Rewriting the Past, Repairing the Present: Chronopolitics and Reparative Storytelling in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is a story in which tragedy disrupts the consistency of lived experience, memory eludes closure, and time refuses to stay linear. This paper explores how the novel addressed suppresses histories of caste, gender and forbidden love by upending traditional chronology and emphasizing broken temporalities. The goal is to investigate how the tale navigates the past as a place of loss as well as one that may be repaired, where creating stories turns into a way to regain control and provide opportunities for recovery. Mapping the time breaks that organized narrative, exploring the reparative techniques woven into the aesthetic of fragmented storytelling, and analyzing how memory and pain are returned through shifting narrative sequences are among the goals. In order to interpret how disturbed timelines disclose the politics of caste and personal mourning, the study employs a methodological approach that involves close textual analysis influenced by the larger fields of memory studies, trauma discourse, chronopolitical thinking and cultural studies. According to the paradigm, the analysis shows how the novel’s narrative form itself serves a reparative purpose by exposing oppressive structures and generating creative opportunities for survival through its fractured temporality. In addition to criticizing the brutality of social hierarchies, the author implies that the broken narrative function as subdues yet potent acts of healing by fusing memory, time and storytelling.