Love and landscape: Decolonial resistance, solidarity, and hope in The God of Small Things

This article analyses Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as an exploration of decolonial hope and sustainability in the age of the Anthropocene. It argues that the novel’s patriarchal Love Laws and the slow violence against the landscape are manifestations of the logic of coloniality, which has permeated the postcolonial present. Drawing on Arturo Escobar’s concept of the pluriverse, the analysis traces how the novel’s marginalized characters – the small gods – and the landscape engage in “world-making” to resist this logic. It follows this resistance from the vibrant defiance of Ammu and Velutha, who forge a temporary world in alliance with an agentive landscape, to the trauma-informed solidarity of Estha and Rahel within a wounded world. The article contends that decolonial hope is found not in a utopian future, but in the radical and persistent work of forging solidarity between the human and the environment within a permanently damaged world.