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

Abstract

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.