Dishonourably Postnational”? The Politics of Migrancy and Cosmopolitanism in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

This article explores Rohinton Mistry's novel A Fine Balance (1996), alongside his short story “Lend Me Your Light” (1987), focussing on the tensions between the politically-distanced cosmopolitan migrant and the socially-committed local activist. My readings draw on Radhakrishnan's notion of diasporic “double duty” — of accountability to, rather than irresponsible detachment from, the homeland. Mistry's representations of migrants, I contend, are centrally concerned not only with the necessity, but also the difficulty, of performing such “double duty” through a sustained engagement with India's history and politics. In this light, I argue that Mistry offers representations of migrants whose attempts to distance themselves from local and national politics are revealed as impossible and irresponsible. Moreover, I suggest that Mistry's representations reveal an anxiety over his position as a migrant writer, and his work seems to mobilize writing as a means of avoiding a problematically apolitical detachment from India. Thus, Mistry establishes a tension between his representation of the migrant within his fiction and his negotiation of his own migrant position through his fiction

Art · Balance (ability · Cosmopolitanism · Duty · Homeland · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

• Canada

  Open Access•Diana Chlebek•The Journal of Commonwealth…•2009

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