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Rethinking contemporary India with Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance:

between realism and transgression
Nicolas Jaoul
Cet article est une traduction de :
Revisiter la démocratie indienne avec « L’Équilibre du Monde » de Rohinton Mistry, entre réalisme et transgressions [fr]

Résumé

The novel in question here is not based on any kind of survey, but on the experience of two Dalits during the state of emergency. By imagining their life experience, it does, however, probe certain aspects of this period which Indian studies failed to address until very recently. Considering that literary and scientific writing are increasingly bound to intersect and influence each other, it is useful to consider all the implications of this permeability, thus raising questions about the boundaries of the social sciences and the challenges of opening up to extra-disciplinarity. This novel, where pessimistic miserabilism rubs shoulders with moments of grace that are at the same time hopeful, redemptive, and fragile, offers food for thought for political anthropology, as an attempt to think about emancipation as a constitutive dimension of lived reality.

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“He gazed beyond, where the warren of alleys began. In that optimistic first light, the promise of transformation shone down upon the sleeping city. He knew the feeling wouldn’t stay more than a few minutes – he had experienced it before, it always faded under stronger light.” (Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, p. 452)

“But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.”
(Quote from Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot, epigraph to A Fine Balance)

  • 1 All quotes from French references have been translated by the author.

1In a text entitled “La leçon d’ethnographie des grands écrivains” (“Great writers’ ethnographic lesson”), Alban Bensa and François Pouillon argue that great writers often provide better descriptions of the world than “professional ethnographers”1 (Bensa & Pouillon 2012: 8). In the same section of Terrain, Gérard Lenclud objects that literature and ethnography do not form part of the same system of knowledge, and that there is therefore no reason to compare them. His argument is based on an idea put forward by Milan Kundera, for whom the novel is concerned with “human existence” and not with reality as an object. Drawing on this formula, Lenclud claims that “it is by reality that the ethnologist is concerned, and not by the phenomenon of existence” (Lenclud 2017: § 65).

2Although this distinction is illuminating, it does not close the subject. Lenclud’s theoretical opposition between a project of scientific knowledge based on the concept of an objectifiable reality and the subjective realm of lived experience seems to rule out a more subjective and reflexive relationship between anthropologists and their investigations (Bensa & Fassin 2008). The heuristic character of this reflective approach is well proven and Bensa and Pouillon emphasize that it still has a lot to learn from writers.

3Therefore the questions raised by the proximity between ethnographic description and literary description invite more discussions, all the more so considering the current craze for “alternative writing” (the move by researchers to non-academic forms of writing such as theater, film, comics, novels, non-fiction, etc.). These evolutions raise questions as to the boundaries of the social sciences and the issues involved in opening up to extra-disciplinarity. Since these different forms of writing are bound to intersect and influence each other, it is more important than ever to question the permeability of their respective modes of thought. Based on a historical novel whose subject intersects with my research, I therefore reflect on what social sciences can learn from literary approaches.

4Although I fully share Bensa and Pouillon’s interest in the preliminary investigations carried out by 19th-century novelists, their way of conceiving the contribution of literature to the social sciences according to a single criterion of investigation does not seem to me to grasp all its implications. Admittedly, as they explain it, the quality of the investigations on which these realist novelists rely offers a guarantee of compliance with the requirements of rigorous scientific knowledge. However, this homage to science stops at the writers’ ability to describe the world, without fully appreciating their capacity to think it.

5In fact, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) is not based on any real investigative protocol. The author gave very few interviews, which prevents us from knowing more about his sources and documentation methods. The little we get to know shows that he assumes the right to draw freely on his imagination, on his own experience in India (which he left at the of 23, the year the state of emergency was declared) and on a variety of written or oral testimonies such as (in his own words) “newspapers, magazines and conversations with visitors from India and with people during his visits to India” (Merivirta 2019: 191).

  • 2 See box.

6Although his novel paints a bleak picture of marginality that is not devoid of miserabilism, it also raises fundamental questions about certain shortcomings of Indian democracy that the social sciences have failed to address until very recently. However, since Modi came to power in 2014, the authoritarian evolution of Indian democracy has begun to worry researchers. By tackling the suffering of the people during the state of emergency (25 June 1975-21 March 1977),2 this novel enables us to place this new authoritarian configuration in the context of a longer past. A warning of the country’s evolution from the 1970s onwards, it is therefore a work emblematic of a counter-current in Indian studies that I would describe as “indo-pessimistic”, which would deserve to be studied in greater depth.

7A Fine Balance is one of the best-selling Indian books in the world. It has established itself as a classic, as much for its tragic depiction of the lived world of the subalterns as for its literary qualities. Its descriptions, which make it a realistic novel with a classical appearance, are accompanied by more marvelous or fantastical developments that sometimes bring out a magic inherent to reality. The magical touches that emerge in the story are not, however, akin to Salman Rushdie’s clearly identified magic realism, which makes Mistry’s style more difficult to classify.

