2017/03/02 by Martin Halliwell · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Indian and Buddhist Studies #History and Theory of Mathematics #History and Developments in Astronomy
paper · doi:10.4324/9781315252704-19
openalex publication_date 2017/03/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The Toronto-based writer Rohinton Mistry emigrated from India to Canada in the mid-1970s, but from his first collection of stories Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) to his latest novel Family Matters (2002) he has continued to focus his literary attention on the Parsi community in Bombay. Like other Asian writers living outside the subcontinent, Salman Rushdie, Romesh Gunesekera and Vikram Seth, Mistry uses the geographical distance between Toronto and Bombay to explore both his own past and the tensions between the colonial and postcolonial history of India. Following the footsteps of Indian writers like Bharati Mukherjee, who emigrated from Bengal to Toronto in the 1960s (and then later to America), as part of the second wave of South Asian emigrants Mistry moved to Canada in 1975 to work in a bank and study at the University of Toronto. Mukherjee’s fiction focuses centrally on themes of assimilation and the difficulties of fashioning a hybrid identity in North America, and Mistry also directly explores the tensions between East and West in some of the stories in Tales from Firozsha Baag.1 However, while Jaydipsinh Dodiya claims that South Asian literature written in English in the 1970s often reflected ‘the reactionary opposition of the indigenous people’ and the ‘suffering, indignity and injustice undergone by the immigrants’, Mistry’s first two novels, Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995), are set back in India in the 1970s and do not engage directly with the Asian diaspora.2 Having said this, as Nilufer Bharucha argues, although the Parsis are among the most Westernized group in India, Mistry is likely to have experienced a kind of ancestral diaspora even in India (his Persian ancestors being exiled from Iran), together with the general feeling that the Parsis had become ‘downgraded’ in the economic upheaval following the retreat of British colonial forces in the 1940s.3 Even though Mistry has not written about cultural flight to the same extent as Rushdie and Mukherjee, on this broader level the theme of displacement creeps into his fiction, particularly his double view of Bombay as both ‘insider’ (Bombay Parsi) and ‘outsider’ (Canadian citizen) and what Angela Lambert describes as a common theme in exilic fiction: the ‘re-invention of the past, seen with the sharp eyes of a child and then filtered through veils of nostalgia’.4