Marginalised Voices in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is an orchestration of marginal voices that populate the novel. Very few novels in Indian English have given so much of narrative space to the poor and the underprivileged. Mistry takes us onto a journey of alternative India which is populated a continuum of marginalised voices– ranging from Dina, a Parsi widow who struggles to maintain her independence, self-respect and freedom from her brother’s domination, to Maneck, a young student who feels ill at ease with the unequal society he lives in, and, at the farthest end of the continuum are the two Dalit tailors, Om and Ishwar, who are struggling to survive and eke out a living in the cruel city which offers them refuge from the atrocities their family had faced in the village. Mistry not only delineates their stories – he also takes us to the physical spaces where they live – the foot path, the basti, the camp, the village and Hotel Vishram, which is a public place where all the characters come together to exchange their stories. Contrasted with these spaces is Dina’s flat, the last bastion of genteel middle class existence that she valiantly strives to protect. The novel becomes a microcosmic representation of nation with its little stories of the marginalised which are contrasted with the grand narrative of the nation – which is shown to us through Nusswan’s discourse on the poor and the overarching presence of the State through Prime Minister’s photograph at Hotel Vishram. I show in this paper that Mistry’s sympathetic representation of the poor and the underprivileged is situated in the discourse of pity and serves to confirm to the negative western view of the country.