Indian Identity In Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry, a prominent Indian writer, has emerged as a significant literary figure in the sphere of English Literature. He established himself quite rapidly as an exciting new voice on the literary scene. An immigrant writer’s total experience is stored in his memory and only the writer’s own conscious choices and unconscious energies might regulate his artistic expression, so did in the case of Mistry. As a diasporic writer Mistry exposed varied ways in his narrative that explored methods to mirror their experience and symbolised their dislocated dwelling places and identities. India, Indian people and their psychology could not stop his temptation of writing about India. He is so much inspired by his country’s love that he presented a wider canvas of the nation in his second novel ‘A Fine Balance’ which interweaves the life of ‘subaltern’ marginalised and the poor in the narrative of the nation. ‘A Fine Balance’ has been very artistically and skilfully carved at the hand of Mistry. This novel is a triumph in the genre of realistic fiction. He covered the most volatile and violent spectrum of contemporary times on the large tapestry of the nation, which shook socio-political stagnation of the country. The novel is the …show more content…
The novel is pre-occupied with the quest for identity, that is, their cultural up rootedness, angust, alienation and loneliness, are the various facets of the their crisis of identity. Mistry indulges in the psychological quest of his protagonists. He straddles two cultures- Indian and Parsis. He stays in Canada but his imagination is not free from the angust and phobia of the existence and the future of his minority community in the post colonial India. Mistry achieves the balance between private and public, following the realistic tradition, and presents the quotidian realities in the lives of four major characters of the