Despite Christianity that made inroads into Kerala nearly two millennia ago, and communism that emerged as a powerful egalitarian force in the last century, caste continues to exercise an insidious, all-pervasive influence in Kerala. While the novel The God of Small Things attempts to subvert patriarchic norms that sustain caste and gender domination by its use of subversive comparisons and analogies, ancient hierarchies that sustain the caste and the gender question still remain assertive, unresolved even by the healing and redeeming powers of fiction.