8The way in which it is promoted on the back cover of the French paperback edition as “the great novel of contemporary India, realistic, abundant, inspired – shot through with the breath of a Hugo or a Dickens,” is therefore open to question. This rather enticing way of assimilating this novel to the familiar form of 19th-century European realism, while adding a touch of the exotic, misses the point of its imaginary dimension. In his only interview with an academic, Mistry claims this freer approach to historical material when he states that “there is a great difference between remembering the past, which is creative and life enhancing and trying to preserve it, which is detrimental and debilitating” (Mistry & McLay 1996: 16).

9Mistry’s own emphasis on the fictional dimension of his narrative therefore escapes the postcolonial critique of literary realism, which, as David Carter points out, reduces this current to “universalism, essentialism, positivism, individualism, modernity, historicism, and so on” (Carter 1992: 296).

10The widespread idea that realism is incapable of accounting for resistance also ignores the fact that, in India, realism has its own history of engagement with resistance (Moss 2000). While freely appropriating the codes of the archetypal 19th-century social novel, Mistry’s peculiar realism enables him to engage directly with the different forms of domination that permeate Indian society (caste, class, and gender). Thanks to its author’s political imagination, the novel also manages to portray emancipation as a constitutive dimension of reality.

  • 3 The figures come from Jaffrelot & Anil (2020).

Between June 1975 and March 1977, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, suspended democratic freedoms. The Indian Constitution allows this in the event of a serious threat to national integrity. While officially reacting to a court decision invalidating her election as a member of parliament, her reaction was in fact abusive. Scholars have argued that is was designed to counter a wave of protest unprecedented since independence and to anticipate a likely electoral setback for her party. Socialist and populist rhetoric and a 20-point program containing redistributive measures in favor of the poor accompanied this period of “constitutional dictatorship” (Jaffrelot & Anil 2020: 349). In reality, this empty left-wing rhetoric concealed an economic policy favorable to the Indian business community and to foreign investors, while also fostering a rapprochement with the United States and Western Europe. Above all, the Emergency period remains associated with authoritarianism and terror at the hands of a clique of sycophants gravitating around Indira Gandhi’s son, Sanjay Gandhi, who took control of the state apparatus via the Prime Minister’s Office. This led to serious violations of democratic freedoms (110,000 extra-judicial detentions, censorship of the press) and human rights violations which targeted more specifically the poor in terms of family planning (11 million sterilizations) and “urban beautification” (the official term used to justify the bulldozing of shanty towns, notably in Delhi, where 700,000 people were displaced3). Sanjay Gandhi’s extra-constitutional role was popular with a bourgeoisie aspiring to order and consumerism, exasperated by the omnipresent poverty in the big cities and tempted by authoritarianism to deal with the radicalization of subalterns (Rajagopal 2011).

11While most denunciations of the period’s human rights violations remained focused on the extra-judicial arrests of political activists and journalists, the novel focuses for the first time on the plight of the more subaltern sections under this period and in independent India more largely. The “untouchable” (or Dalit) condition is at the heart of this story, which follows Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash on their tragic wanderings. They are the only two survivors of the massacre of their entire family in a village in Uttar Pradesh (North India), reprimanded by the landowners for having escaped from their condition as agricultural workers by setting up a small garment workshop. Fleeing the casteist violence, they move to Bombay (although the city is not named) to try to make a new life as tailors.

12In the metropolis of which they know nothing, Ishvar and Omprakash experience the extreme precariousness of life on the streets, the destruction of their shanty town by municipal bulldozers, a round-up of the homeless followed by deportation to a large state construction site where they are subjected to forced labor. They manage to be freed through the intermediary of a beggar’s boss, who buys out the camp’s destitute to make them beg on his behalf. After obtaining his protection in exchange for a monthly fee, their employer Dina finally accepts the suggestion of her tenant, Maneck, to take them in order to fulfill her orders from a ready-to-wear export company. While Maneck, a student from a Himalayan village, immediately fraternizes with them, Dina must first overcome her own social prejudices to fully accept their presence, which gives the two Dalits a moment’s respite. But once stabilized, they decide to go back to their home region to marry Omprakash. Returning to their home district in Uttar Pradesh after 18 months, they come face to face with the landowner behind the family massacre. Now an influential figure in the Congress party, he runs the family planning operations in a venal and violent manner. Captured in a police raid, the two tailors undergo a forced vasectomy operation that turns into a catastrophe: Omprakash, now sterile, is forced to give up the project of starting a family, while Ishvar loses both his legs to a post-operative infection.

A substitute novel for research?

13Paradoxically, although these various acts of violence directed against the poor are historically proven, this accumulation of misfortunes may seem implausible on a biographical scale. Indeed, it seems excessive to make these two characters bear the full brunt of the violence that befell the poor during this dark period. The rarity of this type of testimony has nevertheless led researchers to question, more than for other historical novels, the value to be placed on it.

