social networking domains and are dominant in bilingual or multi-lingual societies for multifarious reasons. While majority of the research was conducted in the spoken form from the real-life contexts, a few were directed towards the written forms in literary genres and computer-mediated communication. However, a significant gap becomes noticeable and needs to be explored in Indian English fiction where creative writers have dexterously used these communicative strategies. Keeping the above in mind, the present paper attempts to analyze the role of these strategies in indigenous interpersonal communicative contexts in Indian English fiction. The text chosen for this purpose is Arundhati Roy’s TheGod o Small Things and the analysis is based on the grammatical and pragmatic explanation of indigenous words which mostly belong to the area of interpersonal communication. The study shows how the author has skillfully used these strategies to unravel the indigenous cultural and social customs and mindset of the people within a particular indigenous community as well as the role-relationship between the interlocutors in a particular communicative context. Keywords: Code-switching, code-mixing, code-retention, interpersonal communicative context, pragmatic markers. Introduction ‘Language is what member of a particular society speaks’ (Wardhaugh, 2006). This is what makes language indigenous or native to a particular community or society. But when people of one community interact with members of another community exchange of lexical items takes place. This gives to rise to the pervasive social phenomena of code-switching and code-mixing which is observed in most bilingual and multilingual societies. ‘Code-switching’ occurs quite frequently in an informal conversation among people who share and are familiar with their educational, ethnic and socio-economic background (Hoffman, 1991); while ‘code-mixing’ refers to all cases where lexical items and grammatical features from two languages appear in one sentence (Muysken, 2000). This trend is especially noticeable in countries like India, where one finds a myriad of languages and dialects. In India, code-switching and code-mixing take place not only between the Indian or native languages but also between the Indian languages and English. From casual Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Vol. 12, No. 1, January-March, 2020. 1-11 Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n2/v12n203.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.03