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INTRODUCTION
Indian English Literature in English originated as a necessary outcome of the introduction
of English education in India under colonial rule. By Indian English Writing, we mean that body
of literature which is written by Indians in English. It could be in the form of poetry, prose,
fiction or drama. It is now recognized that Indian English literature is not only a part of
commonwealth literature, but also occupies a great importance in the world literature.
Among the twentieth century writers Rohinton Mistry is an Indian born Canadian shortstory writer and a novelist. He has become one of the pre-eminent writers of the post-colonialist
writing movement. He now lives in Toronto, but sets his novels primarily in his native Bombay,
presenting an honest and loving image of India. As a Parsi, Mistry is part of a dwindling
community of fewer than 1,25,000 people worldwide, most of whom are concentrated around
Bombay.
The Indian English History precisely begins in the fiery talks of Henry Louis Vivian
Derozio. This very timeless strand was held strongly soon after by the spiritual prose of
Rabindranath Tagore and the anti-violence preached by Mahatma Gandhi. With the bursting in of
colonialism the genre in Indian Literature novel writing never did remain the same. Under men
like Mulkraj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K.Narayan the historical journey of the Indian English
Novel began to take its gigantic strides. In Cooli by Mulk Raj Anand the social discrepancy and
gross inequality in india is very much laid down stripped from any social constraints.

The historical journey of Indian English novel began with a bang when Rabindranath
Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and by the time V.s. Naipaul earned the
same. Bankim Chandra Chatterjees first and only novel in English, Rajmohans Wife was
serialized in the Calcutta weekly, The Indian Field in 1864. It paved the way for Anand Matha
(1884), The second attempt of writing was done by Toru Dutt in the form of Bianc or The Young
Spanish Maidan which was of course of posthumous publication. Indias first political novel
which gave the Indians their national anthem, Vande Mataram. Then came Manoj Basus
jalijangal in the form of English translation as The Forest Goddess by Badri Nath Bose. The
novels published from 1860s upto the end of nineteenth century were belonging to the

presidencies of Bengal and Madras. A majority of these novels are social and a few historical
issues, in the line of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Scott. Tarachand Mookerjees The
Scorpians or Eastern Thoughts (1868), Lal Behari Deys Govinda Samanta Ananda Prasad
Dutts The Young Zamindar (1863), Mirza Begs The Battle of Panipat, M. Dutts Bijay Chand :
An Indian Tale, (1888), Suresh Biswass His Wife and Adventures (1900). The twentieth century
began with novelists of more substantial output. Romesh Chunder Dutt is like passing from the
bud and flower to the ripened fruit. Michael Madhusudan and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had
opened new avenues in literature, and Romesh Chunder Dutt too turned to creative writing. He
was perhaps advised by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to write his novel in Bengali, but he
translated two of these into English: The Lake of Psalms: A Story of Indian Domestic life (1902)
is a realistic novel of social reform with widow re-marriage as one of its themes, The Slave Girl
of Agra, an Indian Historical Romance (1909) is in the Mughal period. Sarath Kumar Ghosh,
another Bengali novelist, wrote Verdict of Gods (1905) and The Prince of Destiny: The New
Krishna (1909). A. Madhaviah and T.Ramakrishna Pillai, belonging to Madras presidency were
two important contemporaries of these Bengali novelists.

Prominent among the Indian English novelist was a Punjabi writer Jogendra Singh. His
fictional work includes: Nurjahan, The Romance of an Indian Queen (1909), a historical novel:
Nasrin, An Indian Medely (1911), Kamala (1925), and Komni (1931), dealing with social themes.
The Gardhian whirlwind blew across the country during 1920-1947. The predictable impact of
the Gandhian Movement on Indian English literature was the sudden flowering of realistic
novels. During the 1930s the novelists focused on contemporary issues. In their novels, the
prevailing social and political problems that Indians found themselves in were given prominence.
The impact of the far-reaching change on the Indian social and political scenes caused by the
Gandhian Movement can be perceived in K.S.Venkatramanis Murugan, The Tiller (1927) and
Kandan, the Patriot (1932). The former reflects Gandhian economics while the latter reflects his
politics.
The novelists Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao paved the way for the great
trinity. Their emergence was the most remarkable event in the relam of Indian English Fiction.
They were the harbingers of the true Indo English novel. These novelists began writing around

the mid-1930s. The writing of these novelists moved the Indian English novel in the right
direction. Mulk Raj Anand was obsessed with autobiographical experience. His works show his
elective humanism. R.K. Narayan kept himself aloof from the prevailing socio-political issues of
the contemporary period. In R.K.Narayans much-admired visionary village Malgudi the invisible
men and women of the countrys ever-multiplying population come to life and in heart-rending
manner, life with all its constrainess and arbitrariness, In kanthapura by Raja Rao, Gandhism
truly comes alive in a quaint laid-back village down south. People like Tagore and R.K.Narayan
have proved this in shining glory time and again and ensured more clarity and served a social
documentative purpose.
Raja Rao was not a prolific novelist but a symbolist, myth maker and philosopher. His
works represent the Gandhian concepts and contain a lot of symbols. They discovered a whole
new world in Indo-English fiction, and the Indian novel owes much to their efforts to attain an
identity . They determined the area in which the Indian novel was to operate, and they
established the suppositions, the manner, the concept of character, and the nature of the
themes.Other novels of the period include C. S. Raus The Confessions of a Bogus Patriot
(1923), Ram Narains Tigress of the Harem (1930), V. V. Chitamanis Vedantam (1938) and D. F.
Karakas Just Flesh (1941) During the period of the major trio, many other novelists were active
and a considerable number of novels were produced. Many of these novelists depicted in their
works based on life in Muslim households. These novels are Ahmed Alis Twilight in Delhi
(1940), Iqbalunnisa Hussains Purdah and Polygamy (1944), Humayun Kabirs Men and River
(1945), and Amir Alis Conflict (1947). After gaining independence, India had many challenges
to face. The convention of social realism in Indian English fiction, established by Mulk Raj
Anand, went on flourishing during the 1950s and early 1960s through Bhabani Bhattacharya,
Manohar Malgonkar, Kushwant Singh, Suddin Ghosh, G.V.Desai and Ananta Narayanan. They
enlivened the trend of the experimental novel, oriented by Raja Rao in his Kanthapura.
Complications took place in social, political and economical spheres but India handled them
thoughtfully and adequately and progressed step by step.

A blend of realism and fantasy in the Indian English fiction was presented by
Balachandra Rajan of the 1950s and 1960s. The prominent feature of this period was the

augmentation of Indian novelists writing in English. Their appearance added a new dimension to
Indian English novel. It is only after India gained freedom that they have enriched their writings
in Indian English fiction. The dominant figures were Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Rohinton Mistry,
Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, and Anita Desai, V.S.Naipaul, and Khushwant Singh.
Rohinton Mistry, a diasporic Parsi writer, has gained recognition as an internationally
acknowledged writer since his works have won international honors and awards. Rohinton
Mistry, Canadian based writer, is the author of three novels and a short story collection which
depict the closely knit and isolated Parsi community in Bombay.Mistry has emerged as a
critically acclaimed literary figure. In his literary writings one can see the traces of subaltern and
marginalized minorities. Mistrys characters brilliantly project the psyche of his community. The
paper shall explore psychological analysis of the themes and characters reflecting the pain of
alienation, marginalization and up-rootedness of the writer and his community. Nostalgic tone,
prevailing throughout his narrative. His writings bear a social purpose. He is one of the
prominent writers of the postcolonial era, Rohinton Mistry, Indian born Canadian writer pays
more attention to the depiction of his community and his fictional works portray Parsi life,
culture and religion. Mistrys focus on Post-colonial concerns of narrating country and
community, there is a taxing need to write about his community. He wants to visualize for the
benefit of posterity. His historical situation includes development of new identity in the nation to
which he has migrated and a complex relationship with political and cultural history of the nation
he has left behind. Generally, Indian Diasporas suffer from a sense of triple displacement. They
lose their native place, they enter into an alien language and find themselves among people
whose culture and codes are different and sometimes offensive to their own. In his fictions,
Mistry hastens to present the position of both his community and the country simultaneously.
Mistrys first novel Such a Long Journey revolves around the life of Gustad Noble and his family
who live in a Parsi Enclave named Khodadad Building in Bombay. The novel is set against the
Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the emergence of Shiv Sena- a party that strongly espouses
Hindutva and pro-Maratha ideology. The novel also mentions the political events of the 1960s
the death of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, his daughter Indiras coming to power, the Indo-Chinese
war and the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Amidst this political and social upheaval, Mistry
places his protagonist-Gustad Noble and examines his personal, social and professional

relationships. The novel examines the impact of the turmoil on the individual while describing
the lives of the Parsis living in the walled compound of Khodadad Building. Through the novel,
Mistry sheds light on the anxieties of the Parsi community which stems from the fact that they
are not a part of the mainstream. By depicting the isolation and concerns of a community on
the fringes of the society, the author highlights the condition of the minorities in the Indian soil.
In his second novel, A Fine Balance, (1996) he delineates how the Emergency declared by
Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi scares at the lives of two Parsis and two Dalits. In his latest
novel Family Matters (2002), Mistrys urge takes a violent turn and forcefully acknowledges the
dilemma within his community in the wake of Ayodhya issue. Here Mistry introduces Nariman
Vakeel, a bedridden, retired Parsi professor. Through him, Mistry decides to prove the delicate
condition of his community. The novel is picturized the experiences of this protagonist and the
members of his family. It includes three generations of Parsis in the fast changing Indian sociopolitical context. The author penalizes his approach to give ample references to the Parsis
efforts in order to protect their racial purity, religious practices, sense of superiority, attitude to
Indians, food habbits, elite status and the present undesirable position of the community. The
narratives of A Fine Balance and Family Matters nurture concurrently more intimate and more
closely fretful with the inner life and composite experiences of the protagonists, though
inconsistent, also more concerned with existing social and political contexts. In Mistrys novels,
one can easily find interconnectedness of various themes like idea of nationalism,
alienation, oppression, human-relationship, fright and persuasion.
The aim of this dissertation is to discuss the intense streaks of political and social
imbalances and sufferings of the common people as portrayed in Rohinton Mistrys works.
Mistrys characters are self-conscious of the reality around them and they carry a sense of
loneliness, alienation and pessimism. He adds the realities of life and plunges into the depth of
the human psyche to score out its mysteries and chaos in the minds of characters. Close study of
the texture and theme of the novels in relation to the tenets of existentialism justifies the above
observation. His works deal with the existential anxiety experienced through his suffered
protagonists. Thus, the existential themes of solitude, alienation, the futility of human existence
and struggle for survival are the major themes of his works. Mistry expresses his personal
feelings over suffering heroes through his works in correlating with existentialism.

The biography and contribution of the author for deriving peaceful and unique culture
and society in the globe is analysed deeply. Rohinton Mistry is a leading writer in literature
particularly in contemporary commonwealth literature. The term Commonwealth has come
from the word Empire and is a historical accident. The independent nationals were organized
and became the members of commonwealth. The most important commonwealth countries such
as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have residents of English
speaking population. On the other hand, West Indies had mixed Europeans and coloured people
in which English is used for communication purposes. So, there is a natural response to study
English as it proves advantageous among them. In this respect, the Commonwealth nations have
a new literature in common and a great home-grown literature of their own, and that is named
Commonwealth Literature. The term Commonwealth Literature applies to work that is
generally accepted in English. The commonwealth literature has highly honoured cultural,
national and linguistic features of the native countries especially the confluence of tradition and
modernity. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Canada Enjoys an enviable position with a
rich store of great literature.

Canadian Literature becomes a part of commonwealth literature. Canadian Literature has

been divided into two parts. One part of Canadian Literature is based on French culture. The
other part is in the traditions of England. On the other hand, Canadian Literature is grown up by
immigrant authors. Canadian Literature reflects three main parts of Canadian experience (1)
Natura, (2) Frontier life and (3) Canadas position in the World. First thing is the effect of climate
and describes the geographical positions on the life and work of their people. Second, Frontier
life is part of Canadas experience and many authors have taken themes from West world across
Canada. Third, many writings reflect how Canadian writers feel about such positions and
problems. On the other hand, Canadian writings are an imitation of colonial literature, because of
the huge imaginations. Canadian literature has some following traits but it has no particular
order. Failure as a theme, humour, multiculturalism, nature, satire and irony and self deprecation
are certain subjects treated in Canadian literature. The first Canadian Novelist is called John

Richardson. His Waxousta (1832) popularized the nations novel and writers like T.C.
Haliburton, William Kirby and Sir Gilbert Parker were very famous in early stage.

In 1880s, Canadian literature began to be noticed around the World. After 1990s,
Canadian literature is viewed as some of the worlds best and Canadian authors begin to increase
the international recognition and awards. Rohinton Mistry belongs to the South Asian Diaspora.
The establishment of the Soush Asian Diaspora provides identity to South Asian Writers
including Rohinton Mistry. Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Bangladesh People are called
South Asian in Canada. Thus, Rohinton Mistry becomes a diasporic writer of the South Asian
origin in Canada like Uma Parameswari, Michael Ondaatjee, Himani Banerjee, Yaswin Lada,
Surjeet Kalsey, Meher Pestonji, Firduas Kanga, Baps Sidhwa, Tarukh Dhondy and others And
Diaspora also refers to being a minority community in a country. The term Diaspora originally
meant the dispersal of Jews. Acquiring the new nomenclature, it is reinterpreted as alienation,
migration and marginalization or being in the minority. There are two phases of Diaspora namely
the old and the new which suggest the migration to the indentured labour and the voluntary
migration to a foreign land for brighter future respectively. Rohinton Mistrys migration belongs
to the second phase of the Diaspora.
In 1992, Michael Ondaatjee became the first Canadian to win the Booker prize for The
English Patient, Margaret Atwood won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, Yann Martel
won it in 2002 for the life of Piand. The immigrant writer Rohinton Mistry won the Booker prize
in 1991 fir Such a Long Journey. Rohinton Mistry is a remarkable and absorbing writer of human
experiences in South Asian Diaspora such as V.S.Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh,
Shahi Tharoor, Vikram Seth and Bharathi Mukharjee. On the other hand, as a Parsi, Mistry
records the complex tradition of Parsi community and its cultural activities in his writings.
Rohinton Mistry is also famous as a Parsi writer like Bapsi Sidhwa, Dina Mehata, Firdous
Kanga, Kete Daruwalla and Boman Desai. Therefore, Rohinton Mistry occupies an important
position among these writers of South Asian Diaspora.
Mistry is a Canadian writer born in India. Although he now lives in Canada, he sets his
novels primarily in his native, Bombay, to present an honest and loving image of India. His

writings often explore the tragic circumstances of Indias desperate poor and their extended
families. He expresses his personal feelings through the suffering heroes of his works. Rohinton
Mistry has an extraordinary sensibility and he has a soft corner for the downtrodden and the
innocent people. He exposes the evils of the exploitation of the people by the landlords,
politicians etc., in his novels. He handled many common problems of great political, religious,
economics and literary activities of day-to-day life in India. Then, poverty, ignorance, and
inability interlink with individuals and society that play a major role in the characterss pragmatic
way of life. Among those diasporic writers. Rohinton Mistry is considered to be one of the
famous authors who have gone out of India and have written in English.

