Mistry In Indira Gandhi's A Fine Balance

Mistry supports untouchables. For him, untouchability is not only disease but it is also poisoning the sacred philosophy of Hinduism. He describes the gender discrimination and the oppression faced by the untouchables in A Fine Balance by introducing the four characters –Dina and Mameck who are Parsees and two tailors Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash are humiliated by the upper castes. The lives of the tailors‘forefathers who were in fact ‘ Chamars’ 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

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 India’s nasty

Two of these massacres, one in Delhi, followed by another a few days later in Sarhupurreceived 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 Mistry’s Thakur Dharamsi wished to send to the Untouchable Chamar families who had sought democratic equality in defiance of caste hierarchy. What is evident here is 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. Mistry’s fictional and Akbar’s 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 Maoist-style uprisings from tenants and landless