Subalternity and Social Mobility in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

This article examines the relationship between subalternity and social mobility in two landmark Indian English novels, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Aravind Adiga’sThe White Tiger (2008). Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of subaltern classes, the Subaltern Studies collective, and Spivak’s critique of representation, together with sociological accounts of caste and mobility, it argues that the two novels stage contrasting but complementary scenarios. Roy depicts a rigid, pre-liberalisation social order in which upward movement by an untouchable man is treated as a moral and bodily transgression and is punished by collective violence. Adiga portrays a liberalising economy in which mobility becomes possible for a poor man only through crime and the severing of ethical and familial bonds. Read together, the novels suggest that subalternity in India is not dissolved by economic change but reconfigured, and that for the subaltern, ascent is either forbidden or purchased at a prohibitive moral price.