CHAPTER II

In-between Experience and Hybridity of Narratives

The major concern of this chapter is to highlight the modes of writing adopted

by M. G. Vassanji and Rohinton Mistry. These writers, in the Canadian context, for

instance, are part of South Asian immigrants or descendants of immigrant families

who left their native home to settle in Canada. This group includes many immigrant

authors such as Michael Ondaatje, M.G. Vassanji, Rohinton Mistry, Fred Wah, Shani

Mootoo, Yann Martel, Carol Shields and Dionne Brand, among others who are born

and brought up in other countries and who have gained international reputation in

Canada. Though these writers live in Canada, most of their works are set in their

countries of origin and involve with their native history.

This chapter is devoted to the discussion of counter-narratives of South Asian

novel as featured in the works of Vassanji and Mistry. These writers tackle and

problematise the nature of “history” which has a broader meaning than the received

versions. South Asian writers play a prominent role in English literature in general

and Canadian literature in English in particular. In other words, they construct an

active interaction between the homeland and the host land and between Canadians and

their groups themselves. Moreover, they form a new material for diasporic writing in

the broader sense of world literature. The desire of sharing and presenting their

communities gives a new birth to Canadian literature and a new subject-matter to the

whole world. They are capable of embracing writing in divergent genres for

producing their own literature. Apollo O. Amoko comments that in recent years critics

“focused on ways in which literary narratives[are]constructed from perspectives

outside or marginal to the discourses of official nationalism – what are referred to as

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‘minority discourses’” (35). It comes in widespread sense of an art springing not from

one culture alone, but from the tension between overlapping cultures and contexts.

Amin Malak argues:

The immigrant imagination is dichotomous by nature, locked on the

horns of a dilemma, neither affiliated with the old root culture, nor

fully fitting with the new adopted one. Accordingly, writers

negotiating and articulating such an experience have to inhabit an

alternative world, a third world: a world of their imagination, their

memory, their nostalgia. (52)

These words prove the essence of differences which should not be fully the adaptation

of the hegemonic narrative nor the ancient origin but creating an alternative one

which hints at the name of the third world. It can be argued that these writers do not

confine themselves to the presentation of the subject matter or the style of the fiction.

They rather map out new literary landscape known as South-Asian Canadian writing.

This kind of novels occupies a significant position in the contemporary criticism. In

the west, the literature of post-colonialism belongs to authors of the “Third-world”

association who are preoccupied with issues of patriotism or articulating a critique on

colonialism. Through their writings, they incorporate their culture, practices and local

illusions. The genre also becomes a target of the contemporary critical theories. It

comprises the South Asian immigrants and their experience in different locations. The

novels under discussion vividly and distinctively bring in a specific historical

narrative of the immigration from India and their movement to East Africa and

Canada, over the courses of many generations. In the last five decades, numerous

novels have addressed the issues of immigration through their central themes. The

immigrant experience is considered as the trade mark which may reject or accept the

40
assimilation into the mainstream. This writing occupies a vital position among several

genres in the open, expanding canon of Canadian literature in English, which

challenges the power structures and establishes Canadians’ relationship with

indigenous peoples, Europeans and immigrant groups.

“In-between Experience” simply refers to a consciousness that arises in

Asian-African diaspora. This awareness is characterized by floating mood in a

situation which is neither wholly repulsive nor all embracing, but a third one

altogether. The feeling of being “in-between” is perhaps experienced by someone who

has been torn between two groups, two identities, two cultures and two decisions. In

her book, Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects, Anjali Prabhu argues that

“in-between experience” happens in many parts of the world differently on the basis

of different histories, cultures, and social contexts. It can be a negotiation from local

to encounter the global using past and present (105). In Life, Death, and Somewhere

in Between: Observations on These and Other Experiences As Seen through My Eyes,

Jeff Hielkema argues that in-between experience is the production of immigrants’

experience of un-belonging . It can be answered only through the concept of spatial

condition. The immigrants’ experience of in-between emerges from cross-

geographical and cultural boundaries (19). In Phenomenology (2005), Lester Embree

and Thomas Nenon explain in-between experience as the entrance canopy, which

works as a threshold that mediates the lived-transition between outside and inside. In-

betweenness involves a place neither inside nor out. It incorporates a threshold

whereby dialogue between inside and outside occurs with a unique in between

experience as the result (29).

