Rohinton Mistry is a writer of Indian Diaspora who possesses a double identity. By birth, he is an Indian and settled down in Canada, despite everything, he expounds his country through his anecdotal works and discusses the agony of immigrants. He throws light on discrimination, brutality, and injuries confronted by the Dalits in rural India. This paper mainly concentrates on how Rohinton Mistry's second novel, A Fine Balance mirrors the truth of India, the political issues of debasement, discrimination, oppression, and abuse experienced by the Untouchables in India. It additionally gives an understanding into rustic India, concentrating on the unfairness, savagery, and ghastliness of injury of Dalits in India along communal and religious …show more content…
The story portrays their experiences with their heaps of troubles and tragedies. The narrative portrays their present day interaction that is balanced by the awful profundity of their past encounters. This is a novel that permits Mistry to introduce the tragic beauty of the city of Mumbai and venture out into the rural Dalit detestations of India's oppressive caste system. It is a novel where the middle class and faceless common labourers meet, sensitize each other, and figure out how to overcome their preference and manufacture obligation of friendship, fondness, and mankind among them. Wadhawan says: “Mistry gives an insight into rural Indian Caste politics that survives the post-independence democracy” (80). He stresses the trouble of battling against this profoundly established restricted Casteism in India, which is discrediting to the possibility of innovation. Genestch in his book The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of MG Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry observes: “A Fine Balance demonstrates and explores the effects of untouchability on individuals with respect to caste and the injustices of caste and probes the implications of defying it”
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,”
Owing to India’s diversity, these identities are determined by caste, ancestry, socioeconomic class, religion, sexual orientation and geographic location, and play an important role in determining the social position of an individual (Anne, Callahan & Kang, 2011). Within this diversity, certain identities are privileged over others, due to social hierarchies and inequalities, whose roots are more than a thousand years old. These inequalities have marginalized groups and communities which is evident from their meagre participation in politics, access to health and education services and
The Wheel of Surya, by Jamila Gavin examines and presents a variety of different forms of discrimination within the novel. She explores this in various ways by comparing the differences between India and England whilst many types of discrimination occur, such as racism, sexism and a lot of disrespect against culture, gender, religion and tradition. Gavin also emphasizes the fact that back in the 1900’s (when the partition of India took place) the Indian Culture was not usually accepted in England which increased the amount of criticism and discrimination against unfamiliar religions. The way Gavin uses discrimination effectively in the Novel will be shown and discussed in this Essay.
Evidently, the descriptive nature of the two divergent environments mirrors the persistent social inequality and unequal distribution of India’s novel wealth. Boo’s prologue fundamentally gives an insight into the social injustice at hand responsible for Abdul’s elusion of the police. Abdul, his father and sister are accused of burning One Leg, a woman named by the Annawadians appropriate to her disability. Once Abdul’s father is arrested, Abdul aspires to escape the slum during the concealing darkness of nighttime. Much to his own dismay, Abdul falls asleep and is instructed to turn himself into the police to protect his ill father the following morning. The inhabitants of the slum represent a form of urban poverty, visibly hidden amid a facade of economic might and superiority. As one of the marginalized groups in Indian society, Annawadians are faced with economic obstacles on the pathway to social equality. Even in India’s moment economic resurgence, the layer of poverty is even further suppressed by the system; struggling to rise above and into the over-city. Yet, Boo describes the aspirations of the youth of Annawadi who seek to work as waiters in the surrounding hotels, acquire a college education or simply climb the
Over the four generations of family covered in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Lowland, the most compelling central conflict is that of social and economic class, providing the motivation for Udayan to become a Naxalite revolutionary as well as helping to drive the wedge between Bela and her father and providing Gauri with the means to stage her own devastatingly quiet rebellion. Although there are emotional and personal reasons that these characters experience the world the way that they do, the overarching theme from the 1940s to the 1990s is that of inequality and injustice in both India and America, as seen in large-scale political movements like the Naxalites as well as smaller, grassroots efforts like community gardening and rejection of American middle-class norms by Bela.
