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Parsi Diary in Canada – a Postcolonial reading of literary fiction by Rohinton Mistry

Sudeep Pagedar (2009)

The Indian Diaspora came into being in colonial times, with the migration of Indians to the various nations under the

Union Jack. Crossing ‘kaala paani’ (euphemism for ‘the seas’) they would arrive in an alien land and have to learn to live with its

alien culture and customs. There, according to Nilufer E. Bharucha, these ‘diasporics’ would fulfill a most important function –

that of ‘imaging India to the world’ .1 The Indian Diaspora has, over the years, flourished, producing many a gem in the field of

literature. This paper will deal with one of those literary gems – Rohinton Mistry.

Rohinton Mistry, a writer who is now based in Canada, was born and brought up in India in a time when Mumbai was still known

as Bombay, and Flora Fountain had not yet been conferred the official sobriquet of ‘Hutatma Chowk’. A resident of Bombay

throughout his childhood and till early in his adulthood, Mistry migrated to Canada in 1975, in the midst of all the upheaval and

controlled chaos that the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi had brought on by declaring a state of Emergency. Later on, the two

year ‘1984’ that began in 1975 would be sublimated into A Fine Balance, a brilliant novel by Mistry; simple – but not simplistic –

despite the complexity of the non-linear narrative. Rohinton Mistry began his career in literary fiction in Canada, starting with the

publication of his first work, a collection of short stories about the Parsi community in Bombay, Tales From Ferozsha Baag. He

then went on to write novels like Such a Long Journey, A Fine Balance and his latest, Family Matters.

Although a Canadian of Indian origin who writes in English, Mistry cannot be typified as merely a writer of the Indian Diaspora

or a writer ‘in exile’. Mistry writes of the nature of Parsi experience in India; specifically, Bombay. In Family Matters,

Mistry goes one step further and writes of a class of Parsi who is alienated even more than others of his faith - the expatriate Parsi.

As R. Latha Devi explains,”Expatriate Parsis are thrice removed: at first they fled from Iran to India, then from India to foreign

countries, and there they do feel alienated.”2 She goes on to argue that Mistry, himself an emigrant, regrets this sort of alienation

and that this is expressed through a character in Family Matters, Yezad, who dreams of emigrating to Canada.

1
Bharucha, Nilufer E. (Author), Jain, Jasbir (Series Editor) Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures and Transcultural Spaces, Jaipur, 2003
2
Devi, R. Latha, Family Matters: A Critical Study, published in The Novels of Rohinton Mistry: A Critical Study, Sarup, New Delhi, 2004
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This is how Mistry’s novels are traditionally read – as a perspective on the Parsi experience in the city of Bombay, and as a

comment on the ways of this community in exile. This paper, however, will examine Rohinton Mistry’s literary work within the

context of Postcolonial theory. The aim is to establish that Mistry’s writing can be read as Postcolonial discourse.

It is necessary, in order to locate Mistry’s work within the framework of postcoloniality, to outline its nature and scope,

without assuming a single, final definition of the theory. It would be more useful to list some of the main issues that postcolonial

theory engages with, which are outlined in ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms’, ed. M.H. Abrams. In addition to rejecting any sort of

master or ‘meta’ narrative, postcolonial theorists emphasize the ‘hybridization’ of the languages and cultural practices of former

colonies under Imperialists. This means ‘writing back’ or providing what are known as ‘counter-texts’ as alternatives to the

hegemonic master narratives of the West.3 As further stated in ‘A Glossary…’, an important question arises; that of ‘how, and to

what extent a subaltern subject, writing in a European language, can serve as an agent of resistance against … the very discourse

that has created its subordinate identity’.

An aspect of Mistry’s novels, which allows them a postcolonial reading, is his treatment of characters in various positions of

power and how his characters engage with both, their geography and politics, often creating situations wherein the boundaries

between the two dissolve, interspersing them with each other. The subaltern is given a voice in the writings of Rohinton Mistry,

reinforcing the perspective that the author’s work can be located within the scope of postcolonial literature. Having said this, it is

important to state that Mistry does not privilege his subaltern characters over the dominant ones who almost always seem to

prevail over the former. While some might see this as forking away from the observed pattern in many works of postcolonial

literature, this tactic works in favour of Mistry’s writing as it serves to establish the ground reality of the nature of the present-day

divide between classes or groups, whether social or ethnological.