In his remarkable book, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha suggests that

in-between experience is the spatial gap. This is fostered by interstitial “intimacy of

41
private and public, past and present” among such other social experiences that

question the binary divisions. In-between experience, he argues, “[T]akes the measure

of dwelling at home, while producing an image of the world of history.” He further

explains the “aesthetic distance” of in-between experience:

provides the narrative with a double edge, which like the coloured

South African subject represents a hybridity, a difference ‘within’, a

subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality. And the

inscription of this borderline existence inhabits a stillness of time and a

strangeness of framing that creates the discursive ‘image’ at the

crossroads of history and literature, bridging the home and the world.

(13)

Moreover, in the introduction, “Border Lives”, The Location of Culture, the

argument points to the “in-between” spaces that provide the terrain for elaborating

new strategies of selfhood . . . that initiate many signs of identity and innovative sites

of collaboration and contestation. However, Bhabha’s definition of in-betweeness is

based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of hybridization as “a mixture of two social

languages within the limits of a single utterance”, to redescribe a binary relationship

in which the two opposed terms are unequal in force (Bakhtin 358). In fact, hybridity

shifts the balance of power between colonizer and colonized at least partially.

According to Martin Genetsch, “hybridity is a heterogeneous concept. In its

syncretistic sense, it foregrounds a mix of diverse cultural influences to a more or less

homogeneous new whole” (38). Current arguments have discussed this term as

substantially inventive as well as potentially frightening. Due to its ambivalence,

hybridity can supply a “sense of resistance when it prevents diagram clear-cut

locations between coloniser and colonized.”

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 In its Bhabhian context, hybridity entails subversion of power. It subverts the

narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. The series of inclusions and

exclusions on which a dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the very

entry of the formerly-excluded subjects into the mainstream discourse.” The

prevailing culture is polluted by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self.

Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabha’s interpretation, as a counter-narrative and a

form of “genre mixing” (The Location 148).

The hybrid literary style of writers like Vassanji and Mistry demonstrates the

characteristic of counter-narratives. Helen Tiffin asserts the operation of counter-

discursive, giving examples of Jean Rhys, who writes back to Charlotte Bronte’s,

Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, so does Samuel Selvon in Moses Ascending and J.

M. Coetzee in Foe who writes back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “Neither

writer is simply ‘writing back’ to an English canonical text, but to the whole of the

discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-

colonial worlds” (Ashcroft, Reader 98).

Hybridity became an important scientific term during the nineteenth century,

in the fields of botany, biology, and natural history. Today, the term has gained

importance as it gets more explicitly engaged in the study of human cultural practices,

not only in literary theory and criticism, but also in cultural studies, communication

studies and anthropology (Joshua Lund xi). According to Joshua Lund, in

contemporary academic work, hybridity works through three central implications –

empirical, methodological, and critical (xii). Therefore, to invoke hybridity in the

generic sense is simply another way of denoting “the theory, practice, and

representation of mixing” (Lund xiv). Critically, the term has evolved into a concept

and is often invoked as a kind of deconstructive lever, a way to reverse and displace

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authoritative rhetoric and discourses. The kind of critical impurification as suggested

by hybridity theory is a basic operation at work in deconstruction from its earliest

moments (Lund xii). In the words of Anjali Prabhu, “Hybridity provides a site of

resistance to hegemonic and homogenizing forces in an increasingly globalized

world” (188).

The hybrid narration, therefore, becomes a significant site for depiction of

such situations of Asians in Africa depending on the interstitial experience. Hybridity

gives way to the emergence of narrative of resistance or what is known as the counter-

narrative. Among the most intriguing developments of fiction writing is the growth of

the hybrid narrative. “To hybridize is to juxtapose, usually without transitions. . .