14Adopting a conciliatory point of view, Lewis et al. see this novel as a substitute for the gaps in scientific knowledge on the period, particularly concerning the human rights violations of the poor and the underlying critique of the Indian development model. This is borne out by the numerous social science works devoted to the novel, and by the fact that it has been widely taught in universities, where it substitutes for lacunar historiography. Lewis et al. conclude that “[b]eyond superficial issues such as the need for proper referencing, paying one’s dues to predecessors and so forth, fictional writing can be said to enjoy a freedom of fabrication that allows it to present ‘ideal type’ exemplifications of social phenomena in a way that empirically grounded academic literature sometimes cannot” (Lewis et al. 2008: 206). They draw on Balzac’s quotation at the beginning of the novel (reproduced at the start of this article), which they believe offers a guarantee of truthfulness on the part of the author.

15It seems to me, however, that this epigraph should not be taken at face value, but rather as a wink from Mistry at his way of playing with the somewhat dated codes of realism. In my opinion, the novel’s assumed fictional dimension runs counter to a desire to scientifically validate its realism.

16While we must resist the temptation to regard A Fine Balance as a substitute for ethnographic documentation, its scientific interest consists in its representation of the period from the point of view of the poor. This reversal of perspective entails a new “sharing of the sensible” (Rancière 2000) that gives it undeniable value on an epistemic level. Comparing it with the academic literature available at the time of publication highlights its ability to counter certain biases of academic research on India.

17This novel is undeniably a step ahead of Indian studies, whose depiction of this period has been marked by the seal of historical exception. On the contrary, the two Dalit characters’ assessment of their misadventures (Mistry 1995: 743) underscores the continuity with the ill treatment they experienced in earlier periods in the village setting. Subsequent academic studies have eventually ended up recognizing the continuity of the Indian state’s treatment of Dalits and the poor in general (Jaffrelot & Anil 2020; Tarlo 2003).

18The emergency had been previously regarded as an insignificant parenthesis for understanding the Indian political model, whose democratic character was often taken for granted. As Emma Tarlo points out, the period had thus been largely neglected by both Indian and foreign scholars, with the exception of studies on family planning and urban planning in which these state-sponsored abuses were mentioned. However, these specialized works referred to these abuses indirectly and in isolation, without linking them to a more systemic hostility towards the poor (Tarlo 2000).

19This lack can be explained by the fact that Indian studies, whether Indian or Western, have often been ideologically blinded by the center-left rhetoric that accompanied the state of emergency. Indira Gandhi thus justified her suspension of democracy in the name of defending her father Nehru’s progressive vision in the face of the opposition’s assaults, which she did not hesitate to describe as fascist.

20In 1995, when A Fine Balance was published, the state violence against the poor that characterized this period continued to be, if not questioned, at least relativized and nuanced by Indian studies. In The Politics of India since Independence, one of the leading textbooks on contemporary Indian history for students of my generation, Paul Brass goes so far as to assume a conciliatory attitude towards these violations of the victims’ human rights. Usually more critical in his writings on local systems of power, which he has rigorously scrutinized in Uttar Pradesh, Brass simply mentions the “widespread discontent with the alleged excesses committed by the government during the emergency regime” (Brass 1994 [1990]: 98, emphasis added). He even goes so far as to justify “attempts to demolish the ugliest and most intrusive of these settlements and squatter walls. The inevitable violence that accompanied these efforts, however, provoked considerable negative reactions, which contributed to the rise in resentment” (ibid.: 361-362). In this way, Brass unequivocally justifies the state-sponsored violence, while fully embracing the official rhetoric of “urban beautification.” Other works on the period, including in France, have not gone that far. Most of them, however, have sought to qualify the period’s record, often presenting the violence as the flip side of other pro-poor programmatic measures. Thus, in L’Inde Contemporaine de 1950 à nos Jours, a collective book by French specialists on India, Christophe Jaffrelot’s chapter on the period refers to “progress, albeit modest” on the social front, while underlining “the excesses of state authoritarianism, which more directly alienated public opinion” (Jaffrelot 1996: 59). For him, these contradictions illustrate “the paradox of Congressional domination: the democratization of the social system is only conceivable when political democracy is put on the back burner” (ibid.), thus falling in line with the official justifications of the period.

21What these academic representations of the state of emergency have in common is that they adopt a distanced point of view towards these crimes of state while neglecting the suffering of the subalterns, which are evoked through the category of “opinion” or popular rumor (Zins 1992), rather than being treated as an objective fact.

22From this point of view, anthropologist Emma Tarlo’s (2003) book on the traumas and popular memory of this period among displaced victims of Delhi’s “beautification” policy marks a salutary turning point. In her first article, which precedes this book, she explains that she arrived at the subject by serendipity. She had discovered sensitive files in the archives of the local administration of the district she was working on, just as she was starting an investigation on a completely different theme (furnishings and uses of the body) (Tarlo 2000).