Rohinton Mistry is of Indian orgin and belongs to Parsi community. Parsis are small, yet
united, religious community in India, devoted to Zoroastrianism, whose ancestors fled Islamic
persecution in Iran during the eighth century. Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay (now
Mumbai), in India in 1952. He graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of
Bombay in 1974 and immigrated to Canada with his wife, the following year, settling in Toronto,
where he worked as a bank clerk, studying English and Philosophy as part-times degree at the
University of Toronto and completing his second degree in 1982. Mistry wrote his first short
story, One Sunday in 1983, winning First Prize in the Canadian Hart House Literary Contest and
then an award he also won in the following year for his short story Auspicious Occasion. It was
followed in 1985 by the Annual Contributors Award from the Canadian Fiction Magazine, and
afterwards, with the aid of Canada Council grant, he left his job to become a full-time writer.
Rohinton Mistrys early stories were published in a number of Canadian magazines and his
short-story collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, was first published in Canada in 1987. He is the
author of three novels: Such a Long Journey (1991) is about the story of a Bombay bank clerk
who unwittingly becomes involved in a fraud committed by the government. The novel won the
Commonwealth Writers Prize. His second novel is A Fine Balance (1996), set during the State of
Emergency in India in the 1970s, and the third novel Family Matters (2002) tells the story of an
old Parsi widower living in Bombay with his step-children. Such a Long Journey and A Fine
Balance were both short-listed in previous years for the Booker Prize for Fiction and Family
Matters was short listed in 2002 for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Mistrys fiction is rooted in the streets of Bombay, the city he left behind for Canada at
the age of twenty-three. Tales from Firozsha Baag (1992), Mistrys first collection of stories
marked at the arrival of a prodigious talent. Also available as Swimming Lessons and Other
Stories from Firozsha Baag, the collection contains eleven interrelated short stories that bring
together some of Mistrys earliest and finest writing. The stories narrate the day-to-day life of the
residents of a decrepit apartment block at Firozha Baag in Bombay. Mistrys affectionate thumb
nail sketches struggles and sorrows of Rustomji, the deranged Jaakaylee and Percy, who is able
to look up girls skirts with the aid of his torch. As Rushdie puts in, Rohinton Mistry is a writer
from elsewhere. However, being a Parsi origin, Rohinton Mistry is more concerned with the
tribulations and the idiosyncrasies of Bombay Parsis. Mistry explores the relationships at the
heart of their community, there cultural identity and uniqueness of their community living in his
novels. Rohinton Mistry uses ordinary men and women as his protagonists and fills his novels
with sights, sounds, smells and colour of India. Depicting his characters as neither saints nor
sinners, he involves the reader in their life as they try to survive the complexities of their culture.
Such a Long Journey unfolds the life of the common people in Bombay. Gustad and the life of
his daily hard work and sufferings, problems of his friends and kith and kin and indeed the
inviolable background of the Indo Pak war forms the base of the story.
The characterization in the novel is depicted in a unique way. It is beautifully constructed
emotionally involving the story of a small family trying to live meaningful life against social
odds. The characters are finely drawn and the plot reflects the traumas of an ordinary man and
his wife caught up in events and crisis not of their own making. Mistry got good exposure of a
writer by writing the novel Such a Long Journey. Thus, this novel helped Mistry to promote his
wiring career to the hilt. The backdrop of Such a Long Journey is set in Bombay and at the time
of 1970s. The central characters of the novel is very hard-working bank clerk named Gustad
Noble. He is a devoted family man. He works hard to maintain his family properly. He has
Dilnavaz, his wife and three children in his family. But he has some problems in his life when his
eldest son Sohrab refuses to attend the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology to which he
gained admittance. His youngest daughter Roshan falls ill. These conflicts within the novel
involve Gustads ongoing interactions with his eccentric neighbours and relationship with his
close friends and co-worker, Dinshawji. Gustad receives a letter one day from an old friend,

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Major Bilimoria, slowly draws him into a government deception involving threats, secrecy and
large amounts of money.
Throughout the novel, the wall outside Gustads apartment building symbolizes the larger
world of Bombay and parallels some aspects of Gustads own life. At the outset, it is used as a
latrine, breeding illness in the neighbourhood. Gustad tries something to come out of this
problem. He persuades a sidewalk artists to paint it, and consequently he depicts scenes from all
the religions of India. Thus, the wall transformed as a holy place. Eventually the government
decides to widen the road and tear it down, Inviolable background of the Indo Pak War forms the
background of the novel Such a Long Journey, in which Mistry has etched out the tales of
common Bombay. Such a Long Journey(1991), Mistrys first novel, won numerous literary
awards when it was first published and has since been adapted for film.
The novel is set in 1971 during the time of the India- Pakistan wat. Its protagonist is no
conventional hero, however: Gustad Noble is a bank clerk and a family man, a vulnerable figure
whose world is still haunted by the war with China in 1962. The fate of Gustads family is
closely bound up with that of the subcontinent during a time of crisis and turmoil. Gustads
daughters illness and his sons refusal to go to college are events that encourage to read the
novel Such a Long Journey. When Gustad receives a parcel and a request to launder money for
an old friend, the events ramifications are at once personal and political.
The story of A Fine Balance is set against of an unnamed city by the sea the backdrop at
the time of 1975 in India, in an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a
State of Emergency, and the country is on the edge of chaos. In these precarious circumstances,
four strangers are forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. Their
background is different and so do their habits. But ultimately they become dependent on each
other and thus the story proceeds.
A Fine Balance brings new understanding about Indias struggles with poverty and caste
systems. Cultures and traditions are displayed through this story using four main characters and
involving many secondary characters to make this novel so realistic. Rohinton Mistry meshes the
life of four people of diverse backgrounds into a bond that lasts long. Dina Dalal, a widow to
make it as an independent woman in the world where women have little value, becomes the

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unwilling glue that supports three other lives. Maneck Kohlah is a student and he is sent by his
parents from his mountain village to attend college in the city. Ishvar Darji and his nephew
Omprakash are tailors escaping the terror in their village by moving to the city to look for work.
This unlikely group of people become dependent on each other out of necessity, their life
entangling to create the basis of the story as well. This novel is sometimes crude while
sometimes cruel.
The story mainly deals with the story of India during the 70s and the changes it was
going through as well as the corrupt government. Uncertain future of the young individuals in the
precarious circumstances of 1975, when the Government has declared the State of Emergency, is
ideally portrayed in A Fine Balance. A Fine Balance, Mistrys most successful work to date, tells
critically the story of four characters as Maneck, Dina, Ishvar and Omprakash and the impact of
Indira Gandhis state of emergency on them. One of the most successful aspects of this novel is
its carefully crafted prose. The morning express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl and
then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed. The trains brief deception jolted
its riders. The bulge of humans handing out of the doorway distended perilously, like a soap
bubble at its limit. This intricate opening paragraph, which is typical of the precise prose of A
Fine Balance throughout, helps to drive the novel forward through what is one of the most
memorable portraits of post-Independence India ever written.
The novel, Family Matters (2002), narrates the circumstances in Bombay once again.
Mistrys first two novels were set in the 1970s and were essentially historical fictions. However,
Family Matters depicts contemporary Bombay and is set in the 1990s. At the centre of the novel
is an old man, a Parsi with Parkinsons disease. Nariman Vakeel is a retired professor whose
illness places renewed strains on family relations. His memories of the past expose the reader to
earlier moments in the citys, and the nations history in a novel that moves across three
generations of the same family. Familiar slippage between public and private world is observed
in Family Matters. Similarly the life of the residents of Chateau Felicity (Narimans former
residence) and Pleasant villa (where he is forced to move by his scheming step daughter) recall
the world of Firozsha Baag. Where the earlier novels tended towards a decisive closure and
however, the epilogue of this novel seems much less ready to console. The novel portrays the
feelings of an adolescent who gets addicted to stamp collection and gets carried away. It also

12

portrays how events hurt in many ways. At the end when Jahangir left the boxful of precious
tamps, which he gets from Dr.Mody touch the readers heart.
The collection of short stories Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry aptly
satisfies the title as this contained the stories of the lifestyle of the residents living in the
apartment named Firozsha Baag. Tales from Firozsha Baag is a collection of eleven short stories
about the residents of Firozsha Baag. Firozsha Baag is a Parsi-dominated apartment complex in
Mumbai. All the stories deal with the same location, and thus the title of the story truly signifies
it. Tales from Firozsha Baag, though a lesser-known work by Rohinton Mistry, still captures with
vivacity, the rich and complex patterns of life of lower middle class families inhabiting an
apartment in Bombay. Mistrys Characterisation in this story is fabulous as he sketches
Jaakayless, an ayah and the Baags ghost seer.
Tales from Firozsha Baag is the story of the lifestyles of the inhabitants living in the
apartment named Firozsha Baag. Rohinton Mistry, being himself, belonging to Parsi community,
experiences the diasporic issues and as a writer he shed light over these issues. He is a writer
who makes up a part of the Indian Diaspora. In his short stories as well as in his novel, Mistry
underscores both the heterogeneous nature of the communitys identity and its vitality.
Traumatism in its inevitability brings change to the characters life, which Mistry focuses in his
fictions. What he affirms is the power and pliability of the individual and that of the community
in a world without a shred of pity. All the stories in the novel Tales from Firozsha Baag is written
in an excellent manner. Its different stories show the language of love from different angle, e.g.
father-son, lover-lovely, and other emotional tales of human life. Mistry always advocates the
independence of the women and his novels are always noted for a protest of the women against
the conventional arranged marriage. His works are often marked with a colour of feminism. His
females are fortuitous and they choose their own male counterpart.
The works of Rohinton Mistry are highly acclaimed and are considered as the
masterpieces of the postcolonial literature. PRIZES AND AWARDS 1983, Hart House Literary
Contest (first price) One Sunday (short story). 1984, Hart House Literary Contest (first prize)
Auspicious Occasion (short story) 1985, Annual Contributors Prize, Canadian Fiction
Magazine 1991, Booker prize for Fiction (shortlist) Such a Long Journey 1991, Governor
Gnerals Literary Award for Fiction (Canada) Such a Long Journey 1991, Commonwealth

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Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Such a Long Journey 1991, Smith Books/Books in
Canada First Novel Award Such a Long Journey 1991, Giller Prize (Canada) A Fine Balance,
1996, Booker Prize for Fiction, Commonwealth Writers Prize A Fine Balance 1996, Irish Times
International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Fine Balance 1996, James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for
fiction) Family Matters 2002, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Family Matters 2002, Man
Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Family Matters 2002, International IMPAC Dublin Literary
Award (shortlist) Family Matters.
Rohinton Mistrys novels brought him national and international recognition. Mistrys
works spread a precise writing style and sensitivity to the humour and horror of life to
communicate deep compassion for human beings. His writings concern people who try to find
own self while dealing with painful family dynamics and difficult social and political constraints.
His work also addresses immigration, especially immigration to Canada, and their cultural
differences.
Rohinton Mistrys works seem to be found that an author carries a mirror from the dusty
highways of Indian society. Hence, the author shows the characters of poor people as their own.
Rohinton Mistry satirises vehemently the exploitations of the powerful people over the poor and
downtrodden. Rohinton Mistry uses his works as a weapon against the exploiters. It has a deeper
insight of political, nativity, and struggles such as a slice of life of Indians and picturesque of
suffering people. Thus, Rohinton Mistry conveys his message of stunning exploitation of people
to the world through his works. He does not stop with attacking the social evils in his respective
society, he also conveys better solutions to those social inequalities and evils through his
writings. Rohinton Mistrys novels have made some tremendous changes in his respective
society. They enable the readers to respect the humans as their equal. They will pave way for the
peaceful life on the earth.
The various drastic events and incidents happened and dealt with in the novels stand
testimony not only for the sufferings of common men but also for the social oppression and
political repression in general. The very center of the novel A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistrys
image of India during the Emergency of the 1970s. The protagonist Farokh kohlah happens to be
a victim of the partition of India in 1947. The invasion of technology in the name of

14

modernization and urbanization has eventually destroyed the green mountain and the
environment of the hill town.
The daily life of common men is picturised with a Dickensian eye of detail. They suffer
due to various factors of historical events like the Hindu Muslim riot on the eve of Indias
independence, the Shiv Sainites protesting against the inflow of South Indians to Bombay, the
instigation of RSS workers during partition, the anti-sikh riots in Delhi in 1984 and the
Government schemes like Family planning, Beautification programme etc.,
Family Matters evidences the Babri Mosque riots that rocked Mumbai. The demolition of
Babri Mosque was a major event aimed at hurting the secular policy of India. Husain, a peon at
the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium is a victim of Babri Mosque police who were behaving
like gangsters. Rohinton Mistry attacks Shiv Sena at several places in this novel. He squarely
blames the two parties Shiv Sena and BJP for encouraging the Hindutva extremists. National
politics is exemplified by the urban meance Shiv Sena workers meddling with Mr.Kapur
asking him to change the cosmopolitan name Bombay and the ensuing murder of Mr.Kapur.
Though Rohinton Mistrys novels could be read and analysed critically as different dimensions,
it has been decided to work on the title Mapping Socio Political Repression, as delineated in
his works, Rohinton Mistrys two novels A Fine Balance and Family matters have been
considered for the purpose of the present research as a matter of convenience.

A FINE BALANCE
Exploitation and suppression based on the political, economic and social aspects is the
theme dealt in the novels of Rohinton Mistry which claims the necessity of social purpose in

15

fiction. Among the very few Indian writers in English like Mulk Raj Anand and Salman Rushdie,
he is one who has dealt with the plight of untouchables. In India, Untouchability or Dalitism has
been one major pact of societal evil since time immemorial and is still in practice in various parts
of rural India. The downtrodden or lower castes are denied to pursue education. It is believed that
if they get educated, they will demand their rights. In India, the caste discrimination and
repression is mostly found to be in practice among the Hindus. Mistry attempted his best to voice
the cruelty and oppression undergone by these muted untouchables in the novel. The novel A
Fine Balance (1996) visualizes the disparities of class and caste in Indian society and also the
novel shows how political changes kindlessly cut through the psycho-social fabric of the country
where justice is in the hands of the rich.

Mistry depicts Chamirs who are born into a leather-making Chamir family. The upper
caste people have humiliated them brutally. This novel portrayed the ill-treatment of upper caste
over lower caste. One of the examples is as to how untouchables are treated brutally and it is
illustrated in the following lines:
For walking on the upper-caste side of the street, Sita was stoned, though not to
death - the stones had ceased at first blood. Gambhir was less fortunate; he had
molten lead poured into his ears because he ventured within hearing range of the
temple while prayers were in progress . . . the wages for chopping wood, instead of
settling for the few sticks he could expect at the end of the day; the Pandit got upset,
accused Dhiraj of poisoning his cows, and had him hanged (7).
The upper class people always attacked the down trodden and also the upper castes which
are exhibited clearly in their activities on stoning Sita. When walking in the streets of upper

16

castes, she is stoned by them till her first blood is seen; Into the ears of Gambhir melten lead
was poured just for hearing the prayers of temple who was nereby and Dayaram was
compelled to eat stools of the landlord for asking wages and soon. Such inhuman actions by
the upper castes have become a routine phenomenon. According to Mistry, untouchability is
a kind of disease. It maligns Hindu culture and it becomes a blot on Indian society:
What is this disease? You may ask. This disease, brothers and sisters, is the notion of
untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human
beings. This disease must be purged from our society, from our hearts, and from our
minds. No one is untouchable, for all are children of the same GOD. Remember
what Gandhiji says, that untouchability poisons Hinduism as a drop of arsenic
poisons milk (120).
It is clear that Mistry supports untouchable because he feels that untouchability is not
only a disease but it is also poisoning the sacred philosophy of Hinduism.The four characters
Dina and Maneck who are Parsis and two tailors Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash are
humiliated by the upper castes. The lives of the tailors forefathers who were in fact Chamaars
or Mochis reflect the ruthless cruelty of the caste-system in the rustic India where unbelievable
oppressions are carried out on the lower-castes by the upper-caste Jamindars and Thakurs. Caste
discrimination has become violent and forced Dukhi, a Mochi, and the grandfather of
Omprakash and father of Ishvar from their traditional occupation of working with leather to learn
the dexterities of tailoring in the town. They migrated to cities. The tailors experience the
poignant dislocation of following a novel professional uniqueness, struggling to find shelter in a
new city and the physical displacement from their village to the city. After earning some money,
they decided to return to their village.