The character of Bakha, in Anand’s Untouchable, is drawn from the lowest caste in Indian society, that of sweeper, or cleaner of human ordure. Despite his unpromising station in life, the central figure in the novel operates at a variety of levels in order to critique the status quo of caste in India. Well aware of his position at the nadir of Indian society, Bakha is able-via his untouchability-to interrogate issues well above his station in life, such as caste and its inequities, economics and the role of the colonizer. Due to the very characteristics of the character's position, Anand is able to examine issues such as society’s revulsion at untouchablility; some local, innate societal sympathy for Bakha's plight, and the fact that in the 1930s Gandhi used his Harijans-untouchables-as a symbol for change in Indian society. This essay examines the modes by which Anand deploys mimicry and the carnivalesque to critique Indian society in the 1930s.
Mahasweta Devi, always writes for deprived section of people. She is a loving daughter, a clerk, a lecturer, a journalist, an editor, a novelist, a dramatist and above all an ardent social activist. Her stories bring to the surface not only the misery of the completely ignored tribal people, but also articulate the oppression of w...
Leonard Woolf considers E.M Forster’s novel A Passage to India to be a representation of ‘’the real life of politics in India, the intricacy of personal relations, the story itself, the muddle and the mystery of life’’ (Jay, 1998). Fosters novel has been the subject of literary criticism from many angles given the highly controversial subject matter which is called into question as to whether it is a genuine representation of India under colonisation written from an objective experience, and whether this attempt to represent India is successful or a failure. The question of how successful this representation of India and the British occupation of the country is will form the argument of this work. Forster makes it known to the readers of the novel that when he first began to compose A Passage to India he had felt that he did not know India well enough to continue in an accurate portrayal, therefore returned later to India before completing the novel. In the time of his second visit, Forster felt that he was able to understand the ways in which the Anglo-Indians behaved towards the natives and also that he became better acquainted with the Indian natives. This would suggest that his writing would be objective portraying both sides of the divide without prejudice towards either class.
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.
The novel deals with a tale of the turbulent 1970’s in India whilst Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of inner emergency and suspended India’s Constitution. Mistry does no longer hide his anger about the malevolence of the authorities and the corruption of its marketers, powerful and petty alike. But of all the great things about this novel, perhaps the best is the way Mistry continues his storytelling from being submerged by way of the political subject. A Fine Balance tells the story of four innocent folks snared in the grinding gears of history. And the post-colonial history of India, like Mistry’s story, is right now brutally easy and delicately complex, plausible and brilliant, perverse and humane. The tale is opened up through the lives of four major characters: Ishvar Darji, his nephew Omprakash, their corporation Dina Dalai, and her paying guest Maneck Kohlah. The emergency intrudes into the lives of these kinds of characters leading to their
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.
Nicholas B. Dirks. (2011). Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton University Press
Dangle, Arjun. Ed. Poisoned Bread: Translations from Moedrn Marathi Dalit Literature. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Limited, 1994.
... Pakistan to surrender during the Indo-Pakistani War helped the Bengalis establish a sovereign state for themselves. The distribution of the racist pamphlets against the minorities showed Shiv Sena's chauvinistic and fascist regime. Indira Gandhi's corrupt government, socialist regime and her controversial scandals such as giving her son's company government money and the 1971 Nagarwala scandal were also revealed. All of these political events influenced the background of the novel and the characters’ everyday lives. .
This total idea of challenging and creating a new identity may seem quite a utopian concept, but it is not so impossible. The present paper will illustrate the writings of Mridula Garg and Arundhati Roy. The characters in their work are not extraordinary and utopian, but ordinary people like us whom we can come across in our day to day life. Here for the purpose of analysis, Garg’s three short stories have been chosen. They are: Hari Bindi, Sath Saal, Ki Aurat and Wo Dusri.