23Tarlo characterizes the period as “an era of collective silence, a moment not to be remembered” (ibid.: 70). Although investigations into this state violence were published as soon as the rule of law was re-established in 1977 (Dayal & Bose 1977; Nayar 1978; Selbourne 1977), Indira Gandhi’s democratic return to power following the 1980 general elections brought this documentation effort to a halt. Once re-elected, Gandhi silenced the most vehement criticisms from civil society voiced during the Janata Party’s interregnum (1977-1980), for fear of reprisals. The official three-volume Shah Commission Report commissioned by the opposition was also withdrawn from circulation by Gandhi, who ordered its return “wherever possible” (Hewitt 2008: 165). To the best of my knowledge, at least two copies have managed to be preserved in university libraries abroad, one by the National Library of Australia (ibid.) and the other (only the first two volumes) by the Centre d’études de l’Inde in Paris (now CESAH, whose collection is now housed in the Humathèque on the Condorcet campus). Therefore it’s not the absence of archives that explains the lack of studies, especially since researchers always had the possibility of doing fieldwork investigations on this relatively recent period to produce testimonies. This lack of academic interest can rather be explained by a broad consensus on the legitimacy of the Congress party within the Indian intelligentsia (Anderson 2012) and among most foreign specialists. Eventually, from the 1980s onwards, researchers understandably focused on the immediate danger posed by the rise of the far right and the violence between Hindus and Muslims, to the detriment of this recent past. All the more so since – in spite of its errors and heavy misdemeanors, such as the 1984 pogrom of Sikhs to avenge the assassination of Indira Gandhi – the Congress party continued to present itself as the principal defender of secularism.

24While she criticizes the silence of Indian studies on the emergency, Tarlo (2000) disqualifies Mistry’s novel as a form of literary adventurism in a field from which the social sciences preferred to remain at a safe distance, which, according to her, testifies of researchers’ methodological scruples. This trial for illegitimacy, however, points to a form of academic corporatism. Tarlo interprets A Fine Balance as the literary extension of a “literature of outrage,” by which she means the investigations published during the two years following the state of emergency. She sees in these publications only “the discourse of resentment, the feeling of guilt, the negative reaction to censorship, the fervor of political will, the desire for sensationalism and the inability to retrospectively distinguish rumor from fact” (ibid.: 70). Through Mistry, Tarlo thus targets a “post-traumatic” literature (ibid.: 72) from which the novelist drew factual information “without recognizing the extent to which this reading was the product of a very particular era” (ibid.: 72).

  • 4 From this point of view, his book seems to me to be a founding work of a pro-Chinese variant of the (...)

25Among the second-hand sources used by Mistry, An Eye to India: The Unmasking of a Tyranny, the essay published the same year as the end of the state of emergency by the British academic David Selbourne, deserves a closer look. It is worth noting that it is a counterpoint to his apology for China published previously (An Eye to China, 1975), without paying any attention to the serious excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which started being revealed at that time. Written in an emphatic style, it’s an essay against the Congress regime. Although Selbourne is not a specialist on India, his critique is based on first-hand investigation in India during the period in question. Despite its polemical bias, this book offers a valuable testimony, in terms of both the facts it reports and the many often lucid analyses that puctutate the narrative. Rather than a parenthesis, Selbourne sees in this state violence the logical consequence of the ideological errors of an Indian-style socialism embodied by Nehru. He even attempts to interpret this violence as a trial run for a kind of fascism in the making, on which he merely speculates, without coming to any conclusions (see in particular Selbourne 1977: 317-320).4 Selbourne’s essay is of particular interest to us here, as it seems to have inspired certain pages of A Fine Balance, in particular his descriptions of the forced-labor camps (to which I’ll return later), which Selbourne is the only author to my knowledge to have mentioned.

Political imagination reinforces popular memory

26In contrast to Tarlo’s opposition to extra-scientific approaches to the period on scientific grounds, Raita Merivirta’s recent book studies the ways in which Indian literature in English has dealt with the latter. According to Merivirta, it would be mistaken to consider that these authors’ project, including Mistry, is to objectify reality. Rather, they reflect the subjectivity of an intelligentsia steeped in the nationalist narrative of independence, for whom the state of emergency represented a “trauma of betrayal” (Merivirta 2019: 23). Thanks to their use of English, these authors address their own middle-class milieu (including the diaspora). Their aim is to raise awareness of inequalities, bring social progress back into the public debate, and generate commitment in these affluent circles endowed with power and resources, who are seen as decisive for the country’s political choices. More specifically, A Fine Balance seeks to bring the question of caste back to the center of discussions in privileged circles, where it has been invisibilized by official secularism.

