Behind the Beauties: Politics Explored and Exploded in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance
When politics is a practice of power that rules lives with a cluster of perceptions and practices, Mistry’s A Fine Balance is a novel that acts as a great force fearlessly displaying life’s rich variousness and barren viciousness, proving that power is abused and the strong grind the weak as Frank Norris remarks in The Responsibilities of Novelists. Aware of India’s social and political life, and closely linked with its background, Mistry’s fiction brilliantly captures the crowded, throbbing life of India as Mistry looks beyond the beauty of ‘Incredible India’ capturing corruption, politically motivated schemes, political decisions, layman’s sufferings, issues of casteism, dominance of Zamindars, and inhuman treatment of untouchable minorities.
Presenting an authentic portrait of contemporary India during the Emergency era imposed by Indira Gandhi, India in the novel is bound with its timeless chain of caste exploitation, male chauvinism, linguistic strives and communal disharmony. Further the tyranny of the power - hungry politicians over the poor – hungry citizens is unveiled as Mistry depicts the humiliating condition of people living in Jhopadpattis, deaths on railway tracks, demolition of shacks on the pretext of beautification, deaths in police custody, lathi charges and murders in the pretext of enforcing Family Planning.
As the story unfolds, A Fine Balance sets the private arena and the public orbit interacting to reveal that the two are linked since the individual and the family cannot escape th...
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... to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world” (594-95). Although in this novel the characters’ lives appear to have lost their importance, and the balance between hope and despair has almost tipped, the age-old question has been well asked. If it continues to be asked, then perhaps the significance of the individual and the necessity of spiritual balance will never be fully lost.
Works Cited
Kumar, Gajendra. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance- A Slice of Middle Class Life. New Delhi:
Swarup and Sons, 2001.
Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. New Delhi: Rupa, 1996. Print.
Bhatnagar, Vinita P. “A Reading of A Fine Balance.” The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry, Critical
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Norris, Frank. Responsibilities of the novelist and other literary essays London: Grant Richards, 1903 (25-33)
In an article entitled, Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga 's The White Tiger, author Ana Cristina Mendes describes the many attributes of the poor proletariat class of India. Mendes shows how “dark India,”
Damrosch, David. (Ed.) The Longman Anthology of British Literature 2nd ed. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 2003.
...the narrator and all people a way of finding meaning in their pains and joys. The two brothers again can live in brotherhood and harmony.
In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo tells the stories and struggles of families living in a slum adjacent to the Sahar Airport in Mumbai, India. Boo details the ways in which the residents of this slum, Annawadi, attempt to escape their poverty, but fail to do so. Despite numerous initiatives sponsored by the Central Government of India to improve the lives of the many individuals living in Annawadi, these programs are ultimately unable to do so due to deep-rooted corruption in the city of Mumbai. Regardless of this, the residents of Annawadi seem to accept corruption as a fact of life, and do little to fight it. As illustrated over the course of Boo’s narrative, this results from the fact that many Annawadians recognize the ways in which the laws of their society allow for the unfair treatment of certain groups of people, especially the poor and religious minorities, and are also cognizant of the fact that they have no real power to change a system that
If my life had no purpose, no individuality, and no happiness, I would not want to live. This book teaches the importance of self expression and independence. If we did not have these necessities, then life would be like those in this novel. Empty, redundant, and fearful. The quotes above show how different life can be without our basic freedoms. This novel was very interesting and it shows, no matter how dismal a situation is, there is always a way out if you never give up, even if you have to do it alone.
Damrosch, David, et al., ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. B. Compact ed. New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000. p. 2256
Damrosch, David, et al., ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. B. Compact ed. New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.
Damrosch, David, et al., ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. B. Compact ed. New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.
The corruption in hospitals, where “doctors can keep their government salary and work in private hospitals”, sees people like Balram’s father die of horrible deaths every day. Dismayed by the lack of respect of the government for its dying citizens, Balram is corrupted by the fact that in the “darkness”, there is no service, not even in death. Balram also claims that “the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money”, which was for a government funded lunch program. However, Balram doesn’t blame him, which justifies that Balram, from such a young age gives into the idea of corruption saying that “...you can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet”. In addition to his father and the school teacher, Balram is corrupted by his childhood hero Vijay. Growing up, Balram idolises Vijay for having escaped “the darkness”. However what he is ignorant of is that even though Vijay is in “the light” he is still corrupted by “the darkness”. Balram explains that “Vijay and a policemen beat another men to death”, yet he doesn’t see it as a problem, because he understand that one cannot become successful in such a corrupt system without becoming as corrupt as the system itself. It is here that Adiga asks the question of how are impoverished Indians are expected to refuse to engage in corruption when they live in such poor conditions. Thus, the reader is able to sympathize with Balram’s corruption,
Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
Rohinton Mistry’s “Such A Long Journey” is the story of turbulent life of Gustad Noble and his family, who lives in Khodadad Building north of Bombay. The story portrays the series of events such as his son Sohrab’s refusal to attend Indian Institution of Technology, hardships faced by his friends and family, political turmoil and chaos caused by the war between India and Pakistan. Gustad transforms from a stubborn, materialistic and awful person to an open-minded and more adaptive to circumstantial changes in his life. Ultimately, Gustad Noble journeys to a greater understanding of his role as a father, friend and citizen of India.
In the novel A Fine Balance, author Rohinton Mistry chronicles the lives of four protagonists, underdogs that struggle to rise up the social ladder in the brutal contest of "survival of the fittest" during the turbulent Emergency period of India. The Emergency, one of the most violent and volatile intervals in the history of modern India that lasted from 1975 to 1977, was a time where "fundamental rights were suspended, most of the opposition was under arrest, and union leaders were in jail" all in an effort to keep the Prime Minister Indira Ghandi in power (Mistry 245). But most of all, the Emergency grossly intruded into the lives of the poor and the vulnerable through the destruction of slums, forced sterilizations, and harsh labor camps, all specific programs used as chess pieces by the politicians playing dirty games which ultimately led to the undoing and demise of the bottom-dwellers. In this microcosm full of potent characters that suffer under the horrors and cruelties of corruption and abuse of power, Mistry adds one character, Vasantro Valmik, an orating lawyer and ex-proofreader with experience in the art of political bluster. Though Valmik appears to be only an ephemeral character in the sweeping narration of A Fine Balance, a fleeting tool to illustrate Emergency's impact on the educated, he nevertheless plays a key role in Mistry's thematic universe as an advocate for hope in the face of despair.
...shown through Lenny’s point of view. Prior the partition, Lahore was a place of tolerance that enjoyed a secular state. Tension before the partition suggested the division of India was imminent, and that this would result in a religious. 1947 is a year marked by human convulsion, as 1 million people are reported dead because of the partition. Moreover, the children of Lahore elucidate the silences Butalia seeks in her novel. The silence of survivors is rooted to the nature of the partition itself; there is no clear distinction as to who were the antagonists. The distinction is ambiguous, the victims were Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims, and moreover these groups were the aggressors, the violent. The minority in this communal violence amongst these groups was the one out-numbered. This epiphany of blame is embarked in silence, and roots from the embodiment of violence.
In the novel, parental absence escalates sibling conflict, which leads to the characters escapement, ultimately resulting in Bim’s anger. While some readers may think that Clear Light of Day just represents a single family’s struggle, the novel clearly represents India’s struggle as well. India’s independence from Britain consequently leads to the formation of Pakistan and continual religious and political conflict. This novel is an allegory that explains political combat in an accessible way because everyone is part of a family. This novel not only models the reasons for conflict in India but for other nations and even families as well.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.