3
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. & Tiffin, H., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Routledge, London, 1989
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To quote Jaydipsinh Dodiya & Pramod K. Nayar, ”The ethnocentric nature of his work discerns the assertion of difference and

fragmentation of identity, creating its own space within the national and diasporic context. The author’s own expatriate position

makes him aware of the element of alienation. He is an existential outsider on one hand and on the other, ‘is on the periphery

even in India,’ as Nilufer Bharucha puts it, ‘so his discourse challenges and resists the totalization of the dominant culture within

India itself.’”4 Thus, while Mistry’s novels might not ‘write back to Empire’, they manage to provide an adequate response by

engaging with the problem of internal colonization. This is evident as in the example of a conversation between travelers in a

second-class suburban local train’s compartment, in the prologue of A Fine Balance:

”The train still showed no sign of moving. …

’Maybe it has something to do with the Emergency,’ said someone.

’What emergency?’

’Prime Minister made a speech on the radio early this morning. Something about country being threatened from inside.’

’Sounds like one more government tamasha.’ “5

Postcolonial literature of Mistry’s sort evolves from a process known as ‘indigenous decolonization’ which refers to the effect

postcolonial theory has on indigenous communities of a formerly colonized nation. Colonization has evolved what is referred to as

a ‘binary’, that is to say, an artificially created distinction between two peoples or cultures. Since it was in the interests of the

European powers to divide the world into ‘white’ and ‘black’, the Manichean binary of the ‘Self’ as opposed to (not ‘and’) the

‘Other’ was formed by them. Beliefs and opinions about other people are, in this manner, influenced by such binaries, and it

follows that any interaction with them would be coloured by the same. It is up to Postcolonial discourse to engage with such

‘otherisation’ and counter it. In the context of literary theory, postcolonialism intends to counter its predecessor by replacing the

system of binaries - the ‘Orient’ vs. the ‘Occident’, in literature, for example - with a certain ‘transculturalization’ through which

the divisive tactics of the latter may be recognised and transcended. This is done in order to evolve a hybridity that would perhaps

not allow the formerly colonized nation to ‘reclaim’ its past, but would certainly vindicate it by facilitating a post colonial

understanding of its erstwhile colonial identity.

4
Dodiya, Jaydipsinh, Nayar, Pramod K., The Novels of Rohinton Mistry: A Critical Study, Sarup, New Delhi, 2004
5
Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1996, Gopsons Papers Ltd., Noida, 2003
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Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, talk about how postcoloniality poses a challenge to the norms of language. They say, in reference to

the English language, ‘the most interesting feature of its use in postcolonial literature may be the way in which it also constructs

difference, separation, and absence from the metropolitan norm’. 6 Mistry, in Salman Rushdie’s vein, also ‘chutnifies’ English,

blending it with dashes of Gujarati, Hindi and even Marathi at times, in order to achieve the hybridity that is often characteristic of

postcolonial literature. An excerpt from Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey reads,

”Toba, toba! I began to feel something wet on my shirt. And guess what it was. A dubbawalla. Standing over me, holding the

railing. … I said nicely, “Please move … my shirt is getting wet, meherbani.” But no kothaa, as if I was not there. …”7

Homi Bhabha, an eminent theorist of postcolonial studies states that the process of evolving a colonial identity involves two

things: identification with the colonial Other – in this case, the British – and also a disavowal of the same. Such identity, thus, can

be considered a site of hybridity that lies between the colonizer and the colonized.

An apt example of this would be the Parsi community, with its almost filial affection for India’s former Lords and Masters

juxtaposed with a deep-rooted desire to have an identity of its own; to be considered Indian, yet maintain a cultural distance. This

conflict manifests as a sort of cultural hybridity within the Parsi community, which Rohinton Mistry addresses in his works,

bringing it out through what Peter Morey has described as ‘migrations and losses’ of his characters. Morey also states that this has

been the reason for some critics viewing Mistry’s primary characters as exemplary postcolonial subjects, giving the example of

the critic Ajay Heble, who, in his essay on narrative techniques (‘“A Foreign Presence in the Stall”: Towards a Poetics of

Cultural Hybridity in Rohinton Mistry’s Migration Stories’), argues that ‘postcolonial identity is always already a hybridized

formation’. 8 He states that the protagonists of Mistry’s novels embody this, arguing further, that that the short stories by the latter,

display ‘appropriation’. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (The Empire Writes Back) this is a characteristic of

postcolonial literature. But, could this appropriation that Mistry performs through the agency of his characters, have unintended

effects?

