Representing the Partition of 1947: Rohinton Mistry's Tales from Firozsha Baag, Such a Long Journey, and A Fine Balance as Political Allegories

My thesis argues that Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), Such a Long Journey (1991), and A Fine Balance (1995), as postcolonial allegories, gauge and reconsider Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. I investigate the representations of the India-China war in 1962, the war of the liberation of Bangladesh, genocide and rape, Hindu-Muslim riots, caste violence, ultranationalism, and State of Emergency in the seventies in connection to Partition, in Mistry’s texts, to ask: Is a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multireligious India, as envisioned by the author, tenable in the face of a nuclear arms race and xenophobia? Does the hybrid identity of the Indian in Mistry teeter on the brink of post-Partition disillusionment? Despite his global readership, scholars have been relatively silent about Mistry’s interpretation of Partition. My thesis addresses this gap and re-evaluates Mistry’s fiction to critically re-position the author in the context of literary responses to Partition. 2022-09-03