A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry was born into a Parsi family in Mumbai, India (then called Bombay). He lived there for several years, obtaining a degree in mathematics before eventually moving to Canada in 1975 with his wife. In Toronto, he worked as a bank clerk and studied English and philosophy part-time at the University of Toronto, completing his degree in 1982. Starting in 1983, he began writing and achieving recognition for his short stories, which often focused on life among Parsi Indians in Mumbai. His first novel, Such a Long Journey, came out in 1991, winning several awards and being translated into several languages. His second novel, A Fine Balance, was even more successful and is arguably his best-known work. Mistry currently lives in Ontario, Canada.

Although most of the characters in A Fine Balance are fictional, almost all of the historical events that appear in the novel have some basis in the real history of India. One character who isn’t entirely fictional is the Prime Minister: although she is never named, she seems to be based on Indira Gandhi, the real-life prime minister of India during the mid-20th century. Indira Gandhi had no direct blood relation to the famous Mahatma Gandhi, although her father, Jawaharlal Nehru was perhaps the most significant figure next to Mahatma Gandhi in the Indian Independence Movement from Britain. British rule in India was unpopular due to the exploitative and often violent relationship that British colonists had with the people of India. The second-longest-serving prime minister in Indian history, Indira Gandhi was influential but controversial. Many of the government policies that appear in the novel—including the allegations of fixing elections, the Emergency, the arrest of political opponents, the programs of forced sterilization, and the demolition of slums—all have a basis in real events that happened in India in the 1970s. Additionally, like the Prime Minister in the novel, Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, and this led to widespread violence across the country against Sikhs (a religious minority), due to the fact that Gandhi’s assassins were her Sikh bodyguards.

Rohinton Mistry’s fiction is part of a broad literary movement called postcolonialism, which focuses on works by or about people from countries that used to be colonies. This includes India and the much of South Asia, as well as other former colonies from around the world. One of the most noteworthy figures in defining and popularizing the concept of postcolonialism was the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said (Orientalism). Some of most popular postcolonial writers who have written novels set in India include Anita Desai (The Clear Light of Day), Amitav Ghosh (The Shadow Lines), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things). Rohinton Mistry also occasionally makes references to older Indian texts, including the Ramayana, whose traditional author, Valmiki, inspired the name for the character Mr. Valmik. Texts like the Ramayana were originally transmitted orally until eventually being written down in Sanskrit. These texts remain an important part of some Indian religions today, including Hinduism and Buddhism, and they are a primary source of information about Hindu deities, including Krishna, who is mentioned briefly in the novel. Mistry also took inspiration from European authors, perhaps most notably Charles Dickens (Great Expectations), who also wrote sprawling novels about characters attempting to survive in urban poverty.