6
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. & Tiffin, H., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Routledge, London, 1989
7
Mistry, Rohinton, Such a Long Journey, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1991, 1992
8
Morey, Peter, Rohinton Mistry, Manchester University Press, 2004
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Amit Chaudhuri, the editor of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, believes that Indo-Nostalgic writing – which is

almost always in English – employs devices such as hybrid language, bagginess, the non-linear narrative, etc. in order to bring out

Indian conditions, and that such ‘Indianness’ causes the postcolonial novel to become a setting of ideal or rather, idealized

hybridity ‘by which the West celebrates not so much Indianness … but its own historical quest, its reinterpretation of itself”. 9

However, Mistry’s writings seem to resist not just the pre-1947 colonization by foreign nations, but especially, the internal

colonization that India has undergone in the years after political Independence. All of Mistry’s novels can be read as scathing

critiques of political events which drastically affected the lives of millions of Indian citizens. His very first novel,

Such a Long Journey, fictionalizes the 1971 Nagarwala embezzlement controversy, wherein a cashier of the State Bank of India

claimed to have received a call from the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, instructing him to hand over sixty lakh rupees to a

Bengali man. Mistry interweaves this with the main plot of the novel, and thus, by crossing the ‘personal with the political’10,

allows his characters to engage with the larger politic of Governmental suppression of information that could threaten its position

at the Centre. His second novel, A Fine Balance, may be read, at one level, as a vitriolic comment on the ‘Emergency’ declared by

Indira Gandhi’s Congress government in the year 1975. It is not merely an accusation; the book lends itself to readings at multiple

levels, and is a far more complex work than his previous one. This novel has claim to two important achievements in the context

of postcolonial studies. The first: in A Fine Balance, Mistry narrates the stories of multiple characters, in some places offering

multiple perspectives on the same event, without playing the part of omniscient narrator; that is to say, he refrains from privileging

any one perspective over the other, avoiding any sort of meta narrative. The second achievement of this novel is that it ‘allows the

subaltern to speak’11 by bringing to the forefront, caste and class politics, sympathizing with the subaltern classes - empathy is not

possible owing to Mistry’s cultural isolation and Diasporic distance - without assuming to offer a solution to the problems they

face. This is a good thing, as Mistry acknowledges his position as ‘outsider’ who is not an organic intellectual.

9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Writing_in_English
10
Bharucha, Nilufer E., Such a Long Journey: When Old Tracks Are Lost, published in Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures … Jaipur, 2003
11
Bharucha, Nilufer E., A Fine Balance: Making the Subaltern Speak, published in Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures … Jaipur, 2003
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Another interesting aspect of Mistry’s writing is its symbolism, which is very effective in providing a sort of

‘imagistic postcolonial response’. In Such a Long Journey, as in A Fine Balance, Mistry rejects any kind of meta-narrative – and it

is true, the story would be less effective, had any one storyline been allowed to overshadow others – through the symbol of the

Khodadad Building. A microcosm of the larger Parsi community, the building has several Parsi residents, each with their own

perspective on life, with their own little eccentricities.

The ‘doll’ is also another symbol in the book, one which is very important. The protagonist, Gustad Noble, has a daughter, nine

years of age, named Roshan. A student in a Convent school, Roshan is Mistry’s ideal of a ‘good girl’ or of a young girl in general:

she is obedient, extremely sensitive – she cries at the drop of a hat – and is ‘daddy’s little girl’. She takes part in a raffle organized

by her school for the ‘war effort’ (the book is situated in 1971, the year of India’s war with East Pakistan, to assist the

Mukti Bahini in their fight against the ‘Pakistani occupiers’) and wins the prize, a ‘blue eyed, golden haired doll’. She gets very

attached to the doll, and is tremendously upset when it goes missing. As Gustad finds out later in the novel, the doll was stolen by

Tehmul-Lungraa, the building’s resident ‘idiot’, a physically handicapped and mentally slow thirty-something man who,

according to Nilufer E. Bharucha, ‘could be symbolic of the fragile, endangered, in-bred Parsi race itself’.12

Gustad chances upon Tehmul in his flat one night during a blackout (imposed during the aforementioned war), attempting to

copulate with Roshan’s missing doll. At first Gustad is angered and disgusted, but then he decides to leave the doll with Tehmul.

The reason cited for this is, Gustad believes, Roshan, his daughter, would not miss the doll as much as Tehmul would. Taking this

into consideration, and assuming one agrees with Bharucha’s interpretation of the character Tehmul as representative of the whole

Parsi race, it would be interesting to further examine a statement made earlier in this essay: The doll that Roshan won, which was

stolen by Tehmul, was ‘blue eyed and golden haired’.