27Rather than denouncing a literary misrepresentation of the period, Merivirta sees Mistry’s evocation of the state of emergency as an attempt to exhume a critical approach to history already present as rumor in society. His novel thus gives a literary shape to a “cultural counter-memory” (Merivirta 2019: 214), helping to undermine the official version.

28Mistry’s writing technique consists in a realistic style that produces verisimilitude, based on facts whose existence has been suggested to him and about which he embroiders the details and imagines the lived dimension through his characters. I was able to identify this process more concretely from facts revealed by Selbourne on the March 1976 round-ups of hundreds of beggars in Bombay, who were sorted and deported to the Chanda, Kukadi, and Jayakwadi dam construction sites in the state of Maharashtra (Selbourne 1977). In my opinion, Mistry’s imaginary description of such a camp is one of the most original contributions to our knowledge of the period, as well as the most harrowing and shocking aspect of the novel. The details of their daily lives in this camp, the harassment by regular workers who see them as free and unfair competition, their exhaustion, the food unfit for consumption, the deadly illnesses, echoed in my mind the testimonies of survivors of Nazi Germany’s labor camps, who describe similar logics. Mistry’s very precise descriptions of the place and of the characters’ feelings create a striking sense of realism. However, this sense of verisimilitude contrasts with the lack of available testimony on these Indian camps, whose descriptions cannot be authenticated. Selbourne, for his part, had only hinted at the existence of these camps, but without describing them, stopping at the fact that “the fate of the evacuated beggars, men, women and children, was gradually lost in the oblivion of censorship” (ibid.: 268). Although based on extrapolation, the political and historiographical stakes of Mistry’s description are major. He uses it, for example, to hammer home one of the main historical theses defended in his novel: instead of protecting Dalits in accordance with the Constitution, independent India perpetuated untouchability with the modern means of a police state. In the camp, Ishvar remarks that having to work barefoot in such conditions of servitude brutally brings him back to the condition of his father Dukhi, who performed the landowner’s chores barefoot.

29As Roland Barthes has pointed out, realism brings together concrete reality, which is assumed to be purely descriptive or neutral, and the meaning that literary narrative inevitably associates with it. Thus, when reading such descriptions, “an effect of reality is produced, as the basis of that unacknowledged verisimilitude which forms the aesthetics of all the current works of modernity” (Barthes 1968: 88). Encouraged to give the benefit of the doubt to such quasi-ethnographic descriptions, the reader may be influenced by an underlying meaning that, unlike academic writing, is not made explicit. Although when reading a novel, unlike an autobiographical account, the reader remains aware of the fictional nature of the testimony, a historical novel such as A Fine Balance creates more uncertainty. Situating the story and its characters in history, with reference to a chronology and proven events, creates a gray zone, in which fiction becomes a “little story,” fictitious but plausible and therefore possible, within the “bigger History.”

30Some inaccuracies, however, indicate that Mistry’s documentary base is not always reliable. On a specific point that intersected more precisely with my research (caste violence, or “atrocities” in official Indian vocabulary), I was alerted to a lack of historiographical rigor in the 80 pages describing the regime of untouchability in the village. These do not accurately represent the realities of the period described, for which the author’s social imagination takes the place of documentation. As Tabish Khair wisely points out, his victim narrative seems to be based on the punishments dictated by the Laws of Manu, dating from around the second century CE, in order to maintain caste order, such as pouring lead into the ears of “untouchables” eavesdropping on Brahmin temples, which were forbidden to them. However, this antique torture no longer figures in the more recent repertoire of “atrocities,” which take other forms, albeit just as violent. Khair thus criticizes Mistry for concealing the real evolution of caste practices in the name of an Orientalist vision of unchanging Brahmin structures. More generally, Khair denounces the limits of a bourgeois imaginary of authors from Indian or foreign metropolises. He refers to this English-language literature as “babu fictions” (based on the colonial opposition between the “babu,” the small middle-class civil servant, and the “coolie,” the proletarian). This dichotomy, which is reminiscent of the Subaltern Studies project, enables him to detect a disparity in the treatment of characters according to their social background: “Whereas the story we have of (Babu) Dina’s past is realistic in every classical sense of the word, the stories of (Coolies) Ishvar and Omprakash emanate largely from different genres: fantasy, fairy tale, newspaper reportage, etc.” (Khair 2001: 141).

31Finally, Khair believes that the conversations between Dina, Maneck, Ishvar, and Omprakash are not realistic, as they would presuppose “a common language” (ibid.: 141) that these two classes do not share, according to his view. On this point, he rightly raises Mistry’s impasse on the question of language: in his English-language novel, the dialogues are reported in English, which reflects a simplification of the narrative. Khair’s argument about the cultural boundaries of class, however, seems to me an excessive reification. In fact, the concerned dialogues are initially limited to everyday interactions, involving invective, sarcasm, and rumors reported from the outside. Readers familiar with Bombay can assume that they take place in Hindi, the national language, which enables immigrants from northern India to communicate with the native, Marathi-speaking population (and the English-speaking bourgeoisie). What’s more, this focus on language overlooks another aspect of this encounter that Mistry emphasizes, namely the meticulous ethnographic description of the coexistence in the apartment of bodies, body language, and, through it, the confrontation of different class habituses.

