REFLECTION OF COMMUNITY AND THE NATIONAL HISTORY IN ROHINTON MISTRY'S A FINE BALANCE

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt is made to discuss how Rohinton Mistry interweaves both the history of a community and a nation in the narrative structure of his novel, A Fine Balance. Published in 1995, the novel is set against the backdrop of the Emergency years, which shook the Indian nation. The novel recounts the lives and struggles of four unlikely characters, revealing the vicissitudes of Parsi life as well as the distress of the ordinary citizens of India during the despotic rule of Indira Gandhi. Unlike his other works, Mistry does not confine himself only to Bombay city and the Parsi community but also tries to explore rural India, showcasing the unheard cries of the lower-caste untouchables in the narrative. Though the novel focuses more on the excesses of the Emergency and the sufferings of the outcast, it also highlights the lifestyle of the Parsis, their exclusivity and superiority complex, and their alienation from the mainstream Indian culture. Emerging from the Bombay Parsi community, Mistry can sense the plight of the Parsis as a minority community in India, and he is narrating the dangers affecting his community in his writings. As a socio-political realist, Mistry in the novel, vividly explores the untold suffering of the Indian masses from the time of the Partition in 1947 up to the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, revealing the deceit and the two-facedness of the politicians and the higher authorities that ranshaked the nation, exploiting the democratic rights of the ordinary people. In fact, Mistry is chronicling the history of the Parsi community and certain decades of post-independent Indian history in the novel.