Hybrid narratives are a bit of a misnomer: we create a narrative and then hybridize it

with something that counters or is unlike that narrative” (Thomas Larson 210). The

consequence is often a portion that attracts us due to the way the writer shifts among

contradictory elements. In “The Hybrid Narrative”, Larson says:

Hybrid writers mix fact and fiction; poetry and prose; memoir and

history; biography and memoir. The hybrid goes by a number of

names: nonlinear narrative, composite, pastiche, montage, collage,

mosaic, and bricolage; it is a form that blurs one genre with another;

and it describes any narrative whose structure is fragmented, braided,

threaded, broken, or segmented. (Lecture)

The important issues explored in Vassanji and Mistry’s texts are all projected

on the central rubric of history and identity: racial and cultural. It is a study to

examine the writers’ use of genre, particularly the ways in which Western genres are

adapted or subverted, and how ‘traditional’ local forms are reworked in a

contemporary context. The related novels of the present study are engaged with South

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Asian immigrant issues. They provide the reader with productive and provocative

reading of their experience. These novels focus on the individual and private rather

than the public, in a sense to discover how public and political affairs influence and

construct the personal life of the individual that, in turn, becomes essential to

conceive an idea about the life of the nation. It is said that approach is confined into

socio-historical milieus with some aesthetic merits. The focused approach hints at the

culture with literary emphasizing and promoting the minority literature. The narrative

technique of this genre revolves around the community history and the family saga.

They address race, ethnicity, family secrets and culture. The nature of immigrant

genre is explained in Salman Rushdi’s words:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates,

are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back,

even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look

back we must do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound

uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost

inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely

that thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual

cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of

the mind. (Imaginary Homelands 10)

Therefore, the immigrant writers bring to foreground issues of identity, representation

of selfhood and marginality that reveal the slippery contract between the forces at the

centre and the discourses at the periphery. The subversion of history is repeatedly

done by Mistry and Vassanji very skillfully and artistically in most of their works. In

this sense, historiography is viewed as repressive, partial and incomplete as most of

what goes in the name of history is a tale of conquest and the repression of the

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subaltern by the dominant perspectives. Narrativized history, on the contrary, is more

human and comprehensive as it accommodates multiple, at times even contradictory,

voices within the same discourse thereby allowing the subaltern perspectives the

scope to surface and assert themselves. History of a place or nation, hence, needs to

be narrativized because it presents multiple views, which cumulatively constitute

identity.

The present chapter concentrates on the technique and style that Vassanji and

Mistry use to express themselves as “other” in the social and cultural position. On this

basis, what comes to be known as “Counter-narratives” exceeds the veil of ethnicity.

One of these techniques that the writers adopt is their skillful use of the language that

cannot be described as English of the colonial. Vassanji and Mistry employ English

language as a device to articulate extensively differing cultural experiences. It is the

weapon that these writers use in their struggle against decolonizing the mind or

against the powerful dominant culture. The idea of counter-narrative is not only

limited to the themes and preoccupation of the literary producer, but also more

profoundly to the chosen medium of expression. English language has been used by

Vassanji and Mistry to convert the cultures of homeland and to mark the distinction of

their identity. The argument of ones’ writing with affection towards his/her homeland

or community attached with its culture, tradition, religion and language reflects the

maturity of immigrant and ethnic writing. The Indian novelist Raja Rao has his own

theory of using English as the language of “…our intellectual make-up… not of our

emotional make-up”. In his well-known “Foreword” to his novel, Kanthapura, he

observes, “…We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only

as Indians. . . . Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will

someday prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or American” (IV). It is

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interesting to note, Vassanji vividly employs the English language with his

modification to present his own language providing a glossary at the end of each

novel. Vassanji has his own perspective towards his employment of English that can

be analyzed as counter use of English. He affirms that:

I have a much more aggressive view towards language; if we were

invaded, then I now see myself as part of an invading force, or part of

an invading culture from the Third world, which is now helping to

transform the cultures that invaded us. So what I do is use the

language, but change it and add on to the literary traditions here. What

I attempt is to bridge different literary traditions. I see the whole

process as much more positive. (Kanaganayagam 24)

The most significant factor of counter-narrative technique that is considered in this

chapter is the use of language. The language used is not only “Henglish” (Hindi and

English) but also interspersed with Arabic and Gujarati terms and idioms. Vassanji

tells the story directly; the language is postcolonial with the short, straightforward

sentences. The language conveys united medium with multiple voices to decline the

outer forces. With the sophistication of the narrative language technique, he preserves

the historical, cultural and religious inheritance.

In short, one can say that there is a very deep agreement on the link between

language and culture. Therefore, replacement of standard English language and the

frequent uses of vernaculars and other native dialects in diasporic novels are

representative of their shift from the point of origin. The displacement in language to

reflect the position of the migrated subjects is, indeed, a form of counter-narrative.