32Mistry describes different ways of occupying domestic space and moving around the city, care techniques, table manners (use of cutlery or fingers), all the while reporting the comments that these differences elicit from his characters. Even if the “legitimate” bourgeois mores of Dina and Maneck prevail most of the time, one of the novel’s great qualities is to show how the characters adapt and evolve through contact with others (notably through Dina’s repulsion towards two “untouchables,” which slowly fades as an emotional attachment develops).

33In one of the last scenes of this shared life in the apartment before the two Dalit tailors leave, deeper, nostalgic reflections emerge on this shared experience in the apartment, which already seems to belong to the past. The various pieces of patchwork fabric sewn by Dina in her spare time from scraps serve as a temporal reference point for their own history. So, contrary to what Khair implies, these exchanges, which involve more sophisticated expression, mobilize shared referents. Although the question of the precise language and vocabulary used remains unanswered, these biographical referents concerning their intimacy show that they manage order to reflect together on their shared experience. This testifies to a micro-process of subjectivation at work, in the Rancierian sense of overcoming social identifications.

34There are two objections to Khair’s sociological critique of the improbability of Mistry’s imagined situation. Firstly, it does not take sufficient account of the cosmopolitan and interwoven nature of life in Bombay, which generates cultural syncretisms that he underestimates. Secondly, he seems to challenge outright the fictional choice to imagine a shared life in an apartment, even though it is made necessary by a crisis situation, and is therefore well justified in the narrative. In so doing, Khair reduces the field of verisimilitude to what he considers sociologically representative, thus denying the possibility of exceptions to the rule, even though resourcefulness and inventiveness characterize the lives of subalterns in a metropolis like Bombay. Mistry chooses to account for this by focusing on the extraordinary. In this way, in a form that is as spontaneous as it is fragile, he brings out the political in the sense of “disidentification” (Rancière 1998) from the communal compartmentalizations of Indian society. With the intuition that characterizes great writers, Mistry’s descriptions thus evoke these characteristic steps of emancipatory processes that Jacques Rancière’s theory of subjectivation underscores.

A political reading of A Fine Balance

35In contrast to Khair’s sociological critique, Peter Morey emphasizes the political dimension of Mistry’s fiction, which consists in bringing together under the same roof three destinies that are so far apart. Dina, the titular tenant of this modest, rent-controlled dwelling, is the embodiment of resistance to patriarchy. Having opted for an open marriage against the advice of her family, and having enjoyed some happy years before being widowed, she had to scrape together a living from her talent as a seamstress. Her bourgeois, patriarchal family did not allow her to study. Committed to her independence, she is determined to refuse her brother’s offers of a second marriage, which would bring her into line with the Parsi minority bourgeoisie. However, she realizes that to be economically viable, her independence depends on the stability of the two homeless dressmakers she has hired, whose vulnerability to “urban beautification” operations leads to frequent absenteeism and delays in orders. A mutual interest thus binds this improbable community together. For Morey, the exceptional nature of the situation is of little importance, as A Fine Balance is a novel about the transgression of social boundaries (Morey 2004).

36This critique of sociological critique of the novel allows Morey to emphasize Mistry’s conception of the “real” as a site of adaptation and experimentation. For Mistry, it’s not just a matter of describing the forces of domination that descend on the characters, but of imagining a breach in communitarianism, the matrix of social order. While drawing up a dark, oppressive landscape of domination with no way out, this experience of living together allows us to imagine a budding solidarity between uprooted individuals. Their reinvention of the family home as a place of solidarity represents the novel’s most transgressive element in relation to a traditional, patriarchal conception of the Indian family in which conservatism takes root. Like any family home, Dina’s apartment is not free of tensions, but these are not confined to class differences. In Omprakash’s admiration for Maneck’s model of modern, urban masculinity, as well as in their shared youthful fascination with the female sex, generational complicities play out that override class allegiances. This is also the case between Dina and Ishvar, who find themselves sharing a parental posture and even end up arguing about Omprakash’s marriage plans. Reflections arise from these tensions, generating both moral adjustments and philosophical overtures of a universal nature, despite the strong constraints exerted in a conservative society. Thus, when Ishvar prostrates himself before Dina to show his gratitude, reproducing village attitudes of deference to the powerful, Dina, shocked and moved, orders him never to compromise his dignity. Ishvar, touched by her reaction, confides that he himself had felt uncomfortable with this same posture of savior: the wife of Ashraf, the Muslim who had introduced him to sewing in their home region, had prostrated herself before him for having saved her family during the partition riots. Finding the right words, he then says to Dina:

“And it made me feel very bad. As though I was taking advantage in some way of her misfortune.”
“That’s exactly how I felt last night. Let’s forget about it now.” (Mistry 1995: 385)

37The equivalence of their respective experiences thus encourages them to do away with charitable models that reproduce difference and hierarchies. This critique of morality reflects Nietzsche’s influence on Maneck the atheist, who, with his intellectual background and his role as facilitator between Dina and the tailors, is the main instigator of this nascent solidarity.

