The Nation at War with Itself: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

Abstract

One of the consequences of the dominance of a poststructuralist-orient ed vocabulary within Postcolonial Studies is that the field has had rela tively little to say about literary realism, despite the fact that a consider able amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition. I discuss some of the reasons behind this theoretical impasse, including Benedict Anderson`s canonical critique of literary realism, which he aligns with the homogenizing force of the national imaginary. The argument I pursue in this article―following Jonathan Culler`s critique―is that the novelistic dynamic Anderson identifies should be seen as less specifically related to the discourse of the national per se, and more connected to a certain basic dynamic pertaining to the idea of a political community, one that condi tions but also precedes the possibility of a national discourse. I bring these ideas to a discussion of Rohinton Mistry`s A Fine Balance from 1995, in which the Schmittian distinction between friends and enemies plays a crucial role in terms of the novel`s portrayal of the historical event of the Emergency. I argue that the novel explores the ways in which bio politics accompanies the national, ideological-interpellative narrative, and that the text`s realism should be seen as a symptom of a divided world (in which everyone, potentially, is an enemy), a nation at war with itself. Mistry`s text provides the framework within which we may understand the workings of the permanent state of emergency.