17

Ishwars father is doing unclean work. He likes to settle his sons, Ishvar and Narayan in a
better way of life and he therefore sends them to a nearby town to learn tailoring. He leaves his
sons with his Muslim friend Ashraf in the town who takes them as apprentices in his tailoring
business. Dukhi Mochi opines sarcastically that at least his Muslim friend treated him better
than his Hindu brothers (9). Once Ishvar and Narayan have safeguarded and secured Ashrofs
shop claiming that is belonged to them, leaving Ashraf indebted to them forever. On returning to
his village, Narayan starts a tailoring business for the people of his village in which he is
successful. He earns enough money for constructing his own house, gets married and is blessed
with a son and two daughters. Narayans business is flourishing well till the local elections are
declared by the landlord Thakur who has burnet the parents of Omprakash by tying together.
Atrocities of upper castes on the lower castes are unabated. The lower caste people are not
permitted to continue their education. Ishvar and Narayan have been beaten up for entering the
village school. Then Dukhi approaches Pandit Lalluram, A Brahmin priest whom he trusts that
he can do justice to him: even an untouchable could receive justice in his hands. Pandit Lalluram
is bittery satirized as an unmannered, greedy intransigent who is not concerned in doing justice
for lower castes. Dukhi is frustrated at this attitude of the Lalluram and feels for the life he leads
as an untouchable and starts enquiring about his identification with the order of caste:
Government passes new laws, says no more untouchability, yet everything is the
same. The upper-caste bastards still treat us worse than animals . . . More than
twenty years have passed since independence. . . I want to be able to drink from the
village well, worship in the temple, walk where I like (11).
Dukhi angers at the injustice and oppression imposed on the untouchables who are not
allowed to drink the water from the village well and banned to enter the temple. Even the women

18

of village were exploited due to the caste system. For example, Dukhis wife, Rupa was
victimized and raped by the Zamindars gardener for stealing fruits and milk from upper-caste
houses in order to feed the children. Her disgraceful exploitation by the gardener is Mistrys
ruthless observation on the dual standards existing in the contemporary Indian society in the
form of untouchability.
I have frequently said that I do not believe in caste in the modern sense. It is an
excrescence and a handicap on progress. Nor do I believe in inequality between human beings.
We are all absolutely equal. But equality is of souls and not bodies. Hence, it is a mental state.We
need to think of, and to assert, equality because we see great inequality in the physical world. We
have to realize equality in the midst of this apparent external inequality. Assumption of
superiority by any person over other is a sin against God and man. Thus caste, in so far as it
cannot distinctions in status, is an evil the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi portrays that
untouchability is a sin of mankind, through this novel Mistry accepted the concept of Mahatma
Gandhi.
Untouchability in this novel shows that subalterns are subjugated and received heartless
treatment at the hands of the upper caste. Even in the local elections, the blank ballots were filled
in by the landlords men but not given to the lower castes who cannot vote freely. The family of
Prakashs father and his two grandchildren are knifed to death. On hearing this brutal incident,
Ishwar and Om rush to police station to file an F.I.R, but the Sub Inspector rudely comments on
them: What kind of rascality is this? Trying to fill up the F.I.R. with lies? You filthy achoot
castes are always out to make troubles! Get out before we charge you with public mischief (12).
At every stage of their lives, the untouchables encounter oppression. During emergency,
chamaars turned tailor pay a visit to their village in search of bride for Om, they are victimized

19

by their old high-caste enemy, Thakur Dharmasi and are maltreated an crippled under the alleged
reason of the free vasectomy programme of the Government. One of the themes of subaltern
literature is oppression besides exploitation of untouchables that is poignantly depicted in the
novel. Mistry gives a heart-rending version of mans barbaric inhumanity to man and also the
unimaginable deprivation and inequalities experienced by the downtrodden and oppressed in
India. The novel presents an authentic portrait of contemporary Indian during the Emergency era
imposed by Indira Gandhi. Zai Whitaker calls it wise and wonderful. It is India with its
timeless chain of caste exploitation; male chauvinism, linguistic strives and communal
disharmony.
In India, power-hungry politicians control the strings of administration like a puppeteer.
Mistry has portrayed the humiliating condition of people living in Jhopadpattis, deaths on
railway tracks, demolition of shacks on the pretext of beautification, violence on the campuses in
the name of ragging, deaths in police custody, Lathi charges and murders in the pretext of
enforcing Family Planning, which are all part of Indias nasty politics. The novel reflects the
reality of India, the politics of corruption, tyranny, exploitation, suppression, violence and
bloodshed. It also provides an intimate insight into rural India focusing on the injustice, the
cruelty and the horror of deprivation and exposes the trauma of Indias millions along
communal, religious and linguistic lines. The protagonist Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow and her two
tailors make their survival in a world of segregation, corruption and oppression in which honest
work was denied by a totalitarian system. To beautify the city, the Government deployed officials
in the guise of Safety Inspectors to check the colony. The bulldozers went in and the illegal
slums were removed making the poor people homeless. During the Emergency the Family
Planning Programme was allegedly used to eliminate the enemies of the establishment. This

20

incident had become a nightmare in the life of Om. As a result, both Ishvar and Om have become
cripples and turn to begging only to fall into the anonymity of the city a world of sudden
police swoops, forced labour, goonda gangs, protection money, and casual street murders. (16)
The new rules of Emergency made it obligatory for every officer to encourage people to get
sterilized to complete his quota; otherwise, there would be no promotion for him. Thus the
Family Planning Programme was pressed into service allegedly to eliminate ones enemies by
confusing sterilization with castration. Deaths during the Emergency were called accidental.
The death of Ashraf Chacha at the market square is described as an accident by the police.
Elections here were under the control of the master-minded landlords like Thakur
Dharamsi. Narayans attempt at voting to make his marks himself results in the ruin of his family
by being burnt alive by the goondas of Thakur Dharamsi. Exploitation of the low castes by upper
caste continues unabated. But the Parsi widow Dina, is capable of feeling for the untouchables
by giving shelter to Ishvar and Om, the two chamaars (sweepers). Freedom remained a cherished
yet unattainable goal to Dina because of the social tyranny imposed by her brother and the
patriarchal structure of the Parsi society. Under Emergency, she does not make any attempt to
approach the law courts because of the powers given to corrupt officials like sergeant Kesar.
Hence, she had to live by striking a balance between despair and hope. Mr. Valmiki made an
observation to Dina Dalal. There is always hope - hope enough to balance our despair or we
would be lost. (648)
The new laws passed by the government on untouchability had changed nothing. It was
deeply rooted in the village community. The two chamaars, Ishvar and Narayana received
terrible beating from the teacher for touching the tools of learning and knowledge. It was a
prohibited world for the low caste. However, Dukhis defiance of the caste system is openly

21

shown by sending his little sons Ishvar and Narayana to Ashraf, the Muslim tailor, who would
also sew for an untouchable. It is clearly understood that the curse of untouchability is deeply
ingrained in Hinduism.
The members who belong to the caste background elected to the Lok Sabha in the last
four decades reveals the changing political scenario of India. For instance, in the first General
Elections in 1952, there were 15 Brahmins out of the 48 members of Parliament elected from
Maharashtra. In the 11th Lok Sabha in 1996, there were no Brahmins among the 48 elected from
Maharashtra. Mistry who wrote the novel is well aware of this political change in India. He aptly
shows that the callous behavior of the upper caste, Landlords like Thakur Dharamsi, led to other
backward castes getting united and asserting their political and social rights. The rise of Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP) in 1979, won in the U.P. Assemble seats. The indication of rise of the Dalits
is acknowledged when the party formed the Government along with BJP in Indias most
populous state. The social tensions in the villages, the changing aspirations of the lower castes
and caste based violence are so well delineated in the novel.
Since India is thickly populated, India becomes a country of hunger and beggars.
Beggarmaster is the leader of the Beggar Association. Ishvar and Om are also members of this
community and beggars ask for membership. This underworld insurance agency is efficient and
effective, certainly more so than the garrulous lawyer Dina finds in court (21). The beggars are
recognized by forming a community and misled by the government. There is Lathi charge at the
beggar Shankars funeral due to faulty intelligence by mistaking Ishvar and Om as beggars for
political activists.

22

The narration and re-narration of Mistry is based on various stories of Indias history,
culture and caste based society. Mistry has set this novel in three different backgrounds. While
Dina Dalal lives in the City by Sea, the tailors, Ishvar and Om, represent rural India and Maneck
Kohlah is from north India. The narratives go on shifting from rural life to city life in the case of
Ishvar, Om and that of Maneck Kohlah. The truth of India, asserts Vinita D. Bhatnagar, is
incomplete like the multi layered and multifarious truth about fiction.
The impact of Hinduism has permitted the social and economic exploitation not only of
untouchables but also on women. It is precisely this conflict between religion and benevolence
that Dr B.R. Ambedkar alludes to in the following statement from his undelivered speech on the
Annihilation of caste:
Caste may be bad: Caste may lead to conduct so gross as to be called mans
inhumanity to man. All the same, it must be said that the Hindus observe Caste not
because they are inhuman or wrong headed. They observe Caste because they are
deeply religious. (83)
Being an untouchable, Ambedkar has represented the interests of the untouchables and
that of other depressed groups in the First and Second Round Table Conferences in London in
1930-31 and 1932 respectively, when preliminary steps were taken towards formulating the
Indian Constitution. Educated under the patronage and financial assistance of the Maharajas of
Baroda not of Kolhapur at Elphinstone College, Bombay and subsequently at Columbia
University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, he emerged in the 1920s
as a spokesman and champion of the cause of untouchables. Ambedkar was anxious to dissociate
the interests of the Depressed Classes from those of the Hindu majority, whom he saw as the

23

oppressors of the untouchables. His solution to the problem of caste oppression was unequivocal.
He enjoined upon the Hindu leaders for whom his above- mentioned undelivered address was
intended to tell the Hindus, that what is wrong them is their religion the religion which has
produced in them this notion of the sacredness of Caste (84).
Ambedkars analysis rejects the notion of Socialists that the economic motive is. . . the
only motive by which man is actuated, and he proposes that religion can operate as one of the
sources of power as the Hindu example indicates (42). From Ambedkars point of view, caste
exploitation could not be satisfactorily uprooted without annihilating the doctrinal authority upon
which it is based. The response of Ambedkars hosts was to revoke the invitation to him to
speak, perhaps quailing before the glare of such a radical critique of the Hindu status. The Indian
political response to caste oppression has been largely predicated upon the secularism of the
nation-state, expressed through various Constitutional measures directed towards the
achievement of casteless egalitarianism. Article 17 of the Indian Constitution abolishes
untouchability, forbids its practice in any form, and makes the enforcement of any disability
arising out of untouchability a punishable offence. Article 15 of the Constitution forbids
discrimination on the basis of caste. The First Amendment to the Constitution permits the State
to make special provisions for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward
classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Article 341 of the
Constitution states that the Act authorizes the President of India to specify castes, races, or
tribes or parts of or groups within castes, races, or tribes which shall for the purposes of this
Constitution be deemed to be Scheduled Castes (Hiro 7). In Dilip Hiros Report produced for
the Working Group on Untouchables, he argues that the law in itself is insufficient to uproot

24

discrimination without the conscientious enforcement of legal provisions, and this is where the
Constitutional safeguards have proven to be less than adequate.
Mistry suggests that the destruction of caste depends upon the rejection of the Hindu
scriptures as Ambedkar has advocated. Hinduism may have authorized the social and economic
order that followed, but this authority has to be withdrawn; it would not follow that the social
and economic order that it has promoted would thereby collapse. In the end, despite its religious
roots, the perpetuation of caste is supported by deep-seated economic and social interests, which
would rather re-invent the discourse of discrimination to shroud their politics or use the law as
their excuse than surrender their advantages. In relation to the secularism of independent India, it
should be noted that the separate electorates for religious communities, had been first established
by the 1909 Morley-Minto Reforms and extended by the 1919 Government of India Act. It was
abolished, although Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (and also women) were included in
the new schemes of compensatory electoral weighting which reserved a proportion of state and
central legislative assembly seats for representatives of these groups (Bayly 272).
The untouchable of the village are the chamaars or leather workers. In the city, the caste
affiliation dissolves in urban anonymity, the new untouchables are the beggars on the
pavement-dwellers, who dramatize through their situation the evolving dynamics of social
ostracism. As Mistrys untouchable characters turn into beggars at the end of the novel, it
becomes clear that the untouchable and the beggar are different manifestations of the same
condition. In each case through the appeal to some ideal principle, which creates also its
antithesis, the object of society is identified and exiled. The principle itself may change
according to political exigencies and prevailing interests, but the fundamental structure of
exclusion is the same. During the Emergency, Beautification of public amenities displaces

25

purity as the desired ideal, which operates mush s caste purity does in order to identify an
expendable class. Mistry installs in his fiction the state of Emergency under whose auspices all
kind of State and bureaucratic power spin into excess. The Emergency also provides the visible
mantle under which traditional forms of power reiterate their hold upon village societies, for
instance using its population policies to take away the reproductive capacities of the
untouchables.
In the city, under the Emergency, the stigma of defilement gets a new interpretation, as its
urban Beautification programmes attempt to eliminate from view beggars and pavementdwellers. These are the new visual equivalents of the Untouchables, and many of them may
indeed, like Mistrys characters, Ishvar and Omprakash, come from the untouchable castes. In
this mutation of the terms of oppression, the only thing that changes is the language of
discrimination, not the fact of discrimination, its logic, or its targets. In a powerful retrospective
sequence that culminates in 1969, Mistry traces their native village by the river. Narayan,
Ishvars brother and Omparakshs father, has challenged the corrupt electoral practices that
effectively disenfranchise the untouchable caste. For this, he and his friends are tortured to death
by the local leader Thakur Dharamsi. Not satisfied with this, the Thakur ordered the torching of
Narayans home and the murder of his family in a bid to root out the aspiration of the
untouchables for democratic equality. This event, as well as the decline of the tailoring business
in their provincial town, precipitates the migration of the two surviving members of the family,
Ishvar and Omprakash, to the city by the sea, which is not identified but which one may deduce
to be Bombay. The fictional murder of a chamaar family in 1969 to 1970 has parallels with
similar incidents that occurred in 1981 and recorded by M.J. Akbr in his book Riot after Riot.
Mistry uses Thakur as a little of honour. This title is particularly widespread among petty

26

Rajput chieftains. This meaning of Thakur ought to be distinguished from its use to designate
the members of a hill-tribe found in the hinterland Bombay.
In 1981, Harijans were killed in several villages in Uttar Pradesh. Two of these
massacres, one in Delhi, followed by another a few days later in Sarhupur received widespread
publicity. The killers, who were Thakur Rajputs, had just one message to send through murder the untouchable Jatav cobblers had to learn their place in society and the caste hierarchy. This is
also the message that Mistrys Thakur Dharamsi wished to send to the untouchable chamaar
families who had sought democratic equality in defiance of caste hierarchy. What is evident here
a conflict between the terms of nationhood and those of caste stratification, which have their
roots in Hinduism. The casualty in the conflict is the principle of democracy upon which equality
of citizenship depends. Mistrys fictional and Akbars documentary accounts of caste violence
may be usefully situated within the broader context of caste wars that have dominated parts of
Tamilnadu, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Bihar. Most of the violence against the
Dalits comes from landowning caste Hindus, who are equipped with militias and private armies
that have been recruited and trained with government assistance and cooperation, initially for the
purpose of combating Maist-style uprisings from tenants and landless people.
The Emergency is identified as a symbolic vehicle to demonstrate government collusion
and participation in the outright thuggery that confirms the continued disenfranchisement and
displacement of depressed groups. His retrospective flashback to Narayans murder by Thakur
Dharamsi locates the excesses of the Emergency within a history in which the actual political
process has continually eroded the constitutional and legal safeguards through which genuine
democracy has to work. Whether it is power at the village level or at the national level, in each
case the holders of power seek to perpetuate or succeed in perpetuating authoritarian forms of

27

governance under the guise of democracy. Under the Emergency, even the pretence of
democracy withers to expose the authoritarianism at the heart of Indian politics. The unequivocal
collapse of the governments moderating role is also contained the collapse of the fine balance.
The title of Mistrys novel A Fine Balance advertises, and which alludes to the balance between
hope and despair, and presumably also between power and resistance.
The narration is interspersed with the personal hope of his untouchable characters that the
quest for individual freedom may triumph. One of these occasions of hope emerges in the
rebellion against the mandates of caste by Dukhi, Ishvar and Narayans father, when he decides
to apprentice his sons to be tailors. Due to the impact of politics, Dukhi getting away with it may
be a result of contemporary caste politics. This was in 1939, the end of the decade in which the
Poona Pact was signed among Hindu leader promising the end of the discrimination against
untouchables. By using the name Dukhi, it is quite possible that Mistry is invoking a literary
genealogy for his depiction of untouchability, besides situating the aspirations and efforts of his
untouchable characters within a history in which their defeat is pre-determined. Significantly,
Dukhi is the name of the untouchable protagonist in a short Sadgati (Deliverance) by the Hindi
novelist Premchand, which was made into a film by Satyajit Ray. In an essay written in 1982 and
also in his book Riot after Riot, M.J.Akbar demonstrates arts likeness to life as he juxtaposes
sequences from Rays just released film with scenes from the massacre of untouchables living
outside Sarhupur on 31 December 1981 (61-76). Rays and Premchands Dukhi dies from the
combined effects of starvation and hard labour upon an already weak and debilitated body. In
contrast, Mistrys Dukhi is made of a more robust constitution; he survives the privations of his
position and turns his disillusionment towards a constructive purpose, the release of his sons
from the occupational stigma of being leather workers. Dukhis efforts culminate in the massacre