38This experience, however, is only an embryo without a future, before what Mistry himself calls the forces of “chaos” (Mistry & McLay 1996: 17) – whether caste in the village or state power arrayed against them – catch up with his characters like a flood. Just as Dina finally manages to fully experience her hitherto repressed sympathy for her Dalit employees, making the whole story move towards a moment of grace, the negative forces of history are finally unleashed, destroying this cell of solidarity … and with it, the four uprooted people who depended on it for their material and moral survival. Ten years later, on his return from Canada where he had emigrated after his studies, Maneck encounters the other characters and sees their decline. Ishvar has lost both his legs and Omprakash has become obese as a result of his vasectomy. Maneck looks on fondly as they beg on the sidewalk, seeking solace in the fact that they have clearly not lost their sense of humor. But he doesn’t say hello to them, and neither do they: a sign that social barriers have taken over. Shortly afterwards, he throws himself in front of a train, a suicide whose motives are not explained, leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions. As for Dina, once again alone, deprived of her livelihood and the emotional comfort provided by their co-habitation, she had to resign herself to accepting the hospitality of her brother. A broken woman, she ends up replacing the maid, who is fired for asking for a salary increase.

39Through these intersecting trajectories and powerful human encounters, Mistry suggests that opportunities for solidarity and emancipation are always present on a molecular scale in even the most conservative and repressive societies.

40Contrary to Merivirta, who sees Nehruvian ideals as the foundation of this solidarity, it seems to me that there is more political imagination in Mistry than mere nostalgia for this vertical model of a people led towards progress by a responsible, enlightened elite. Indeed, in his narrative, the political elite is virtually absent and disembodied, as in the scene depicting a distant yet grotesque political gathering of the Prime Minister and her son. The main characters are thus portrayed as the “orphans” of a democratic promise betrayed by its own elites, as well as by a greedy national bourgeoisie tempted by authoritarianism – in the image of Mrs. Gupta, the exporter supplied by Dina, and Dina’s brother and his business friends, who advocate the elimination of 200 million poor people as a solution to development problems. These four characters, representing different figures of marginality, are trying to survive with their own economic and moral resources in the rubble of a political model that has scuttled itself by declaring a state of emergency, thereby losing the trust and esteem of the population. The people left behind have no choice but to reinvent their own solidarity in the here and now. Rather than expressing nostalgia for the Nehruvian model, this story seems to me to advocate the values of resourcefulness, popular solidarity, and autonomy, over and above community divisions and hierarchies.

Politically out of time

  • 5 B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), who advocated the abolition of caste and opposed the Congress party, est (...)

41The manner in which this novel approaches caste is out of step with the progressive political dynamics of its time. The year of the novel’s publication was also the year of a major achievement of Dalit mobilization, with the arrival in power in Uttar Pradesh of Chief Minister Mayawati, a young Dalit woman. Since the late 1980s, the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which takes its cue from the anti-caste thinking of Ambedkar5 and mobilizes Dalits in an identity-based mode hostile to the upper castes, has created controversy.

42In fact, while opposing Nehruvian secularism for its paternalistic dimensions and underlying social conservatism, the BSP succeeded in blocking the Hindu nationalists in their stronghold of Uttar Pradesh. This major event in the country’s social and political history aroused enthusiasm among Dalits, but also embarrassment and disapproval among progressive intellectuals from the urban bourgeoisie and the upper castes. The latter did not look kindly on this political affirmation of the Dalits, which intends to do without them and is even openly hostile to them.

43In view of his membership of the progressive elite, it is therefore not insignificant that Mistry chooses to make the Dalit movement invisible in his novel, even though it is strongly represented historically and geographically in the period and regions where he sets his story (Maharashtra and western Uttar Pradesh). While following the victims of caste in their regional exile, he stages human encounters of people cut off from their respective communities, left to fend for themselves in the metropolis, outside community solidarities and organizations. Dina’s apartment thus becomes, for a few months, a laboratory and an embryo of what could be a model of fraternal society in a humanist and universalist perspective, in which the mobilization of Dalit identity clearly has no place for Mistry. In this sense, his novel is closer to a tradition of humanist realism by authors from the indian bourgeoisie, dating back to Mulk Raj Anand and his novel Untouchable (2014 [1935]), than to the autobiographies by Dalit authors emerging from the 1970s onwards, a Dalit literature to which he seems to be turning his back.

