摘要：More than sixty years have passed since Indian gained its political autonomy, but the fact remains that women and untouchables living in Indian society are yet to witness freedom in a truer sense. Women, of course, have witnessed some improvement in their status, and now most of them are getting education, which was previously declined to them. But their conditions remain problematized as they continue to be at the receiving ends both - in their own houses as well as outside their domestic spheres. Untouchables, on the other hand, continue to occupy the lower strata in the social hierarchy. Still, they are considered to be defiled creations of this earth having no rights for their (re)formation. Post-colonial India has given birth to various political parties but even they have failed to strengthen the deplorable condition of untouchables. Ironically, many political parties merely use them as perfect weapons to secure their personal favours and as many votes as possible. This increasingly paradoxical status of untouchables – although they are powerless yet they have an inherent capacity to give power to others – is one of the most contested issues, along with the empowerment of women, which lies central to the field of post-colonial studies. The present paper seeks to explore the maltreatment meted out to the subalterns in Arundhati Roys' The God of Small Things (1981, to be cited hereafter as TGST). It will highlight the various ways in which the rights and privileges of both these classes are generally ignored or cancelled out even in the present era of post-colonialism. Clearly a novel which deals with the troubled history of females and the untouchables, Arundhati Roys' The God of Small Things has already received high critical acclaims. The novel fetched her the valued Booker Prize in 1997, the year which brought double glories to India, since the year also marked the Golden Jubilee year of India's Independence and put a brake to the self-glorifying statement of Lord Macaulay made in 1835 that "A single shelf of a good European library in worth the whole native literature