28

of all of his descendants, except for a son and a grandson, who eventually slide into beggary as a
result of the government sponsored mutilation of their bodies during the Emergency. Through
the possible inter textual references, Mistry demonstrates, like Akbar, that nothing has changed
despite the rhetoric and the occasional examples of upward mobility.
Mistry parallels between the oppressive policies of the Emergency and those of the caste
system. The slum dwellers, whose homes are razed to the ground by the Beautification Brigade,
are corralled into tracks, which deliver them to construction sites as free labourers. Mistry
invokes here shades of slavery as well as of the Jewish holocaust. The parallel with slavery is
reinforced when Ishvar and Omprakash, who had been forcible transported from their hutments
despite being employed, have to buy their freedom by indenturing themselves to the citys
Beggarmaster. But their transportation to the construction site, which functions as a
concentration camp, alludes to the more covert wish to eliminate the people whose
unaccommodated presence mars the citys beauty. Nusswan, Dina Dalals wealthy but obtuse
brother, gives voice to the idea of a final solution. He suggests that the two hundred million who
are surplus to requirements may be eliminated through a free meal containing arsenic or
cyanide, whichever is cost-effective (458). In the end, the project for genocide occurs through
more subtle methods when Ishvar and Omprakash are forced to undergo botched vasectomies
that leave one crippled and the other castrated.
The novel drives away from the sphere of public struggle and looks for solutions that
operate through domestic and familial metaphors. In diametric contrast to the final solution
proposed by his character Nusswan, Mistry puts forward a symbolic project for the
accommodation of the displaced. The politics of both caste and the politics of gender converge in
the precarious entitlement of both the untouchable tailors and Dina Dalal to a dwelling place of

29

their own. On their arrival in the city, the tailors are permitted grudgingly to sleep on the back
pavement of someones shop. After finding employment with Dina, they are encouraged by their
host to rent a hut in the slums, only to be evicted by the Emergencys slum clearance programme.
Being aware of the danger of sleeping in public places, they gladly accept the sanctuary that
Dina offers reluctantly in her cramped flat. The picaresque style of the novel, which
characterizes its forward trajectory, is largely motivated by the tailors quest for a home of their
own. Dina, on the other hand, lives in fear of eviction on some real or trumped-up excuse, since
her rent-controlled flat represents potentially valuable real estate for her landlord. The flat is the
symbol of her independence. She is able to retain both only so long as she has the income from
her tailoring business. Hence, Dina and the tailors are mutually dependent on each other. She
draws a parallel between Indias calculated but unacknowledged displacement of millions of
people and the policies of the Third Reich: True, theyre not being annihilated or taken to gas
chambers, but I can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than it any
concentration camp of the Third Reich. Theyre not captive, but they redefine the meaning of
liberty (23).
The lifestyle of the four characters Dina, and Maneck Kohlah locate their relationship
within the paradigm of the reconstructed family. The four followed the inequalities irrespective
of both gender and caste. This experimental symbolic family is based upon the erasure of gender
inequality as well as caste inequality. Through the projected wedding of Omprakash, this family
looks forward to its perpetuation. However, Omprakashs castration and Dinas eventual eviction
from her flat indicate the defeat of Mistrys tentative proposal of accommodation for women and
untouchables. In the final analysis, the political force of Mistrys fiction lies not in the survival of
his solutions, but upon the epic magnitude in order to demonstrate the effectively invincible and

30

protean qualities of traditional power, as well as upon the moral indignation that he summons
against such power. Like the intractable structural stasis that underlies the picaresque mode of
Mistrys A Fine Balance, an unshakeable historical determinism controls Arunthahthi Roys
novel. At the outset of her work, Roy stretches through time to isolate the Laws delivered by
History, which determine social and sexual interaction, as well as her narrative resolution. She
describes these Laws as being older than the European colonization of India, older than the interrite conflicts between the Portuguese missionaries and the Syrian- Christian church, and older
even than the Christianization of Kerala in the first century AD. Roy is, of course, referring to
the Laws of Many upon which is based the caste system, which organizes society into
endogamous units, rendering as outcaste anyone who defies its rules of sexual contact. These
Laws have derived their authority and purity through the sheer weight of History.
Despite the Marxist slogan Caste is Class, comrades (281), and despite some overlaps
between class and caste stratification, the two concepts derive from different principles.
Accordingly, the pursuit of class warfare provides no necessary resistance to caste stratification,
thus enabling the History that has written and sanctified the Love Laws to triumph over the
Marxist interpretation of history. It also triumphs over narrative teleology, controlling the
trajectory and resolution of desire. History as an abstract force may be construed as belonging to
the sphere of the Big God, whose realm includes the violent, relentless, chaotic, monumental
train of events that make up the public turmoil of a nation (19). Against the Big God, whose
legitimacy is undeniable because size and publicity are in his favour, Roy juxtaposes the Small
God, The God of Small Things, to whose domain belongs the contained world of personal desire.
And personal desire is necessarily inconsequential because it fails the test of scale. In the
cataclysms, devastations, destruction, and violence that beset India, the personal tragedy is

31

buried, beneath the weight of more potent sorrows. Thus fiction, which privileges personal
emotion, is an indulgence that History ignores in its majestic sweep through time, unless, of
course, fiction interrupts Historys progress.
In demonstrating this, Mistry and Roy confirm the paranoid rejection of the body that lies
at the base of both caste and gender hierarchies. In Mistrys case, the response to the paranoia is
to propose what in another context Terry Eagleton calls a materialist morality. Eagleton
perceives such a morality as having its genesis in the circumstances that control materials
existence (35). Roy, on the other hand, reverses the abject status of the body through the
celebration of a materialist eroticism. Eagletons essay, which appeared in The Guardian Review,
is an edited extract from his book After Theory, published on 25 September 2003 by Allen Lane.
Mistrys novel makes it abundantly clear through a variety of options that social
dominion has its source in the oppressive subjection of the body of the other. Repeatedly, the
postulated defilement of the untouchables serves as the pretext for various landowners to visit
upon them with impunity all sorts of brutalities. In one instance, after a day of back-breaking
labour, pounding chillies for Thakur Premji, the upper caste landowner, Dukhi, Ishvars father,
is beaten and his wages confiscated because the mortar used for pounding had split into two. In
another instance, the young Ishvar and his brother Narayan, who are excluded from school under
caste regulations, endure physical punishment for stealing into the classroom, when no one is
around to safety their curiosity. Fascinatedly experimenting with chalks and slates, Ishvar makes
the discovery that it is easy to make his mark before it is contradicted by the physical blows that
rain upon his and Narayans bodies when the schoolmaster finds them in the classroom. By this
time, Ishvar already bore on his face, like a caste mark, the scar that he had sustained on the day

32

of his initiation into his hereditary occupation as a leather worker. Helping to shift a dying
buffalo from the field of an upper-caste landlord, he is blushed on the face by the buffalo.
Mistry foregrounds the false schism upon which the notional alienation from the body is
predicated when the upper-caste Pandit Lalluram belches, breaks wind, and blows his nose, as he
pontificates upon the defiling touch of Ishvar and Narayan in the schoolroom. Although the
sovereignty over the body that the Pandit aspires to is evidently beyond his reach, what is amply
within his grasp is its ritual expression through the power exerted over untouchable bodies.
However, as Mistry proves, this is no disinterested quest for ritual purity since it also legitimizes
and perpetuates an oppressive economic and social order. Similarly, gender hierarchy is asserted
throught he degradation and humiliation of female bodies.
In a scene from Dinas pubescent years, we are shown how her loss of agency to her
brother Nusswan coincides with his hatred for and violence towards her burgeoning sexuality.
With the death of their father, Nusswan becomes the figure of authority in their home,
controlling even minor details of Dinas apparel and appearance. On one occasion when Dina
defies Nusswan and cuts her hair, he chastises her for this exercise of autonomy by taping her
severed plaits back to her head. He regards the severed hair as polluted. By forcing Dina to wear
them, he not only revokes the autonomy she has exercised, but he is also bent upon constructing
her body as degraded. Nusswans action links the fertilizable female body with pollution.
Like the untouchable who carries with him the liability of the contaminating touch, Dina
carries with her the reminder of the pollution that is linked to her fertilizable body through the
stock of sanitary pads that she has devised from the remnants of fabric. As Dina gradually
crosses the pollution barrier between herself and the tailors, Ishvar and Omprakash, by

33

dispensing with segregated cups, by dining together, and by massaging Omprakashs strained
back, a reciprocal leveling of the gender hierarchy occurs. It is signified through Maneck an
dOmprakash turning Dinas sanitary pads into phallic symbols, which they attach to themselves,
as they cavort around her room in an exuberant burst of masculine bonding during her absence.
Yet this inclination towards symbolic equality between male and female bodies runs the risk of
being torpedoed when Omprakash proposes to Maneck that they should satisfy their sexual
voyeurism by peeping on Dina in the bathroom. This attempt to install the male gaze
disintegrates as Maneck rises to the defence of Dinas honour. Since Maneck does not refrain
from indulging his voyeuristic instincts with Omprakash on another occasion in another location
where their object is an unknown woman, it must be assumed that the gender hierarchy is in
abeyance only provisionally. Yet it is leveled sufficiently for Dina to contemplate
accommodating the tailors on a permanent basis and receiving into her household Omprakashs
prospective wife. What motivates Dina is the surge of sympathy that she feels on being
conformed with the visible suffering of Ishvar and Omprakash. They, in their turn, are moved by
her recognition of their humanity.
Mistry suggests that ultimately this human bond needs to be acknowledged through the
practical accommodation of the other, which is to be distinguished from the dues that pity and
guilt yield to beggars. Beggarmasters public mourning for his unacknowledged, belatedly
discovered half-brother, the beggar Shankar, privileges the perception of human fraternity, which
facilitates the accommodation of the other, over the random, and sometimes impersonal,
philanthropy extended to beggars. Mistrys vision terminates in a practical ethics that is
ultimately incompatible with the values and politics that support hierarchies. Given the
invincibility of these hierarchies, the trajectory of his fiction recognizes the divide between his

34

vision and its effective realization. Perhaps this pessimism is reiterated and compounded in the
suicide of Maneck in 1984 after he discovers about the circumstances leading to the beggary of
Ishvar and Omprakash. But Mistry balances this despair with the practical assistance that Dina
continues to render to Ishvar and Omprakash, despite her reduced circumstances at the end of the
novel. Beyond all sense of balance in the public arena, a fine balance still survives in the sorts of
personal responses that suffering may elicit. Instead of dramatizing as Mistry has done the
privations inflicted upon the untouchable body.
The novel also deals with a turbulent 1970 s in India when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
declared a state of internal emergency and suspended Indias Constitution. Mistry does not
disguise his anger about the malevolence of the government and the corruption of its agents,
powerful and petty alike. In this novel Mistry keeps described submerged by the political theme.
The post-colonial history of India, like Mistrys story, is at once brutally simple and delicately
complex, believable and incredible, perverse and humane. The tale is unfolded through the lives
of four main characters: Ishvar Darji, his nephew Omprakash, their employer Dina Dalai, and
her paying guest Maneck Kohlah. The emergency intrudes into the lives of all these characters
leading to their ultimate destruction. The question that arises is whether the novel, as its events
unfold, maintains a fine balance between hope and despair or forfeits that balance in the end.
Vinetha Bhatnagar contends that the end of the novel forfeits that balance.
Through this novel Mistry shows how political changes kindlessly cut through the
psycho-social fabric of the country where justice is in the hands of the rich. In the novel, the
picture of India - the secret longings and tensions of the poor and their struggle to construct a
new life for themselves seems unimportant at first sight. It also mirrors the inequities and
discrimination in the society. But the styles of the Mistry derives from the past, his concerns are

35

very much of the immediate present. They are the daily impact of the seething, sprawling,
contradictory, and unpredictable politics of the nation which he left in 1975 when he moved to
Canada. Again, Mistrys concerns are not with those at the top of the heap. People of wealth and
influence are seen from a distance, and ironically, by a number of astute observers. Instead, his
interest is in the average people of India struggling to wrest a basic living and some sort of
meaning from a life that is brutish and hard indeed. And once again, Mistry writes with
compassion, humour, and humanity, and in the process, he gives us complex and endearing
characters.
A Fine Balance introduces Mistrys native and the main characters of this novel. The
novel revolves round the small apartment of Dina Dalai, the pivotal character in the novel. She
does all she can to wipe a tear from the eyes of the poor, the helpless and the innocent tailors and
to make a reasonable deal with they which they have been long denied: For this job, there will
be no customers to measure, she explained, the sewing will be straight from paper patterns.
Each week you have to make two dozen, three dozen, whatever the company wants, in the same
style... The more dresses you make, the more you earn . We meet Dina Shroff and learn how
she became the widow Dina Dalai, living alone in the city stitching scraps of cloth into a quilt at
night and trying to keep her dignity and independence from her dominating brother Nuswaan
who assumed the role of the head of the family and legal guardian to Dina after the death of her
father, Dr.Shroff.
Mistry tries to re-discover the Indian identity by setting his novel in three different
backgrounds. This novel maps out how Dina Dalai, the protagonist of the novel, and the three
characters, Ishvar, Omprakash, and Maneck, suffer from a sense of rootlessness. The author
brings his readers face to face with the dilemmas of inter-relationship and broken values and

36

customs of society. Dina Dalai lives in the metropolis; Ishvar and Omprakash belong to the
village, while Maneck is from high altitude. A composite picture of India with its passions,
hopelessness, strength, weakness, and beauty pulsates in the novel on account of the different
backgrounds from which the characters come. A spectrum of values and mindscapes is placed
before the reader.

Dina Dalai decides to take in a boarder and run a tailoring business. The boarder is
Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hillside town in the shadow of the Himalayas. He was sent by
his parents to study refrigeration and air conditioning maintenance, the trade of the future in the
hot latitudes. And to help her with her fledging business, Dina Dalai takes two woefully unlucky
untouchables as tailors. Ishvar Darji uncle and his nephew Omprakash emerge from a
community of leather workers that occupies the lowest rung of the ladder in the oppressive caste
system in the village by a river. The second chapter of A Fine Balance returns to the present and
introduces us to the manager of Au Revoir Exports, Mrs. Guptas. Through Mrs.Gupta approval
of Mrs.Gandhis actions we are confronted with the complicity of the Indian business house with
the outrages committed during the period of the 70s. Dinas assumption that the emergency is
irrelevant from the point of view of the common people turns out to be woefully misguided. As
she struggles to eke out a living for herself, events conspire to strip each character of dignity and
humanity. The acrimony that characterizes the relationship between Dina and the tailors at the
beginning of the novel transforms itself during the course of the narrative to mutual respect and
compassion. Dina and Maneck both, like Mistry, are members of the Parsi faith and are
ostensibly outside the Hindu caste system. They are confronted by their own prejudices and the
capriciousness of the lawless society. But it is the stories of the untouchables, Ishvar and

37

Omprakash, that provides the moral perspective of A Fine Balance. Their voyage from a tiny
village in a small town to the big city is one which reveals the real price of abstract social
policies. Ishvar and Om belong to the chamaar caste. The narration is very clear on chammars
ways of life. Trifling details like how they skin the carcass, eat meat, and tan the hide are dealt
with great interest, and with touching subtlety. For example, And as he mastered the skills
Dukhis own skin became impregnated with the odour that was part of his fathers smell (98).
The novel highlights specific rural experiences of frustration and exploitation. Besides
narrating certain living experiences, the author depicts his concern for the neglected regions of
this vast country. It is quite significant that India still lives in its villages. Mistry portrays both
the simplicity of rural life and complexities of city life. The shift is remarkable towards an urban
and modern situation. Mistry attempts to understand Indian reality in terms of his past experience
and tradition. Ishvars readymade formula of optimism, the human face has limited space .... If
you fill your face with laughing there will be no room for crying4 is verycrucial to the theme
and the title of the novel itself. Mistry confronted with the question of caste oppression. In the
village, Ishvars father Dukhi violates caste restrictions in attempting to make his sons into
tailors. Narayan and his uncle Ishvar were sent by their father to be apprenticed as tailors with
Ashraf. This shows surprising courage tobe and to become in a man who has been socialized into
accepting his position in the caste hierarchy unquestioningly. This is particularly the most
moving section of the novel. A fine sketch of the lives of lower caste - Indians living in rural
India - obtains in the novel. Even the upper caste women are not exempted from subjecting
people to oppression. We are told that they are indignant at the birth of two sons to Dukhi:It was
hard for them not to be resentful - the birth of daughters often brought them beatings from their

