Family Matters

Rohinton Mistry was born in what is now Mumbai, India, in 1952. Mistry was born into a Parsi family, and many of the central characters in his fiction are Parsi as well. Mistry received a degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Bombay (now Mumbai) before emigrating to Canada in 1975. He then studied philosophy and English at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1984. Mistry published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Tales from Firozsha Baag, in 1987. He then published three novels: Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002). All three of his novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a prestigious award for the best English-language book published in the U.K. or Ireland in a given year. In 2016, Mistry became a member of the Order of Canada.

Family Matters takes place in the mid-1990s, around the time when the Maharashtra state government, led by the Shiv Sena party, changed the name of what was once Bombay to Mumbai. The name was changed because Bombay has colonialist origins, while Mumbai pays homage to a goddess whose worship is strongly tied to the Maharashtra state. The Shiv Sena party also plays a prominent role in the novel. The Shiv Sena was a conservative Hindu nationalist political party from the Maharashtra state. The party, as it’s described in the novel, existed from 1966 to 2022, at which point the party split into two separate factions. The novel also discusses the Babri Mosque riots, which are also known as the Bombay Riots. Those riots began on December 6, 1992, when a Hindu nationalist rally of about 150,000 people became violent. A mob of people from that rally then destroyed a mosque called the Babri Masjid. The ensuing riots, which lasted for two months, involved fighting between Hindu and Muslim communities in India and resulted in the deaths of more than 2,000 people. The Shiv Sena party was reportedly responsible for much of the violence, and in July of 2000, authorities arrested the leader of Shiv Sena, Bal Thackaray, for his involvement in the riots. In the novel, Mr. Kapur speaks explicitly about Shiv Sena’s involvement in the riots and the discrimination against Muslim people during and after.

Mistry is the author of two other novels besides Family Matters. Those novels, Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance, center on themes similar to those of Family Matters and, like Family Matters, delve into the everyday lives of Parsis living in India. The sons in Family Matters, Jehangir and Murad, frequently discuss the children’s author Enid Blyton, particularly her book series called The Famous Five. Critics have compared Mistry’s work to authors like Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. Charles Dickens’s most well-known novels include A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, while two of Tolstoy’s most prominent works are Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Mistry, though, has said that he is not particularly influenced by those 19th-century writers and instead cites several 20th-century American writers as his favorites, including John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and John Updike. He is also influenced by 19th-century Russian authors Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev. Other novels set in Mumbai include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. Finally, Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is a nonfiction book that takes place in Mumbai.