Hybridized identity and 'going native' in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Paul Theroux's The Elephanta Suite

Within the past decade, critics such as Aarti Vaade, Peter Mortenson, Janet Thormann, and Pumla Dineo Gqola have examined various facets of Arundhati Roy's landmark novel, The God of Small Things (1997), investigating topics from ecological collectivity and the environment to ethical subjectivity and the caste system, respectively. However, scholars have yet to assess the hybridized identities that function as an attempt made by the characters in Roy's text to challenge the Indian caste system. Furthermore, while scholars largely regard "going native" as a literary trope that is localized to various nineteenth-century travel narratives and fictional works, novelist Paul Theroux's The Elephanta Suite (2007) presents itself as fodder for a contemporary examination of "going native." In assessing Theroux's body of work, including his highly regarded travel narratives, critics such as Terry Caesar, Tim Youngs, and Elton Glaser have gleaned notions of what Theroux considers to be the meaning of travel and travel writing, yet no scholar has studied identity construction and performance within The Elephanta Suite.;To this end, my thesis examines hybridization and "going native" in these texts. Through the use of small-scale character studies, I argue that both texts present characters whose identities have become hybridized as a result of an obsession with, attraction to, or sexual contact with a character of an opposite cultural group or a lower caste. Based upon this interaction, I contend that these texts portray the unsustainability, shame, or danger associated with hybridization and "going native." I develop this thesis in the course of two chapters and a coda. The first chapter examines hybridity in order to determine how the characters in Roy's novel are changed as a result of their interaction with British colonizers. The second chapter analyzes how hybridized identity constructions are achieved through sexual experimentation and forays into "going native" by the characters in Theroux's text. Finally, the coda investigates how the boundary-crossing relationships in these two texts depict what a postcolonial India looks like by assessing one family's fall in family status within the caste system as well as the advent of transnational capitalism in India.