38

husbands and their husbands families... Then they had no choice but to strangle the infant with
her swaddling clothes, poison her, or let her starve to death. (99-100)
A Fine Balance is a humane novel. All events and images, divine and bestial; are brought
together skilfully in the depiction of the two tailors and their lives. Twenty years pass after
independence and nothing changes, Narayan says no more untouchability, yet everything is the
same.
The upper caste bastards, still treat us worse than animals.
'Those kinds of things take time to change.
'More than twenty years have passed since
Independence. How much longer? I want to be able
to drink from the village well, worship in the
temple, walk where I like. (142)

Narayan points out the fact that as a chamaar he is not allowed to drink water at the
village well, worship in the temple confined to the upper castes, or walk where he likes. When he
attempts to assert his right to vote, he is brutally tortured and then hanged in the village, women
are raped and their huts burnt down. The Thakur decides that the Dukhis family deserves special
punishment for crossing their
limits:
What the ages had put together, Dukhi had dared
to break asunder; he had turned cobblers into
tailors, distorting societys timeless balance.
Crossing the line of caste had to be punished with

39

the utmost severity, said the Thakur. (147)

For Ishvar the world is no better, and only occasionally worse than he expects. Young
Omprakash is at first outraged by the treatment meted out to untouchables. It is a trait inherited
from his father Dukhi, an ambitious and capable businessman. Like Rosa Parks refusing to sit in
the back of the bus in the American South in the 1950s, Dukhi demands that his rights be
respected, that he be able to vote as he chooses rather than as the local chieftain decrees. For this
Dukhi is tortured and put to death and Omprakash orphaned. It is in the face of this seemingly
never ending loss and injustice that the tailors must find the 'Fine Balance between hope and
despair. Dukhis family, along with Narayan corpse, are brunt alive at the behest of the Thakur.
Narayans son Omprakash dreams of revenge but both Ashraf and Ishvar know the results of
such dreams and instead decided to send Om to Bombay along with his uncle Ishvar. With their
move, a new phase starts in the life of Om and Ishvar. In the city of Gold (Mumbai), it is class,
rather than caste, that oppressed them. They are forced to stay in a Jhopadipattis and are forced to
work as unpaid labourers. Though Mistrys style of narration and tone through this section of the
novel is slightly jocular, he manage to let us see the reality behind the glamour of the Dream
City, Bombay.
In A Fine Balance, the satire is often directed at the young Indians who live on Dinas
goodwill and generosity. Dina blends almost imperceptibly with the tone of innocence. At times
she makes it clear that it is not sainthood but eroticism that dwells in the beautiful eyes of
Maneck Kohlah and the two tailors, Om and Ishvar, who are
manifestation of one name, that is, God. All of them have behaved outrageously in order to
enrage and distress Dina. Even in the prologue itself, it is learnt that Maneck and the two tailors
were sitting in the same compartment of the local train, travelling to the same destination, that is

40

Dinas house. As is typical in Indian trains they start conversing and then realise that they are in
search of the same address. Initially both Ishvar and Omprakash are apprehensive that Maneck is
a rival for the job. However, they become friendly once they realise that Maneck is not seeking
employment with Dina. Ishvar is initially deferential towards Maneck because of the latters
classback- ground. However, Omprakash who is more independent does not suffer from
inferiority complex and soon befriends Maneck. The months thus spent in Dinas house helps
this friendship bloom and grow. The plight and suffering of Omprakash gives Maneck a wider
perspective on life and human suffering. Remaining cheerful and retaining a sense of humour
despite adversity are the admirable qualities that both Ishvar and Omprakash possess. Ishvar,
Omprakash, and Maneck head for Dinas house where they will share their lives for a while.
Before their lives are irretrievably shattered, the two tailors are hired to enable Dina to earn a
living through selling dresses to the Au Revoir Export Company of Mrs.Gupta. At first Dina and
the tailor Om are apprehensive about each others concern. Om tries to spy on Dina in order to
find out about the export company so that he can directly contact them and get orders.
As the novel advances, circumstances conspire to deny them their modest aspirations.
Thus they discover that there are other forces at play larger than their individual selves. Each
faces an irrevocable destiny. The fifth section of the novel deals with the story of Maneck Kohlah
who comes into the household of Dina as a paying guest. His story is the ecological denudation
of the Himalayas through the forces of 'development and the death of the indigenous enterprise
through the entry of multinationals: But the day soon came when the mountains began to leave
them. It started with roads. Engineers in sola topis arrived with their sinister instruments and
charted their designs on reams of paper. These were to be modern roads, they promised roads
that would hum with the swift passage of modern traffic. Roads, wide and heavy-duty, to replace

41

scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad vision of nation-builders and World Bank
officials. (215)
In this novel the characters suffer from a sense of rootlessness. Oppressive caste violence
drive Ishvar and Om from their traditional occupation to learn the skills of tailoring. They are
driven from the rural background to the overcrowded Bombay. Similarly, Maneck moves from
the invigorating atmosphere of his home in the hills to Bombay but her sense of independence
after her husbands accidental death keeps her away from her family. So, in this sense, all the
characters are lonely and struggling for identity and survival. Social circumstances, loneliness,
and a sense of rootlessness bring them together and forge a bond of understanding. The human
spirit displayed by these four characters of different class background and ages despite repeated
setbacks, upholds Mistrys subtle political theme of how the human being can endure and survive
with some dignity despite oppressive circumstances. Ultimately, the four main characters
struggle to maintain A Fine Balance in their lives. The struggle for survival as far as the four
characters are concerned does not have a political angle to it. They all believe that the word
'emergency is a sort of game played by the power centre. A major instance is the violence
perpetuated by Thakur Dharmsi and his action against Narayans family during the week of
parliamentary elections. The generation gap is shown in the aspir- ations of the lower castes.
Narayans father tells his son, you changed from chamaar to tailor, be satisfied with that" (143).
Tabish Khair makes a similar point when he says, the caste system as it exists in India
appears only by proxy in the novel (143). He also dismisses Mistrys depictions of caste
oppression because they are static images derived fromexpressions of a textualized Bahminical
ideal which obscure contemporary cultural and economic hegemonies. Narayan who is
educated wants to exercise his rights. He wants to actually vote in the elections and not let the

42

blank ballots were filled by the landlords men (144). Mistry expresses clearly his views on the
cynical manipulation of elections in rural India. Although Khair acknowledges Mistrys
perception of these hegemonies in the Emergency sections, he prefers to glide over them,
arguing the Mistrys individualized and reduced notion of resistance, in a A Fine Balance, can
only lead to a repetition of oppression.

FAMILY MATTERS
In post-colonial Literature, writers exemplify the oppressed social groups and ethnic
minorities which differ from mainstream majority cultures. Many of these writers focus the
glories of their culture and restore lost values and produce their own version of their social
history. The assertions of community lie in its glorious past and the deplorable present is clearly
discernible in the writings of minority Parsi writers.

43

Parsi novelists always played a vital role in English literature. Rohinton Mistry is one of
the prolific Parsi novelists. From there he endeavours to map the Parsi cultural space in India in
his narratives. Mistry seems to be deeply concerned about the marginalized Parsi existence
which is severely threatened under the impact of globalization and modernity and the sharp
decline in population made him frightened. The rising communal disharmony has intensified the
community consciousness more than ever before. This concept is exemplified in Mistrys novels.
Family Matters is the third and the latest novel published in 2002 in the line of unearthing the
ethno-religious minority traits. He delineates the domestic upheaval and middle class family
matters of a Parsi family of Bombay amid the trouble torn years of post Babri Masjid demolition
period in nineteen nineties. Family Matters crosses the boundary of nation, ethnicity and times
and achieves universality by taking up the thematic issues such as geriatrics and caring, familial
bondage and human relationship, cosmopolitan city life, secularism, corruption and
communalism, suffering and death, immigration, alienation and sense of belongingness.
In this novel, Parsi community wants to vindicate its exclusivity, racial purity and cultural
superiority. The Parsis wish to be solicited. In the novel, the protoganistNarimanVakeel
reminisces about his love affair with Lucy Bragansa, a Goan girl. His parents grieve over this
affair with a non-Parsi girl and compel him to give her up. As a result, accepting that traditional
ways were the best and realizing his responsibilities to hold up the values and the purity of his
community, he marries a forty-two year old Parsi widow with two children. One of his close
relatives, Mrs.Katwal shouts in joy that the naughty boy at last becomes a good boy, its a
double delight (13).
Nariman is a highly educated person and a professor yet he has to surrender his personal
predilections in preference to his community consciousness. He cannot have the life partner of

44

his own choice as being a Parsi his allegiance to his community is in his flesh and blood that
decides his life.Mistry highlights the Parsis efforts to preserve racial purity; he quotes a similar
experience. At the end of the novel, Narimans grandson Murad develops intimacy with Anjali, a
non-Parsi girl. Yezad is terribly upset on seeing his son Murad kissing the girl in the stair and he
makes it clear to him that his relationship with the non-Parsi girl is totally inadmissible.. He
shouts in anger, Im warning you, in this there can be no compromise. The rules, the laws of our
religion are absolute; this Maharastrian cannot be your girlfriend (469) Yezad continues his
warning of his sons you can have any friends you like, any race or religion, but for a serious
relationship, for marriage, the rules are different (469). Yezad is a representative Parsi who
affirms to preserve the purity of his race at any cost because we are a Persian race a unique
contribution to this planet and mixed marriages will destroy that (469) Mistry has deliberately
brought into the novel the love experience of both the grandfather and the grandson with nonParsi girls to reiterate that the Parsis can never change their convictions whatever be the whims
and fancies of the individual.
In free India, they are gradually losing the lofty and exalted position they once enjoyed.
At present, there are various factors which make them feel that their existence is under threat.
They have inculcated a feeling that the successive governments of India are biased towards them.
The changing social system, the increasing communal clashes and violence, triggered off by
fundamentalism suppress them to a great extent. The Parsi race is nearing its extinction that
makes them worry about the future of the race. He communicates his fears through Dr.Fitter in
the novel who bemoans the pathetic conditions of his community as follows:
In a conversation, Dr.Fitter and Inspector Masalavala are seriously discussing their grief
and concern over the future of their community. Dr.Fitters comments that the Parsis will be like

45

dinosaurs (400). The experts in demographics are confident that fifty years hence, there will
be no Parsis left(400). Dr.Fitter further humorously makes a comparison between the Parsis and
the other Indian communities: There are lots of wealthy couples living alone in new flats who
produced juse one child. Two, if were lucky. Parsis seem to be the only people in India who
follow the family planning message. Rest of the country is breeding like rabbits (401).
In Family Matters, the significant use of Bombay railway is described as a stage where
the regalia of British sovereignty were displayed, where the space was most explicitly governed
(29). Use of railway and the body is deployed in strikingly different ways as evident in
Mr.Kapurs adventure at Bombay railway station. It is in the railways that Mr.Kapur
countenances the spirit of Bombay in flesh and blood. He excitedly narrates the incident he had
encountered at the railway station with Yezad. The man lifted his hands towards the running train
and he was immediately helped by myriad of helping hands there he was, hanging, his life
literally in the hands of strangers.
The mixing, melting and merging of humanity in the railway station is totally segregated
in the name of religion.
Mr.Kapur in his words proves My beloved Bombay is being raped (151) that
encapsulate the present condition of the city. Bombay is a microcosm of the post-colonial India.
Predominant religious fanaticism and its impact of the ordinary people in Bombay are depicted
throughout the novel. The fact that all those who stand up again sty religious fanaticism are
silenced is an allegory noted in the killing of Mr. Kapur by the Shiv Senaites. Destruction of
secularism in the city symbolically alludes to demolition of anti-colonial nationalism by

46

monological forces of religious identification though Bombay is under the hold of unholy nexus
of politicians.
Race and ethnicity are the significant cultural and social categories in the
heterogenous societies (Ryan 148). Ethnic studies characterizes the ethnic identity
and inter-ethnic relations show the differences and diversity, celebrating hybridity
and multiculturalism as parameters of dynamic intercultural interaction resulting in
growth, vitality and change in the evolving geopolitical situation. The focus is on
the other cultures and their literatures highlighting singularities and individuations
of difference are exposing the hidden agenda of colonialism responsible fort
hierarchical or binary structures that are the natural offshoot of hegemonic
oppressions. To accept nativism as such is to accept the consequences of
imperialism, the racial, religious and political division imposed by imperialism
itself (Said 276).
Family Matters evidenced the Babri Mosque riots rocked at Mumbai. The demolition of
Babri Mosque was a major cataclysmic event aimed at hurting the secular polity of India. Mistry
has brought out minority communitys expostulations with the secular multicultural image of
the Indian polity. The role of the government agencies in the perpetration of atrocities against the
innocent civilians of the minority communities has been questioned. An aged Parsi couple is
burnt down in their bedroom by the rioting mobs, under the impression that Muslims were hiding
there. Mistry points out that the danger exists not only for the Muslims but also for the Parsis.
Husain, a peon at the Bombay Sporting Good Emporium, is a victim of Babri Mosque police,
which were behaving like gangsters. While narrating his woeful tale, Husain becomes an

47

authentic voice of not only the minority Muslim community but also of the authors own
Parsicommunity :
In Muslim Mohallas they were shooting their guns at innocent people. Houses were
burning, neighbouts came to throw water. And the police? Firing bullets like target
practice. These guardians of law were murdering everybody! And my poor wife and
children . . . I couldnt even recognize them (155).
Mr. Kapur, his benevolent employer, responds, More than three years have passed and
still no justice. Shiv Sena polluted the police. And now Shiv Sena has become the
government(155).
Mistrys attack against Shiv Sena at several places in this novel becomes understandable
in the wake of Shiv Senas alleged partisan role in the Babri Mosque riots and the resultant
feeling of insecurity and fear by the ethnic minorities including the Parsi Zorastrains who mostly
are concentrated in Bombay. An undercurrent of tension between the Parsi minority community
and the Hindu majority community may be taken cognizance of. However, this tension is not
impulsive enough to manifest itself into a violent confrontation causing irreparable loss to the
fragile multicultural life of Bombay. Edward Said believes that the advanced cultures have rarely
offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, ethnocentrism for dealing for dealing
with other cultures (204).
The rise of Hindutva forces on the Indian cultural and political scenario has pushed the
ParsiZorastrains to retreat to the ethnic enclosures. Neverthless, the right wing politics of Shiv
Sena and BJP haunts them in both their personal and public lives.The abusive castigation of the
Shiv Sena and BJP combine is not simply a tangential concern of Narimans birthday party

48

gossiping. The conversation further yields disquieting insights into the double standards of the
Sena verses propagation of Indian culture and at the same time organizing a pop music concert
of Michael Jackson. Mistry further makes Nariman and Jal deride the whims and caprices of the
party leadership. In another scene, when Yezad along with his wife and children is going back
after attending Narimans birthday party, he has an encounter with the drunkards at the bus stand
who ogle at Roxana and make libidinous remarks.
On being challenged by Yezad they scoff at his threat and reveal their identity. We are
Shiv Sena people, we are invincible! (44). Mr.Rangarajan, a non Parsi technician in the Parsi
hospital says that some Shiv Sanaites have infiltrated the GPO, subjecting innocent letters and
postcards to ignition if the address reads Bombay instead of Mumbai. Any person moving under
suspicious circumstances in a Parsi locality may be construed as a Shiv Sanaites. In another
incident the politician criminal police nexus is exposed by Gautum, a non-Parsi journalist.
He mentions SiveSena in his article, which is not liked by the party. Some of the goondas of the
party catch him outside his office and blacken his face with show polish.
All throughout the novel, Mistry does not let slip the opportunity to case aspersions on
the old bte-noir, the ShiveSena. Kapurs murder by the Senaites is the last straw in the series
of events involving Shiv Sena. It is a climatic moment of the sub-plot that has obstrusive impact
on the story line of the main plot. The novelist has succeeded in lending a political background
to the otherwise personal life story of a Parsi family.The ethnic minorities in India are distrustful
of the current ethno-religious politics being pursued by the dominanat majority community
group. These minorities are affirming their ethnic identities by retreating to their ethnocentric
enclosures. Within the hegemonic Hindu cultural order the assertion of ethnic identity and selfimposed ghettorization as assuasive effect on the Parsi mind beset by doubts and uncertainties.

