A Fine Balance

Abstract

One of the most remarkable features of Rohinton Mistry‟s fiction is that it brilliantly captures the crowded life of India. His novels are closely linked with social and political background. If one studies his novels from a political point of view, one realizes that Mistry‟s knowledge of Indian politics is not at all far from reality, though he left India three decades ago to settle in Canada. His novels capture corruption, politically motivated schemes, political decisions, caste problems and human condition of untouchable people in India. Mistry likes to write about India. Living in Canada and writing about India, Mistry is fully aware of several drawbacks of India‟s social and political life, as distinguish in his novels. In Mistry‟s novels, there are no references to Canada but only the political and social disorder of India‟s postcolonial experience. Ambition and dreams of his protagonists are fixed with hope and despair about the life of the modern world. The author succeeds Inter weaving national history with the personal life of the protagonists. The main action of the novel is set in a city by the sea, apparently Bombay and it takes place during the Emergency of 1975.A Fine Balance is set in the 1975‟s Emergency period, and its four characters are interconnected to each other. Mistry engages with the issues like emergency, social and political issues, untouchability and cast, history and loss of identity in his writing. The novel is not merely a family story but Mistry covers novel from the historical points of view of the current past. The important events of this background; India‟s Independence (1947) and the time of the Indian Emergency (1975-77), during which most of Mistry‟s novel is set. Mistry says himself: “In Such a Long Journey, the year is 1971. It seemed to me that 1975, the year of the Emergency, would be the next important year, if one were preparing a list of important dates in Indian History.