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 The use of language is a significant element in the context of reforming

diasporic identity. The transportation of language related to the immigration of people

cannot be totally disconnected. In this argument, a linguistic movement is a part along

with the physical and mental transfer. Therefore, linguistic migration is a challenging

approach to a “Standard English” structure. The writers such as Vassanji and Mistry

are displaced from the applied norms and put themselves in hybrid nature of living

being and hybridity defies the unity of nationality, identity and language. In a counter-

narrative, the use of English is not only an instrument of communication but also a

channel to impose power. In dismantling the canonical language structure, both

authors employ terms, images, new words that do not exist in English dictionaries.

Accordingly, these varieties of dialects and variety of modified English is not only to

make safe for the language of ethnic-identity but to transform the sphere of English

into ‘englishes’ as it emerges in “Re-placing Language: Textual Strategies in Post-

colonial,” in Empire Writes Back. In this concern, dismantling the hegemonic English

language is a noteworthy factor in deconstruction of the official language and

reconstruction the ethnic or diasporic language (37-40).

The modes of writing are not purely historical, pastoral, tragic or comic but a

mixture of all these modes to establish the immigrant genre that has been discussed

above. Vassanji and Mistry have not paid much attention to the narrative structure

(the plot) because there are many voices and several stories that develop the main plot

and its sub-plots. The concept of the novelist is to counter the hegemonic narrative

using a variety of techniques that serve his purposes. Om P. Juneja argues in the

‘Forward’ to Aditi Vahia’s book, Native Canadian Literature: Writing Their Own

History, the strength of this literary voice is that “it is authentic and blurs the

boundary between the oral and the written, colonial and postcolonial” (x). He called

48
this kind of writings as narratives of “colonial consciousness” that contain two

cultures and tolerate the consciousness of two worlds. Thus, the strong writing of

immigrant authors is based on the consciousness of their in-betweenness, with

awareness of two or more different cultures they have adopted.

The narrative technique of Vassanji’s novel The Book of Secrets is not only an

investigation of the dominant narrative but it is also the representation of the counter-

narrative. Therefore, the author’s techniques of epistolary exchanges are clearly

explored and seen in the novel. Thus, the four lines from “The Rubaiyat of Omar

Khayyam” is the real image of the domination of alternative narration. These lines

polish the vision of Vassanji indicating his capacity to see and present that others are

blind to and hence are not able to discover the unknown or hidden literary work and

history. Moreover, the novelist employs as the narrator, Pius Fernandes, a Goanese

teacher who spends his working life in Africa and remains in Tanganyika, to reframe

and recreate new alternative narratives to represent the history of Africa. The novelist

through his narrator reconstructs new modes of writing using a diary that he gets from

his former student (the book of secrets of the title) that belongs to a British

administrator based in British East Africa (now Kenya) in 1913. The novel is set in

Africa and the politics are both imperial and post-colonial. Mostly, it draws on the

relationships between the colonial masters and the first Indian diaspora, with

exploration of the horrible consequences that these non-native servants of the imperial

masters have faced when the British left Africa.

The Book of Secrets is not equally divided. It has three major parts. “The

Administrator” is the first part that has an epigraph of two quotations of Sir Thomas

Browne and William Pitt illustrating the orientation of the novelist to discover the

wonders that Africans unconsciously seek to forget. The way they realize themselves

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and Africa is the novelist’s desire of depiction. In this section, Vassanji unfolds the

history of Africa during the colonization and the reality of multiculturalism in trading

and living with Arabs and Indians. The administrator is first obsessed with beautiful

sights and scenery of Africa. It is mostly the narration of Corbin’s dairy. It is followed

by Miscellany (і) which repeats and explains many things from the previous narration

of the dairy from the personal notebook of Pius Fernandes in 1988, Dar es Salaam. It

consists of letters from Sona and some appendices. The second section of the first part

entitled “The Great Riddle” reveals the Swahili riddle in which enemies become

friends sometimes narrating personal and historical events in the diary. At the end of

the first part, the shifting back to Fernandes in 1988, Moshi in Miscellany is again to

indicate the recreation of the story (іі). Vassanji uses the history teacher as his

narrator to reframe the diary again countering and explaining some ideas mentioned in

the dairy. Vassanji uses this section to explore how the colonial masters misrule and

marginalize the Africans. It goes further to launch the doubtful position of those

Indian immigrants who are suspected of helping the colonizers and spying on the

Africans. They are essential to the functioning of the empire and control most of the

commerce but at the end they are homeless. The hybridity in this novel draws

characters’ dislocation, isolation and subjection and becomes a dominant theme of the

novel in its form and subject-matter.