49

Mistry has focused on the current issues, glorious Parsian past, the Indian connection and
more of the ParsiZorastrains. He discourses not only the problems of NarimanVakeel, an aged
Parsi of 79 suffering from the diseases of the old age like Parkinson and Osteoporosis but also
the ageing Parsi community on the verge of extinction. Inspector Masalavala in his conversation
with Dr. Fitter comments, The experts in demographics are confident that fifty years hence,
there will no Parsis left (412). Dr. Fitters ironic humour is not without a tinge of tragedy in it:
Extinct like dinosaurs. Theyll have to study our bones, thats all. (415) the reasons given for
the dwindling Parsi population include decreasing birth rate, Parsi men and women marrying
non-Parsis and the heavy migration to the West. Inspector Masalavala laments that in a few more
years, there wont be any Parsi left alive to tell that it was they who built the beautiful city of
Bombay and made it prosper. He sadly reflects, But it will be a loss to the whole world. When a
culture vanishes, humanity is the loser (415).
While discussing the various issues faced by the Parsi community, Mistry dwells upon
the inter-religious marriages in the community through the paradigmatic shift to Narimans love
affair in the flashback scenes which unfold Narimans past life history. In the first flashback
scene Nariman is shown surrendering to the will of his parents by agreeing to end his ill
consideredliason with a Catholic girl Lucy Braganza. For eleven years he and Lucy struggled to
create a world for themselves but they had been ground down by their families (13). Lucys
parents too were against her marrying outside her religion. Inter-religious marriage is a problem
not peculiar to the Parsi community alone. It is a worldwide phenomenon, which has usually
been resisted by the different communities. However, inter-religious marriages in the case of
Parsis should be considered in the context of their fast diminishing numbers. Parsi men and

50

women marrying outside their community is one of the major reasons for the downward trend in
population.
The diasporic Parsis took refuge in India in the eighth century A.D.yet they have never
forgotten their past. This weight carrying the past all the time with them has made the Parsi
Zorastrian religion an insular and alienated one from the majority community. Under the impact
of westernization, all Zorastrian institutions have undergone change but religion has singularly
remained unaffected. However, with the changing times, the need for reforming the debilitating
prescriptions of the fixed Parsi faith has been felt by the liberals which though has been
tenaciously opposed by the conservatives. Mistry takes up the case of performing the sacred
ceremony of navjote investiture ceremony of Sudra and Kusti into the Zorastrian religion
of the children of a Parsi mother and a non-Parsi father which is an absolute taboo for the
orthodox Parsis. Narimans father being orthodox writes a letter to the editor of a local
newspaper opposing such an installation. However, his neighbor Mr.Arjani. a liberal, writes a
fervent polemic favouring the acceptance of such children into the Zorastrian fold. This incensed
Mr. Vakeel and in his venomous letters he called Mr.Arjani a prime example of the substandard
mind whose deliberation were clearly worthless, unable to grasp the simplest tenets of the
religion and the supreme significance of navjote (133). This polemical debate took them to the
court when Mr.Arjani sued Mr.Vakeel for libel. Though Mr.Arjani lost the case due to some
technical lacuna in the libel laws, he later did not miss the opportunity to wreak vengeance on his
son through Lucy by employing her as a household drudge.
A disgusting concomitant of the geriatric Parsi community is the care of aged parents like
Nariman. Low birthrate and high average age of the marriage have left very few young couples
to look after the aged parents. Narimans middle-aged, and unmarried, stepchildren Jal and

51

Commy are not unencumbered with the responsibility of looking after the aged step-father.
Mistrys concern for the motibund community finds further manifestation in his depiction of
quotidian level of existence of the ageing and un married Parsi women. Coomys bitterness for
the step-father goes back to Narimans early married life when her mother was subjected to
extreme mental torture by Narimans resumption of old love ties with Lucy.
Coomys life story, far from being farcical, becomes a sad tale full of sympathy. Her true
feelings for the family come to light when a wedding gift with a note, For Murad and Jehangir,
on their wedding (484)., containing two pairs of gold cufflinks and two sets of shirt studs was
discovered by Jal after her death. It is this gesture, which brings tears in Roxanas eyes and
makes Jehangir reflective. Mistrys introduction of a talented violinist Daisy Icchapporia in the
life of the bed-ridden Nariman is a welcome exception, which wafts him away from the sordid
and insalubrious living conditions to the soothing world of music.NarimanVakeel in the text
represents the fate of the geriatric Parsi community; the fate of the colonial elite is similar to that
of the condition of the Parsi community in the post-colonial country. Nariman devotes a lot of
time in describing the internal rift between the conservative and the radical section inside the
Parsi community.
The

relationship

between

Mr.Kapur

and

Yezad

relationship

is

other

than

employer/employee kind, they share their lives, loss and happiness. As Mr. Kapur shows Yezad
the priceless photographs of Hughes road in 1930s Yezads memory opens into his childhood
happy days and he becomes emotional and exclaims No matter where you go, there is only one
important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemptions (221). Mr. Kapurs story is
based on youth, loss, yearning and redemption. In this case, the good old cosmopolitan Bombay
is describes in this story.

52

Mr.Kapurs photograph brings back the longing in him. In his own words he tells
Mr.Kapur, you know, in these pictures you have shown me my loss (220). Yezadsown failure
to sustain the connection becomes the books final tragedy and undermines any simple
redemptive modernistic vision of the wholeness of art.Yezad and other characters like Mr.Kapur,
Mr. Nariman and Coomy cling to their past and are ultimately lost. For instance, Coomy and
Jals collection of toys decaying in their cabinet signifies their fixation of the past. Lucys
obsession and thereby the ensuing struggle to get back her Nari symbolizes inevitability of
decay. The tragedy of Yezad is that he fails to recognize and contest the social forces behind the
transformation of his and his fathers space-just as he fails to confront the abuses of body and
space Yezad attempts to migrate, unfortunately, fizzles and makes him bitter.
Mistrys treatment of impact of Bombay riot on the citizens of Bombay. Husain is a
living example of how the residue of the riot can ravage the human beings emotionally as well as
physically. Narimans Parkinsons near vegetative condition and Jals handicap corroborate
Boehmeras scarred. Often because of the very barrier they erect themselves to protect wrap from
the outside world. Yezad, Coomy and Narimans parents wrap themselves in religion fanatically
thereby disrupting the lives of their loved ones. This is symbolic of the religious fundamentalists
who try to undermine the enshrined secularism their motherland.
In Mistrys text, symbols themselves generate an imagined nationhood. As such national
politics as symbol is exemplified by the urban menace Shiv Sena workers meddling with
Mr.Kapur asking him to change the cosmopolitan name Bombay to Mumbai and the ensuing
murder of Mr.Kapur. This is only one of more overtly allegorical moments in the text. Other
examples include homework scandal in Jehangirs classroom. Exposing bribe at the classroom
level is the nations descent into chaos.

53

Mistrys novel highlights the role of capitalism and colonialism together. Indeed, all the
machination of the capitalism and neocolonialism could not help with Yezads unemployment
after Mr.Kapurs murder, with Suresh and the unorganized il- literate cheap labour who go to
Vilas to write their letters, or with the insecurity of the highly westernized Parsi community and
the xenophobic religious fanaticism. In the novel, the exploration of religious intolerance takes
place against the crisis of the secular state in India and the rise of Hindu nationalism in the mid1990s. While the Hindu Right failed to effectively mobilize popular opinion for forty years after
independence in 1947, it gained a great deal of publicity after its karsevaks (volunteers)
destroyed the Babri Masjid (mosque) at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.
The subsequent riots between Hindus and Muslims all over India heralded the rise of the
Hindu Right in the public sphere. However, whereas the first three publications explore the
problems in the 1970s corruption of the state machinery, the vulnerability of marginalized
groups and religious minorities, and the disparity between the middle-class of Parsi community
and the poverty of the majority. His most recent novel, FamilymMatters, is set in 1995 and pays
attention to the rise of religious funda- mentalism in the public (Bombay) and private (the Parsi
community) spheres. Within the Parsi community it explores the increasing intolerance of the
Orthdox faction towards diversity; within Bombay it examines the dominance of the Shiv Sena
(a militant Hindu political party) which suppresses minorities and those individuals who demand
that India most continue to be guided by the secular principles it was founded on. Given the
significance of this historical event and the work that has been generated disciplines history,
political science, literature, theatre and film studies with regard to secularism, religious
fundamentalism, faith and communal violence in India, it is odd that very few literary critics
have engaged with Family Matters.

54

The novel pays more attention to the anxieties regarding Parsi identity in the private
sphere, and though events in the public sphere have consequences for the Parsis, these events
become a backdrop to the crisis within the community. However, Mistrys exploration of
extremism within the Parsi community is extremely significant for theorists debating the
relevance of secularism in South Asia. Peter Morey, one of the few critics to have engaged
Family Matters, has argued that the novel explores how religious intolerance in the private
sphere of the Parsi community parallels Hindu fundamentalism in the public sphere. Secularized
religious or ethnic identities construct authoritative narratives of community that highlight their
purity, claim to be culturally homogenous, and implicitly suggest their superiority over other
groups. While all community majorities and minorities are susceptible to these secularized
narratives, secularized majorities in democratic societies are the most dangerous because they
cause their numerical strength to oppress minorities.
Mistry reveals problems with this alternative through an examination of it within the
confines of the Parsi community. Mistrys solution is also unusual as most contemporary South
Asian fiction in English prioritizes faith something which recognizes and respects the
plurality of religious doctrine and personalizes the relationship between the devotee and God-as
an alternative to secularized identities.
Both the novels are skeptical of the ability of the secular, rational individual to negotiate
these problems. Mistry disagrees with this trend in contemporary postcolonial literature; he
critiques faith and emphasizes the individuals ability to discern the problems that one has to
face. The novel is narrated by a wise narrator and takes place in 1995, two years after the
Bombay riots. Though the seventy-eight-year-old NarimanVakeel stays in a specious seven-room
apartment with his middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy and Jal Contractor, their relationship is not

55

cordial, and when he breaks his ankle he is sent to live with his own daughter, Roxana Chenoy.
This development creates financial and emotional complications in Roxanas household, because
the Chenoy family, which includes her husband Yezad and their two sons Murad and Jehangir,
live in a two-bedroom apartment and are barely able to sustain a middle class lifestyle. Feeling
pressured to earn more money, Yezad, who is the manager of a shop that sells sports equipment,
schemes to earn a larger salary by trying to convince the owner, the ecumenical Mr. Kapur, to
stand for elections in order to root out corruption and challenge the Shiv Sena. His scheme has
tragic consequences when the Shiv Sena has Mr. Kapur killed. Coomy also dies; not wishing
Nariman to return, she intertionally damages the ceiling of his room and is accidentally killed
when a beam falls on her. In the meanwhile, Yezad is unable to bear the emotional and financial
strain he is under; he gradually turns to religion and becomes a devout Parsi, a far cry from his
initial skepticism towards religious faith. The epilogue takes place five years later and is written
from Jehangirs perspective.
Nariman has passed away, the Chenoy family has moved in with Jal after Coomys death,
and Yezad has turned into a religious fanatic. Tension continues to pervade the family as Yezad
demands that Murad, who is now a rebellious college student, be mindful Zoroastrian traditions.
The novel concludes with Jehangir saddened at his fathers behavior, but aware that he has to
negotiate between his responsibilities to his family and the Parsi community, and his own
individual desires.
The constitutional secularism is represented by the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium,
the shop where Yezad works, and the Jesuit school that Murad and Jehangir attend. The sports
shop becomes a symbol for the Indian nation state, as Mr. Kapur, a Hind u, is the owner, Yezad, a
Parsi, is the manager, and Husain, a Muslim, is an employee. This echoes the secularism that the

56

State disseminated through advertisements in cinema halls and national television in the 1970s
and 1980s that portrayed a variety of people marked by their religious affiliation coming together
to express their solidarity as Indians. Mr. Kapur, in the cooperative spirit of the Indian
constitution, practices unity-in-diversity: you know my policy: in our cosmopolitan shop, we
honor all festivals, they all celebrate our human and divine natures. More the merrier (253). He
takes this sentiment a step further when he decides to propagate this form of religious harmony
and contrasts the ideals of the Constitution with the Shiv Sena: If the Shiv Sena crooks can get
thousands from us, why not some gifts for the children in our neighborhood? Besides, they will
learn about other communities and religions, about tolerance, no? They hear enough from Shiv
Sena about intolerance(314).
Likewise, St. Xaviers, a Jesuit school and minority institution, becomes a replica of the
Indian nation where students learn the virtues of good citizenship. Miss Alvarez, Jehangirs
teacher, evaluates the homework of their peers in order to make them aware of the necessity of
social responsibility. However, these diverse formulations of the secular in the public sphere
breakdown in the novel. Mr.Kapurs murder at the hands of the Shiv Sena results in the closing
of the shop. It is symbol of religious harmony; Yezad and Husain are unemployed, and so forced
to rethink their futures, literally, as individuals, and symbolically, as communities (348-9). While
this breakdown reveals the failure of secularism to check the rise of the Hindu nationalism,
Mistry suggests that there are problems internal to the practice of secularism. Even in the highly
controlled space of the classroom, abstract citizenship fails to take root, and the economic
concerns of the outside world corrupt it. Wealthy students bride Jehangir, a class monitor, with
money so that they can be excused from doing their homework. Jehangir, who wishes to

57

supplement the family income that is being drained in looking after Nariman, at first takes this
money hesitantly, but then begins to aggressively extort money from students (191,210-212).
The failure of Yezad to gain employment suitable to his college degree and his inability
to sustain a middle-class life-style leads members of the family- Yezad and Jehangir to become
corrupted. Furthermore, corruption is also clearly apparent is those who are economically
successful, when the boys who bribe Jehangir belong to affluent families. Therefore, the project
to create the ethical abstract Indian citizen seems to have failed. Second, secularism as cultural
practice has not been able to cultivate an awareness and sensitivity towards religious and cultural
practices of minorities. Though they are committed to fighting the Shiv Sena and social evils
domestic violence, corruption in the political and administrative class, and gambling.
Parsi Identity deals with the anxieties of the cosmopolitan class in the public sphere in
accordance with Colonialism and the Secularization with explore the relevance of cultural values
that are associated with the Parsi community. The crisis within both social groups is not a
coincidence, but is uprooted from the impact of colonial power. This is most clearly elucidated in
the novel through the devastating effects of two significant cultural norms honesty and racial
purity that are viewed as intrinsic to Parsi identity. These norms that came to be identified with
the Parsi community were part of a broader reformulation of Zoroastrianism during colonial rule
a process that is described as secularization. Indeed, to elaborate on what the process of
secularization involves in order to fully demonstrate the implications of Mistrys critique of Parsi
honesty and racial purity in Family Matters. But the rise of the public sphere and the rights of the
autonomous individual also has significant implications for faith-based communities. While the
State protected these communities from a potentially intrusive public sphere, they, in turn, were
influenced by the rationale promoted by the state. Like the state, faith-based communities

58

prioritized the common good of the people in secular time. The debate has been further
complicated by an increasing number of Parsis who have drifted to Australia, Europe, and North
America, where they have formed their own organizations that have undermined the authority of
the Bombay Puchayat.
In The article, Parsis in India and the Diaspora in the Twentieth Century and Beyond,
John R.Hinnells discusses a growing number of organizations, such as the Federation of
Zoroastrian Associations of North America (FEZNA), Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe
(ZTFE), and World Zoroastrian Organization (WZO) that represents the growing population of
Parsis in the diaspora. Some of these organizations have begun to recognize that the community
needs to adapt to changing environments and discard some of the values appropriated. For
instance, the key issue for FEZNA is inter-religious marriages, and though the controversy has
not been resolved, the spouses and children of these relationships are quietly welcome at most
functions. The WZO has proven to be more controversial because it cognizes inter-religious
marriages and wants to accept converts into the community.
While Mistry fails to represent the more radical reformulation of secularism from the
perspective of economically marginalized social groups in Bombay, he is aware of the current
debate over inter-religious marriages within the Parsi community. Family Matters refers to the
controversy in the early nineteenth century between the Orthodox and Reformist factions, and
examines it more closely in the mid-twentieth century through the debate between Mr. Vakeel,
Narimans father - a member of the Orthodox faction and Mr. Arjani, a reformist. The conflict
between the two erupts when a Parsi priest carries out the najvote ceremony (through which an
individual is formally incorporated into the Parsi community) on a child whose mother is Parsi
and whose father is not. Mr. Arjani accuses Mr. Vakeel as a racist. Mr. Vakeel defends his

59

position on the grounds that the purity of this unique and ancient Persian community, the plinth
and foundation of its survival, (is) being compromised (113).
More significantly, the plot turns on the stigma of inter-religious marriages. Narimans
parents dissuaded him form marrying Lucy Braganza, a Christian. Obeying his parent, he enters
into a loveless marriage with a Parsi widow, Yasmin Contractor, and adopts her two children, Jal
and Coomy. Though the birth of Roxana does provide the family with a glimmer of hope, Lucy,
devastated by his actions, gradually becomes senile and attempts to commit suicide by jumping
off the roof of the building where Nariman lives. Yasmine tries to pull her off of the parapet, but
they both fall, and Nariman, who is on the roof with them, fails to hold them back.