44In contrast to those Dalit authors – often Ambedkarite activists – who generally evoke the moment of encounter with Ambedkar’s ideas as a tipping point towards emancipation, the solidarity that spontaneously takes shape in Dina’s apartment refers neither to Ambedkar nor to any political ideology or model of emancipation, but simply to a culture of subaltern solidarity that reinvents itself ad hoc. It was with the family of Ashraf, the Muslim tailor who had taught Ishvar and Omprakash’s father to sew – and whom the latter already called “Uncle” – that they for the first time recreated a family-type bond beyond differences of religious affiliation. It is certainly possible to explain this absence of Dalit ideology by the migration that extracts the characters from their communities of origin where the Dalit activism unfolds. However, the Ambedkarite movement was well established in Uttar Pradesh in the 1970s, particularly among the Chamars of western Uttar Pradesh, to whom Ishvar and Omprakash belong. This invisibility is the result of a way of representing Dalits that sidesteps their political subjectivity.

45However, the failure of the apartment suggests the impossibility of individuals resisting outside modes of community organization. Mistry’s observation is therefore pessimistic: the attempt to refound a community around humanist values cannot take place in 1970s India, where “the universalist paradigm no longer holds” (Moss 2000: 163). However, Mistry’s pessimism fails to take into account the way in which universalism can be upheld from the margins through Ambedkarism.

46Finally, it’s no coincidence that the story takes a turn for the worse with Ishvar’s plan to marry off his nephew against his will. Cultural, social, and generational differences resurface in the anger of Ishvar, who reaffirms with desperate rage his patriarchal duty to decide his nephew’s future. He tramples on a budding bond with Dina, whose authority he rejects, and reaffirms the primacy of blood ties and caste. As she tries to reason with him, Dina is violently returned to her status as an outsider and mere employer, Ishvar accusing her of intruding into their private affairs in the manner of a slaver (Mistry 1995: 673). Although Dina finally accepts his wedding project and even offers to house the young couple on their return, which would have enabled their common life to continue, Ishvar’s obstinacy and impatience precipitate the story towards catastrophe. Mistry thus paints a pessimistic picture of the conservatism of subordinates. Although it is depicted as an understandable community instinct, it nonetheless represents in his narrative the ultimate obstacle to the abolition of communitarian barriers.

Conclusion

47Celebrating the importance of inquiry among the French realists of the second half of the 19th century, Bensa and Pouillon propose in Terrains d’écrivains to “grasp the methodological question of writers’ relationships to inquiry, and the possible ways of accounting for them in an academic setting” (Bensa & Pouillon 2012: 15). Elucidating the relationship of literary works to reality is an undeniably relevant and, of course, necessary object in order to establish the validity of their empirical content. Yet the usefulness of literature for the social sciences should not be conditioned by this attempt to retrieve more or less authentic ethnographic material. A Fine Balance indeed resists this use of the novel reduced to the logic and interests of social sciences. But, in my opinion, it is precisely in this non-conformity that its interest for the latter lies. These few months of solidarity in Dina’s apartment, however improbable from a sociological point of view, are nonetheless conceivable in a crisis situation such as the state of emergency. By focusing on this ephemeral fraternity, doesn’t Mistry manage to reach “vital centers of societies that our discipline loses sight of,” that “something that might escape us,” to which Bensa and Pouillon (2012: 14) themselves say they aspire?

48While chronicling lives damaged by India’s social violence, which doubled as political violence during the state of emergency, Mistry manages to imagine moments of grace that point to new possibilities. Behind a losers’ story, emancipation always seems ready to emerge on the scale of everyday life. Indeed, why not consider the forms of emancipation and subjectivation at work in a given era as being part of “social reality”? To be fully political, shouldn’t anthropology be able to grasp these phenomena in all their fragility?

49As suggested by this book and the abundant commentaries it has generated, the question is no longer simply of knowing whether literature can provide us with ethnographic material that meets the methodological requirements of social sciences, or simply of thinking “about” literature and its representations. Instead, in order to forge these tools, we need to accept to learn from it and to think “with” it.

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Notes

1 All quotes from French references have been translated by the author.

2 See box.

3 The figures come from Jaffrelot & Anil (2020).

4 From this point of view, his book seems to me to be a founding work of a pro-Chinese variant of the "indo-pessimist" current, within which the scathing criticisms by Perry Anderson (2012) – another non-Indianist – of Nehru and "Indian ideology" also fall.

5 B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), who advocated the abolition of caste and opposed the Congress party, established himself as the national leader of the Dalits from the 1930s onwards. He officialy supervised the drafting of the Indian Constitution before calling on Dalits to leave Hinduism and convert to Buddhism shortly before his death.

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Nicolas Jaoul, « Rethinking contemporary India with Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance: »Terrain [En ligne], Glissements de terrain, mis en ligne le 18 juin 2025, consulté le 08 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/27621 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1437n

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