History as a Marker of Otherness in Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance”

Abstract

Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born writer belonging to the Parsi community. He has been living in Canada for the past thirty years where he is currently one of the most celebrated writers to emerge out of the multicultural framework of the country. This paper deals with one of the ways in which he constructs cultural difference/Otherness in his second and most famous novel to date “A Fine Balance” first published in 1995. The book is set in an unnamed city that the reader can easily guess is Bombay and it concentrates on the terror experienced by people during the State of Emergency of 1975-1977 underlining the most unsightly and hideous aspects of life such as poverty, despair, and violence.