At the end of the novel, Mr. Vakeels affiliation with the orthodox faction of the community, he
and his family did keep remnants and pictures associated with Christianity. Hinduism, and Islam.
While this act is superficially an expression of constitutional secularism, in actuality it reveals
the limits to which the Parsi community was secularized; people maintained faith in other
religious deities despite the attempts of the Anjuman to weed them out. Yezad discovers these
objects and consults the Orthodox section of the community who decide that they need to be
discarded, a signal that the kind of religious ecumenism practiced by Mr. Vakeel is no longer
appropriate. In contrast to Mr. Vakeel, who can exist with the conflicting narratives of religious
ecumenism and racial purity, Yezad is an extremist. He comes to the conclusion that Mr. Kapurs
murder, Coomys accidental death, and Jals decision to invite the Chenoy family to live with
him in Chateau Felicity have been divinely ordained because these incidents have turned him
towards religion. At the end of the novel, Yezad refuses to work and devotes his life to following

60

religious prescriptions. He imposes rules of purity and pollution on the family, and commands
Roxana to stay in seclusion when she is menstruating (428-430).
The differences between Mr. Vakeel and Yezad are explored in the novel through the
ability of faith to exist in the gaps of a secularized Parsi identity. One can accept and participate
in a diverse set of religious beliefs that are not rationally justified.Mr. Vakeel is a purist because
he is opposed to interreligious marriages. On the other hand, he follows a pre-secularized Parsi
practice of non stoicism, but worshiping deities belonging to other communities. These opposing
formulations of religion are separately examined through Coomy and Roxana. Mistry explores
religion as ideology through Coomy who practices the rituals out of a sense of duty and
prioritizes these over her responsibility to people around her. Coomy believes that it is her duty
to visit the fire temple on her mothers death anniversary while Nariman, who has just been
discharged from the hospital, remains uncared for (53). By contrast, Roxana is pragmatic about
her religious obligations, carrying them out only when she doesnt have to look after the family.
The rituals also give her a sense of peace and fulfillment, something Coomy never seems to
have, and even though Roxana encourage her sons to partake in the rituals, she does not impose
these upon them. Though Zoroastrianism in India was secularized during colonial rule and the
good Parsi was modeled on the colonial Englishman, it is problematic to explore the ritual in the
novel about twentieth century Parsis by referring to transformations in religious practice in
seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.
Mistrys exploration of the ritual is historical but it does provide me with the means to
make sense of his paradoxical perspective in the interview. Mistry makes no correlation between
the practice of the ritual and an insight into the divine. At the same time, he describes the rituals
as beautiful, which suggests that he is able to relate to them at some level that is not rational,

61

beyond the outward expression (signifier)of an idea (signified), whether it is the beauty of the
words, the intonation of the chant, or the physical gestures involved, or some combination of the
three. All the descriptions about the ritual are equally important. The first two map Yezads
transformation from an agnostic to a devout Parsi in order to retain some security in a world
public and private that is spiraling out of his control. In the first scene Yezad sees a man
praying at the free temple; he is tempted to partake in the ritual because it brings back pleasant
memories of his childhood. In the second scene, Yezad decides to visit the temple and the
description reveals how the power of ritual can provide solace. The detailed descriptions of
formal elements required to practice the ritual (wearing the cap with the seams at the back) and
the particular structure of the ritual (beginning with the prayer before offering the sacrifice) are
represented as rediscovery of a past that Yezad has voluntary given up, but realizes that he
always has access to because of a bond that depends on what might be described as a filial
structure. For instance, despite his rational assumption that the steps in the ritual are arbitrary, his
training from decades ago forced him to say the kusti before taking his offering to the fire. It
is through this instinct that he rediscovers that the can recollect the prayer with ease:
And now, to [Yezads} amazement, the words of Kem Na Mazda rose silently to his
lips as though hed been reciting the prayer all his life, morning and night, without
missing a day. Phrase upon phrase, into the next section, through Ahura Mazda
Khodai and manashi, gavashni, kunashni, intot he final preparation for retying the
kusti. (294-295).
Yezad is surprised that he (re)discovers the pleasure in practicing the ritual the chanting
and the tying of the kusti. However, the ritual does not only involve his physical senses. He is
reminded of his childhood then he visited the fire temple with his parents, but it also takes him

62

back to a distance and imagined past when he realizes that his parents, grandparents, and greatgrand parents muse have stood in front of the same fire which has been burning for a hundred
and fifty years (295-296). If the secular time of the nation-state brings disillusionment, the
highertime where ritual connects the generations to one another provides Yezad with a
community, one that, unlike the cosmopolitan elite or the secularized Parsi community, is not
ambivalent about its identity. There are a couple of moments in this section when Mistry
explains facets of the rituals for a non-Parsi audience, but by and large the leader simple remains
an observer of Yezads reawakened religious sensibility and gains a glimpse of the beauty that
Mistry sees in ceremonies and rituals of the Parsis.
If the myths of Parsi honesty and racial purity were effective strategies by which the
Parsis gained leverage during colonialism, they have to be discarded because they are an
impediment to the communitys growth in independent India. However, Mistry does not suggest
the necessity for new myths; rather, the solution that he offers in the novel is that individuals
need to maintain a fine balance between their desires and the expectations of the community
that have become increasingly ineffective and even more dangerous.
The phrase a fine balance refers to the title of Mistrys earlier novel that deals with the
Emergency of 1975 when Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, stopped the civil
rights of citizens and used it as an excuse to exhibit her power. During this period, India
Gandhis political detractors were thrown into prison, slums were destroyed in the name of
progress, and the poor were forcibly sterilized in order to limit the population. The novel deals
with four marginalized characters: Dina, a lower middle-class Parsi woman, Maneck, her paying
guest, and Ishvar and Om, two Dalit (of the Untouchable caste) tailors employed by Dina. In a
society that is being brutalized, these four characters are able to maintain their dignity by

63

depending upon one another and the barriers that divide them class, religion, and gender are
gradually broken. Towards the end of the novel, Dina, Om, and Ishvar make ethical choices and
suffer as a consequence; Dina is reduced to the status of a servant in her brothers house, and
Ishvar and Om are forced to become beggars. Despite their suffering, Dina maintains contact
with Ishvar and Om and looks after them whenever her brother is not at home. Maneck, contrast,
chooses to work abroad in order to become economically successful, and returns nine years later
to discover that Dina, Om, and Ishvar are living in poverty. Realizing that he has betrayed his
friends, he commits suicide; he fails to maintain that fine balance between his ethical principles
and a successful career.
Family Matters twice refers to A Fine Balance. Mr.Vakeel feels that the cause for
Narimans attraction towards Lucy is . . . (t)oo many books. Modern ideas have filled
[Narimans] head. He never learned to preserve that fine balance between tradition and
modernity(15). These lines turn out to be ironic because Nariman, in acquiescing to the
pressure of his parents, deserts Lucy and marries a Parsi woman. In doing so, he fails to maintain
that fain balance between the culture and traditions of the Parsi community and the changing
ideals of a modern world. Vilas refers to A Fine Balance indirectly. When he isnt working, he
volunteers as a letter writer for illiterate migrant laborers. Trying to make sense of the suffering
that he reads of in the letters, Vilas refers to A Fine Balance: A while back, I read a book about
the Emergency. A big book, full of horrors, real as life. But also full of life, and the laughter and
dignity of ordinary people. One hundred percent honest made me laugh and cry as I read
it(181). Vilas therefore represents the authorial figure of Mistry in the novel, who seems to be
suggesting that in a world where the old myths of community are no longer relevant, the

64

individual must maintain a fine balance between tradition and modernity and remain ethical
despite the violence and the corruption, in order to live with a sense of purpose and dignity.
If Vilas, who remains alienated, is the authorial persona and Jehangir becomes its
conscience. The novel traces the development of Jehangirs character over the period that
Nariman comes to live with them. As a nine year old boy, Jehangir is captivated with his picture
puzzles, whose pieces he puts together to create the perfect serene scene. Beholding the
emotional and economic problems of his family, Jehangir believes that he could solve them as he
does his puzzles, in order to create the happy harmonious middle-class family, However, by the
end of the novel he becomes aware that despite his desire to inhabit Enid Blytons novels and his
puzzles, they dont help him address the problems that he sees around him.
The epilogue of the novel, written from Jehangirs perspective, takes place five years
later, and becomes key to comprehending Mistrys exploration of the problems within the
extended Parsi family (the Vakeel Contrcator Chenoy family). At the age of fourteen Jehangir
has matured, and in the process of giving away his Enid Blyton books and his picture puzzles, he
realizes that (t)here is only one puzzle worth struggling with now (426). In the immediate
context, this statement refers to the information he has recently learnt about the love triangle
between Yasmin, Lucy and Nariman.
He realizes that there is no absolute truth to the tragic event of Yashmins and

Lucys

death: the picture is still not complete. Like some strange jigsaw puzzle of indefinite size. Each
time I think its done, I find more pieces. And its form changes again, ever so slightly (426).
However, given the larger problem in the epilogue the quarrels between a religious Yezad and a
secular Murad, as well as Roxanas inability to realize the problem with her perspective the

65

puzzle refers to Jehangirs desire to maintain a balance between these warring perspectives. The
puzzle becomes the dominant metaphor for navigating life that is now morally ambiguous; it
replaces myth which asserted a confidence in the secularized norms of the Parsi community
that helped it navigate the past. At the same time, an identity that is community based, is
displaced in favor of the secular individual.
Mistry recognizes the importance of community, but he argues that community identity
needs to be tempered by the individual who must be vigilant of the dangers of religion-asideology and religion-as-faith. At the same time, Mistry cautions against the confidence of the
secular individual. At the end of the novel, Murad seems to be the opposite of Yezad; he is
liberal, dates a Hindu girl, wears his hair shots, and is critical of Yezads narrow interpretation of
Zoroastrianism. Yet this difference between them is only apparent because Murad santagonism
towards religion is equally fanatical and absolute: he compares Yezad to Hitler, intentionally
offends him by disobeying the purity rules at home, and mocks his father, as opposed to trying to
reason with him. Each becomes intolerant of the values of the other. Ironically, Murad is an
extreme version of a younger Yezad, who wore his hair long in college (which was considered
rebellious) and was dismissive of religion. While Jehangir is saddened that his real father is
gone, (and has been) replaced by this non-stop-praying stranger (434), he still respects his
father, remains obedient to his parents, and carried out the rituals and the traditions that are
considered important by them.
Mistry also dealsNarimans conflicting family consisting of his two middle aged step
children in the novel The Family Matter, Coomy and Jal. Narimans sickness has augmented by
his broken ankle which forced him to depend upon Coomy and Jal for the daily necessities.
Coomys harshness reaches its height when she devises a scheme to send Nariman under the care

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of Roxana, her sister and Narimans real daughter and the complexities of the narrative starts
from this point. Roxana lives a peaceful and contented life in a small flat of Pleasant Villa with
Yezad and her two children Murad and Jehangir. The inclusion of a new member in a small and
already stuffed house proves painful both from emotional and financial point of view. Narimans
staying with Chenoys for the next few months changes the lives of everyone, they struggle, they
grow, they learn and they endure (Dodiya 87). Despite of this, Roxanas selfless devotion and an
urge to be a dutiful daughter prompts her to shoulder the responsibility of Nariman without any
hesitation. But Yezad is quite angry with the mischief done to them by Coomy and Jal for
pushing them in an acute economic instability.
Narimans inclusion has proved to be an additional burden on Yezads household.
Inundated by the ever increasing financial worries he tempts himself to an idea of theft involving
VikramKapur, his eccentric employer at Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium. After the death of
MrKapur, MrsKapur announces her intention to wind up the shop. Before doing that she wishes
to give Yezad a months salary in advance despite ignoring his fourteen year service. With this all
the hopes of betterment of monetary circumstances shatter and Yezad plunges into a whirlwind
of contemplation about the future that ultimately makes him a Parsi fanatic who seeks solace in
the sacred texts and praying at the fire temple.
Mistry through this transformation of a confident, resolute and jovial man into a religious
dogmatist, tries to prove the necessity of religiosity in this so called modernised world. Jal has
shown them a way out from the gloomy future by suggesting reunion in Chateau Felicity and sell
the small flat for ensuring a livelihood. Family Matters with its narrative strategies show the
whole world can be made to inhabit one small place and that the family can become the nexus of
the collective and the universal.

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Mistry conveys everything from the dilemmas among Indian Parsis as a marginalized
community to the wider concerns of corruption and communalism. This novel like his first one
presents Shiv Sena as a Hindu fundamentalist force fully involved in rioting, looting and burning
the poor and the innocent people. Hussain, a peon is a tragic victim of the Babri Masjid riot. His
wife and children were killed in riot. In Hussains own utterance:
The police were behaving like gangsters. In Muslim Mohallas, they were shooting their
guns at innocent people. Houses were burning, neighbours came out to throw water. And
the police? Firing bullets like target practice. These guardians of the law were murdering
everybody! And my poor wife and children I couldnt even recognize them. (FM 148)
Although, Indian secularism spreads in The Family Matters, the depiction of the religious milieu
of the nation Family Matters incorporates people from more religions than the other two Mistrian
fictions. In this novel Chenoy family represents Parsis, MrKapur is a Hindu, Hussain is the
representation of Muslim, Lucy Braganza is a Christian and there are references of Jains in the
plot of the novel. The novel also refers to several festivals from different communities like
Diwali, Christmas, Id, Navroze, Baisakhi, Buddha Jayanti, and Ganesh Chaturthi which prove
the basic foundation of national integrity. We also catch a glimpse of secular India through the
character of MrKapur who embodies Indian secularism. He promotes secular and
accommodative Bombay as his religion (FM 361). He employs a Parsi manager and a Muslim
peon. He opens his shop on Christmas Day to promote peace and harmony and offers sweets
(FM 368). He decides to celebrate all religious festivities in his shop (FM 159).
These fundamentalist forces used to unleash terror over peoples minds. The novelist
wails over the ruthless and oppressive measures taken by these religious fanatics. They are

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responsible for ruining the multicultural and multilingual peaceful coexistence of the nation. It
speaks volumes about how a religious minority like Parsis gets trampled under the sense of
insecurity. Yezad also sums up the attitude of the Shiv Sena as: South Indians are anti-Bombay,
Valentines Day is anti-Hidustani, Film stars born before 1947 in the Pakistani Part of Punjab are
traitors to the country. (FM 32) Mistry seems to put a negative propaganda and the politics of
cultural terrorism through the delineation of this communalism.
Mistrys larger point here is that one must constantly acknowledge and engage ones
religious identity to realize its strength and weakness. The book, therefore, emphasizes the
perspective of the secular individual, for in the contemporary world where the myths of
community are no longer adequate. The solution is not to retain old myths like honesty and
racial purity or to create new ones. It is rather to prioritize the perspective of the individual,
who must view life as a puzzle to carefully engage with the complexities and contradictions
between the desires of the individual and the claims of community.