Would it be far from reason, to view the doll as representing the British, who ruled India for two centuries? If this is the case,

then Mistry has made a very strong observation about the Parsi-British connection: Tehmul belongs to the older generation of

Parsis, while Roshan is of the younger generation, which has a more metropolitan view. Tehmul is obsessed with the doll, and

would miss it much more than Roshan, were it taken away from him. Could Mistry be commenting on a wish that older

generations of Parsis have, that the British should not have left India?

12
Bharucha, Nilufer E., Such a Long Journey: When Old Tracks Are Lost, published in Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures … Jaipur, 2003
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Mistry’s latest novel, Family Matters sets the record straight, as regards his opinion about the influence that European culture has,

on the Indian mind. In the initial parts of the narrative, Mistry voices a postcolonial opinion about the author Enid Blyton’s books,

through one of his characters, Yezad Chinoy, whose younger son Jehangir, has an affinity for that author’s writing.

Yezad believes, ‘it did immense harm, it encouraged children to grow up without attachment to the place where they belonged,

made them hate themselves for being who they were, created confusion about their identity. He said he had read the same books

when he was small, and they had made him yearn to become a little Englishman of a type that even England did not have’.13 Parts

of the book such as these, reinforce the feeling that Family Matters is the closest Mistry has come to autobiography, despite

writing about a Bombay; a Mumbai that Mistry was not privy to, living abroad in Canada. Mistry seems to confirm this in an

interview to AsiaSource: “Going to Canada, faced with the reality of earning a living and realizing that although I had, up to that

point in my life, read books and listened to music that came from the West, there was a lot more involved in living in the West. I

felt very comfortable with the books and the music, but actually living in the West made that same music seem much less relevant.

It suddenly brought home to me very clearly the fact that I was imitating something that was not mine, that made no sense in terms

of my own life, my own reality.”14

It would seem, in the case of Rohinton Mistry that while his Diasporic distance in terms of actual geographical miles

remains the same, his Diasporic distance in terms of years gets reduced. This poses Mistry quite a challenge. His link with the city

formerly known as Bombay is undoubtedly strong – it has allowed him to produce three novels located in the city – but as the

years go by, one wonders whether (and hopes that) the link between Mumbai and Toronto will sustain, long enough for Mistry to

engage, once more, with the complexities of this country and his community.

13
Mistry, Rohinton, Family Matters, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 2002, 2003, Gopsons Papers Ltd., Noida, 2004
14
www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/mistry.cfm
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Bibliography

Primary sources:

Mistry, Rohinton, Such a Long Journey, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1991, 1992.

Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1996, Gopsons Papers Ltd., Noida, 2003.

Mistry, Rohinton, Family Matters, Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 2002, 2003, Gopsons Papers Ltd., Noida, 2004

Shaikh, Nermeen, AsiaSource Interview with Rohinton Mistry, November 1, 2002, www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/mistry.cfm

Secondary sources:

Dodiya, Jaydipsinh, Nayar, Pramod K., The Novels of Rohinton Mistry: A Critical Study, Sarup, New Delhi, 2004

Devi, R. Latha, Family Matters: A Critical Study, published in The Novels of Rohinton Mistry: A Critical Study, Sarup, New Delhi, 2004

Morey, Peter, Rohinton Mistry, Manchester University Press, 2004

Abrams, M.H., Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8e, Thomson Wadsworth, Delhi, 2007

Bharucha, Nilufer E. (Author), Jain, Jasbir (Series Editor) Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures and Transcultural Spaces, Jaipur, 2003

Bharucha, Nilufer E., Such a Long Journey: When Old Tracks Are Lost, published in Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures … Jaipur, 2003

Bharucha, Nilufer E., A Fine Balance: Making the Subaltern Speak, published in Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures … Jaipur, 2003

Bharucha, Nilufer E., Family Matters: About Happiness and Unhappiness, published in Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures … Jaipur, 2003

www.wikipedia.org (entries on: Rohinton Mistry, Postcolonialism, and Indian Writing in English, Homi K. Bhabha, and Amit Chaudhuri)
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Sudeep Pagedar is a 20 year old student of English literature at the University of Mumbai, India.

He writes poetry, some of which is prescribed as recommended reading material in a few middle and high schools in

the United States of America. He has also written and directed ‘e.g.’ (For Example), which is a one-act play about the

failure of mankind to learn from past genocides. Sudeep’s interests include trekking in the Himalayas, reading,

listening to music, and taking part in slam poetry sessions.

He can be contacted at sudeeppagedar@gmail.com