Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotion and Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling, this essay examines how ‘shame’ functions as political instrument in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). While classical affect theory, particularly Silvan S. Tomkins, positions shame as self-corrective—triggering introspection and behavioral modification—cultural theorists argue that shame operates relationally as social technology. Ahmed’s insight that affects do not merely represent individual interiority but emerge through social relations enables this reading of shame as constructed rather than essential. This paper argues that shaming in Roy’s novel serves as regulatory mechanism upholding caste hierarchies in Kerala society, yet Ammu, the divorced Brahmin protagonist who loves an ‘untouchable’ Paravan man, refuses shame’s interpellative force. Rather than self-correction, Ammu engages affective refusal—repudiating shame’s moral valence while asserting her cross-caste desire as resistant praxis. Her ‘shamelessness’ destabilizes both the social instrumentality of shame and the naturalized ‘love-laws’ governing caste-based matrimonial alliances. This reading contributes to affect studies by demonstrating how marginalized subjects navigate affective governance, revealing shame's failure as disciplinary technology when its target refuses compliance.