CONCLUSION
Mistry focuses on literature to reflect the happenings in the society. Societies always
show the partiality among individuals who are born with differences both cultural and
economical backward. India has been recognized as sub-continent due to its variety in
language, culture, economy, dress and caste. Religion and language-discriminate the people.
Further, such divisions are provoked to degrade among individuals and the society. Especially,
the discrimination in caste and religion has affected the social institutions and the unity in nation.
Mistry portrays broken human personalities under the socio-economic suppression. He motivates

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the individual to adopt intimacy with others in order to fulfill their space in the social milieu.
Heinsists that the untouchables are humiliated in the name of caste.
Mistry portrays both the simplicity of rural life and complexities of city life. The shift is
remarkable towards an urban and modern situation. Mistry involves both history and geography
to prove his socio-political views in his select fictions A Fine Balance and Family Matters.
Employing his characters in historical and geographical contexts, he tries to achieve a balance in
characterization. He depicts the obsessed characters in relation with history. A Fine Balance also
occurs in the form of positive aggression. Positive aggression occurs when individuals act across
barriers and form relationships.He believes that due to the impact of socio-political measures, the
characters in his novel face oppression. Geographically, Mistry proves his accuracy in his
descriptions of the towns, villages and the hills.
Mistrys choice of the locale and thetheme is to be appreciated for its
uniqueness. His social vision is backed by concreteproposals for a better society. His

envision about society is to improve the bonding between individuals. He tries to instruct that the
society is to be sensitive and un-bias. Since there is no spirit among the members of the society,
there remains a social imbalance in the society. The writings of Mistry bring awareness and
awakening to a successive level. His style is casual and not based on a closely knit structure.
He picturizes the life style of the middle-class adopted in Bombay. Though he wants to
be objective and to be away from the paris culture, Mistry finds it difficult to be away from Parsi
identity. Parsis involves in business and they belong to an urban community. Their religious
perception is strange to Indian religious and cultural ethos. Parsis are introverts and safeguard
themselves by self-protective instincts.

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Mistrys characters are too real to be ignored as figment of imagination. Ishvar and Om
Prakash are characters who resemble most of the Indians suffering in the name of untouchability.
The poignant human situations in which they are placed and the human relationships which
undergo their course of life, are portrayed with a serious trace of realism. In Mistrys second
novel A Fine Balance the search for identify is processed by a term of four: Dina, Ishvar, Om
Prakash and Maneck. The four major characters from different social and economic backgrounds
mingle with each other as a joint force in order to prove their self-identify and position in the
society. Dina Dalal, the protagonist of the novel suffers at her younger age due to the death of
her parents in progression. She is dominated by her elder brother who wants to protect her like a
bird in a cage. Dina is a humorous lady and independent in nature. Her brother who is a male
chauvinist forces her to marry a gentleman of his choice. Though she is upset with the death of
her parents, Dina protests her brother by marrying a compounder named RustomDalal whom she
loves. But unfortunately, Dinas husband dies in an accident. She prefers to be an independent
woman. With the help of the tailors Ishvar and Om Prakash who are referred by Maneack, the
son of Dinas classmate. Dina becomes a dressmaker. The Emergency of 1975 shatters all her
hopes and leaves her in despair. She is forced to get her brothers support.
The tailors Ishvar and Om go in search of their identification in the metropolitan city.
Their forefathers belonged to a lower caste and were being suppressed by the notions of caste
system. Ishvars father wanted to change identity as leather worker and so he sent Om and Ishvar
to learn tailoring to have a better survival. After learning, the tailors move towards Bombay and
get placed under Dina.
In the beginning, Om and Ishvar find uncomfortable with Dina by knowing that she
belongs to urban community. They doubt her and even try to get the direct orders from the

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companies, because they feel that they are dominated by Dina. Both feel that it is not easy to
adjust with and lead a better life in metropolitan city. They find they have lost their identity with
their village and city dwellings. They stay in a small shack in the slum but are rushed from there
because of the city beautification project. Left alone on the street, they search for shelter. Even
Dina refuses them to stay in her house.
Besides, Om who is Not yet married is castrated. In the act of preventing Om from
castration, Ishvar loses both his legs and left in the street as a beggar. The life of these two tailors
ends in numbness. Maneck and his family have got settled in a hillside. His father Farokhs long
walks during the evening times make him to be free from tensions. Both Maneck and Farokh feel
comfortable with their companions, the fall and the forest. The government plans to connect the
city to the hills but that is a great blow to the Kohlahs family and the other villagers; they do not
believe that the plan might give more job opportunities in the city side. Manecks father sends
him to Bombay to pursue higher studies. Like Ishvar and Om, Maneck shows his disinterest to
lead his life in the city. Moreover, he is irritated by the seniors in the college hostel. Finally, he
decides to stay as a paying guest in Dinas house. He develops friendship with the tailors. He
realizes he has lost his originality and space due to migration. Through the life style adopted by
the four characters, Dina, Ishvar, Om Prakash and Maneck, the novel A Fine Balance goes in
search of identity in various aspects. Dina has been evicted from her house, has lost her struggle
for independence and stays with her brother. Walking away from Dinas house it is perturbing to
see Ishvar and Om prakash handicapped and leading lives as beggars. The culmination of these
series of staggering events is that it drives home a lesson of extreme despair and shows the
sensitive Maneck loses in the struggle to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.
Rohinton Mistry emerges as the foremost Parsi political novelist for his consistent depiction of

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ideology and politics in his novels. Various episodes in the novel reveal Mistrys sympathy for
the oppressed and antipathy to authoritarian.

In the next novel Family Matters, Mistry proves himself s a matured writer. The narrative
technique adopted by Mistry successfully applies the flashback narration with fine mingling of
the time present and the time past. The protagonist Nariman is the only protagonist who is
depicted most of the time as a sick person. Mistry proves that his theme is around a silent
character. Nariman suffers throughout his lift. In his younger days, he is dominated by his
parents. He loves a Christian girl, Lucy but he is warned by his community and his family
members not to marry her. By marrying Yasmin, who belongs to his community, a widow with
two children, he recognizes himself that he has lost his identity. His married life with his wife
and stepchildren leads him to suppression.
Nariman is always be in the memories of Lucy. He plans to meet Lucy even after his
marriage. He feels happy when he comes to know that Lucy as servantmaid in his neighbouring
house. He secretly meets Lucy. By knowing, Yasmin angers at Nariman. She quarrels with him
in front of her children and this incident ends in bad impression about him in the minds of the
two stepchildren. Thus, Nariman attempts to find identity as a true lover or loyal husband. After
the death of Lucy and Yasmin, Nariman is left alone without mental and moral support. His
stepchildren Coomy and Jal develop grievances against their father. The only consolation
Nariman receives from his own daughter Roxana. After Roxanas marriage, Nariman has to stay
with his stepchildren. Coomy is cunning and Jal is a good for nothing fellow. Nariman is warned
by Coomy not to go for evening walks. When Nariman returns home one evening with scratches,

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she scolds him for his irresponsible action. So, Nariman realizes of being suppressed from acting
freely in all phases of his life.
The characters in Family Matters are integrated with others but there is coordination
among them. Other than Nariman, Roxana, the direct daughter of Nariman, has caught between
her father and her husband. She has to nurture her father amidst the opposition of her husband.
The bedpans and their foul odour and the increased budget of the medical expenses of Nariman
irritate her husband, Yezad. Roxana finds difficult to offer separate place for Nariman as they
live in a tiny two-room apartment presented by her father as marriage gift.
Roxana is afraid of her husband and her son Jehangir prefers illegal route to earn money
in order to meet the expenses but could not do anything. So, Roxana is also searching for her
identify as a dutiful daughter and humble wife, which she acquires to a greater extent through
her generous character. Coomy, on her part, wants to lead a comfortable life at the expense of
others misfortunes. She has no attachment towards her father though Nariman is unbiased
towards his stepchildren and his daughter. This is because of her mothers preaching of her
fathers relationship with Lucy. Yezad wants to earn money by flattering his boss, Mr. Kapur to
contest in the forthcoming election. His boss wants to take part in the municipal election to do
something to retain the old traditions of Bombay but the intention of Yezad is to reach high status
in the society. He happens to fail in all his illegal attempts to earn money including his gambling
in lottery. All the characters, Nariman to Yezad fail to possess their identity as independent
individuals. Its idealism tempered by in search of an individual and self-sacrifice against the
odds of squalid poverty and pessimism.

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Characters in Family Matters are trapped in complex actions and reactions in their
dealings with each other. Physical corruption and the inevitable change are linked with the social
and political corruption which becomes the main characteristic of modern Bombay.
Mistry stresses that historical situation involves construction of new identity in the nation
to which he has migrated and a complex relationship with the cultural history of then nation he
has left behind. He dramatizes the pangs of alienation in which adaptation in India and expulsion
in Canada are similar in function. Mistry, therefore, successfully evokes a sense of loss and
nostalgia in the diasporic experience and the alienation of Parsis in India.
There is no solution for the rights of diasporas but only a constant striving to reach higher
ground. A Fine Balance brings the picturization of metropolitan Indian existence that generally
ignored by many post-colonial Indian writers in English. But, Mistry does not have the
ideological vision to move beyond the particular event. All these works predict the same
essential structure, the tangled life and concerns of their Parsi protagonists. The works A Fine
Balance and Family Matters project the individual struggles of various characters; continue to
portray Mistrys concern with bearing witness to a dying community and humanity. The close
connection between Parsi and Bombay is portrayed in his novels. Mistrys works show how
humans require solutions to their problems.
Mistry shows his concern towards the downtrodden and the innocent people. He exposes
the way the downtrodden has been exploited. Though Rohinton Mistry belongs to different
religion and culture, he has experienced the problems of untouchables in his works. One can
obviously find that he is more concerned with the basic humane for every human being. Mistry
angers at the lack of humanitarianism. The wealthy are treated as superior and the poor people

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who lived in rural areas could not compete with them. Hence, the rich became richer and the
poor became poorer. Further, the people in the wheel of affairs exploited the poor people.He has
succeeded in maintaining a balance between scepticism and affirmation, faith and bigotry,
family nurture and control, and once again given us something absolutely painfully pleasurable:
a bittersweet rendition of life in its most ordinary intimate setting.
Indians who belong to high society began to exploit the lower class innocent people.
Rohinton Mistry depicts the untold miseries of the oppressed. Thus, Mistry is the champions of
the downtrodden and the innocents. He handles many common problems of great political,
religious, economic and literary activities in day-to-day life in their respective nation and the
suppressed are also offered valuable solution to problems. He is much worried about the criteria
of materialism with which every man was counted at the time of the state of emergency. He
gives his voice in support of those who are affected by the political unrest. In his novel A Fine
Balance, he pasteurizes the sufferings of the bottom of the society. Low class people are
humiliated by the upper class people. No one is ready to show any mercy on the humanitarian
grounds. He condemns vehemently at the exploitations of the powerful people over the poor and
the downtrodden. Mistry uses his works as a weapon against the exploiters. He conveys his
message to exclude the perception of the exploitation of people to the world through his novels.
He does not stop with attacking the social evils in the irrespective society. But also conveys
better solutions to those social inequalities and evils through his works. His novels have made
some tremendous changes in their respective society. It enables the readers to respect the feeling
of other men as they do to their own. It paves way for the peaceful life on the earth. By affirming
his faith in humanity, Mistry has successfully demonstrated that hope springs eternal in the

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human heart. Everyone must feel that the human beings are all equal, liberal, and belong to one
fraternity.
Mistrys argument for a fine balance between the secularized narrative of the Parsi
community and the individuals desires are nuanced. It brings a solution to an important dilemma
in Postcolonial Studies. The assertion of the rights of minority communities is stressed, while
protecting the individual from being imposed upon by the community. Family Matters reveals
the dangers of the secularization of religion championed by Charles Taylor, who assumes that
with the creation of a public sphere. The abstract individual attempts to participate in a range of
political, social, and cultural organizations. Instead, Mistry agrees with the postcolonial critic
David Scott, who argues that as secularism in South Asia was imposed through colonialism.
Secularized religious communities began to claim their superiority over other groups, and in the
contemporary ages, these secularized identities have created and continue to perpetuate conflicts
by highlighting their uniqueness and difference. Like Scott, Mistry questions with these
secularized narratives. Family Matter determines that the values of Parsi honesty and racial
purity, which the community successfully incorporated during colonial rule, encroach on their
development in an independent India. Mistry demonstrates that Parsis depend on this stereotype
to intentionally distinguish themselves from other Indians. This proves to be a valid means to
define Parsi identify in colonial India when the community collaborated with the British.
The honesty of Parsi intentionally perpetuates a sense of superiority, but ultimately,
separates itself from other Indians. Furthermore, it also reinforces the idea of racial purity and
involves in the opposition of inter-religious marriages. Mistry suggests that the crisis of a
secularized identity is to conceive of these norms as myths or narratives that are not absolute
truths. He believes that myths have the power to perpetuate certain models of behavior. Now that

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they are inadequate to resolve the problems of Parsis, they believe that it is necessary that these
myths be discarded. However, despite Mistrys criticism of secularized identifies, he disagrees
with Scott, who suggests that communal rights provide an alternative. Communal rights, as
Family matters demonstrates, would allow powerful divisions within communities to dictate a
religious value or belief. By not allowing inter-religious marriages, the more extreme sections
within the Parsi Orthodx faction impose further stereotypes on women. Mistrys criticism here
coincides with those of a number of critics, especially feminists, who point out that communities
assert the patriarchal system, and in the name of communal rights, women are supposed to bear a
greater burden than men.
Being aware of the current debate over identity within the Parsi Community, Mistry
suggests a nuanced solution to this problem. His understanding of secularism in the public
sphere is limited. If Mistry is critical of secularized religious identities and communal rights, his
solution to the riddle is to emphasize the importance of the secular individual, who is a key to
manage the demands of both entities. He seems to be closely aligned to Taylor when making thus
argument as he puts the burden of responsibility on the individual. However, he differs from
Taylor in his recognition that religious or ethnic identities have a strong impact on individuals
and so cannot be easily discarded. Therefore, individuals must be aware of the importance of
religion and directly engage with it, and by doing so they can be aware of its strengths and its
weakness. In this context, the puzzle becomes the ruling metaphor to comprehend the
complexities of a world in which society is in flux: the myths that sustained the Parsi community.
In secular India, the suppressed have been displaced by religious extremism in the public
and the private spheres. Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies
by Kumkum Sangari and In the Name of the Secular by Ruston Bharucha, among others.

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Constitutional secularism promoted by middle-class characters, like Mr.Kapur, has failed to

create religious harmony; he is unaware that contemporary theorists of secularism, like
Bharucha, have argued that secularism is most effective when it is democratized. Bharucha
examines how religious tolerance evolves through interaction and dialogue between those social
groups that are most vulnerable to religious violence. It is briefly described about the mohallas
committees in Bombay formed by working-class Hindus and Muslims to prevent inter-religious
riots. He is not able to present this position, partially because he lives in Canada but also because
he belong to a cosmopolitan community, It is difficult in engaging with a politics other than its
own.
Furthermore, his exploration of cosmopolitanism is marked by a sense of uncertainty.
Thus, while a cosmopolitan culture is celebrated in the private sphere. He suggests that this
culture, with its Western referents, has no correlation to the lived reality of the English
speaking middle class in India. Towards the end of the novel, Mistry seems to be critiquing
cosmopolitan values as Jehangir gets rid of his Enid Blyton books and picture puzzles,
acknowledging that these fantasies have nothing to do with his daily experiences. Yet the
anglicized values that Jehangir was inculcated with as a child still remain; at the very end of the
novel, he and Jal attend the Bombay Symphone Orchestra (415-416). Mistry demonstrates the
necessity of paying attention to ones religious identity as one cannot easily escape it. It is
equally important to inhabit it apart from its class identity, to acknowledge ones ambivalence
about it, and to remain aware of its limitations.
The works of Rohinton Mistry, in general, deal with the dominant issues of communal
influence, social intrusions, political upheavals, imbalanced, execution of government schemes
religious conflicts and intolerance so on.

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The characters Ishvar and Om Prakash In the novel A Fine Balance are very much
affected by the government schemes like Beautification Brigade of the city Bombay and Family
Planning Programme. Ishvar and Om Prakash are forced to get sterilized and as a consequence
Ishvar is crippled and Om is castrated. The social oppression is evident in the treatment of
Avinash and his sisters. Avinash is beaten to death by the police and all his three sisters are
forced to commit suicide.
In the novel Family Matters,Mistrys writings will be a perennial source of inspiration for
the Parsis to preserve the identity in future. His narratives seem to be a constant battle with the
changing time and pace of modernity to preserve the customs, traditions, heritage, rituals, ethics
and language.The protagonist Nariman, a 79 year old retired professor is victimized due to
communal bigotry. Rohinton Mistry discloses his aversion towards the ideology of the Hindutva
outfit Shiv Sena. VikramKapur, an employee of Bombay Sporting Good Emporium is brutally
murdered by the Shiv Senaites. The reference about the demolition of Babri Mosque, the
enforcement of RSS ideology towards the commoners, the atrocities of Shiv Sena and so on are
repeated by referred to in this novel. It is analyzed that the oppressed characters in the select
novels of Rohinton Mistry have undergone a lot of sufferings and have become victims of social
suppression and political repression in the Indian social milieu.