That first section also suggests the conflict and the war between the British

and the Germans that has a bad result and awful consequence of Africans and Indians

leading Britain to control Kenya and Germany to control Tanganyika. At the same

time, Africans and Asians endure all the troubles. They are a part of economic

shortage and they lose a part of advantage and success. In this section, the author uses

the Indian immigrant Pipa’s story to show his suffering in his early years and to

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illustrate the customs and rules in the real technique of presenting the nature of the

immigrant class. A teacher of history, Fernandes picks up the story of Pipa and

Mariamu with their light-colored son to examine and re-narrate it from many

opinions. The story of Mariamu with her sickness, her work at Corbin’s house till the

brutally mysterious attack on her and murder is gradually developed to serve the main

plot. The framework of the diary serves mainly to form the experience of the Asians

in Africa and the reasons behind their immigration.

In this sense, The Book of Secrets is a mesmerizing novel of many generations,

blending the history of the present in 1988 in Dar es Salaam with the past of the 1913

diary of a British colonial officer that is found in a shopkeeper’s back room. The diary

triggers the teacher’s curiosity to apply theoretical history he teaches to the practical

one he undertakes in Africa with many stories gradually connecting the past with the

present. Loaded in detail and depiction, Vassanji’s cherished novel wonderfully

invokes past scenes and events as it discovers the condition of living abroad from

one’s home and from oneself.

Another major concern in Vassanji’s technique that enhances the construction

of the novel is his playing with tenses to drive home the idea that the past affects the

present, and the strong link between what comes in the present as a reflection and a

consequence of the past. In addition, the protagonist who is from the writer’s

community and a representative of the nation is affected by the history of the space

itself – “How personal and public histories can overlap” (Malak 279). The colonial

history of Kenya and Tanzania serves as the background of the novel but it is the

method of mingling the personal history that is contained in the diary of a colonial

administrator with the whole of country’s history. Vassanji’s presentation of the past

is never crystal clear: “The past in [The Gunny Sack] is deliberately murky to some

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degree. I did not see, nor wanted to give the impression of, a simple, linear, historical

truth emerging. Not all of the mysteries of the past are resolved in the book. That is

deliberate. It’s the only way” (Kanaganayakam 22). This way is described as a

circulation of the history that may not be a linear. The only way is the presentation of

a new interesting Eastern subject-matter emphasizing on the writer’s own ethnicity.

The second part “The Father and the Son” begins with a Swahli proverb and a

Gujarati hymn. In this section several stories of the administrator, Pipa with his wife,

Mariamu, Rita and Ali’s Mariamu’s son are intertwined with the war between

German and British forces in Africa. The overlap between personal and public history

portrays how the Asian community is influenced by the war. The part of “Miscellany”

(ііі) recreates the real world of the narrator in which he decides to finish the story at

any price – “the story is all that matters. I can’t stop now. I’ll take it to its end” (229).

In this sense, the narrator brings out the nature of his technique in narration:

First Rita, then Gregory, they have entered my narrative, unasked, so

to speak. I began a history, with an objective eye on the diary of Alfred

Corbin, ADC, DC, one of the architects of Indirect Rule, later

Governor- and so on. I saw myself as a mere observer, properly

distanced by time and relationship, solving a puzzle. Now, strangely, I

see myself drawn in, by a gravitational force, pulled into the story.

(233)

The feature of Vassanji’s writing is similar to many other Canadian immigrant

novelists who emphasize on the themes concerned without full depiction of them.

This can be discovered from the subjects discussed in his novels. For instance, the

metaphysical relationship between Ali and Rita comes to affirm the feature of

repetition of themes such as interracial love that cannot be stopped— “Young love

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knows no barriers, no strictures” (257). The Shakespearean “Romeo and Juliet” is

equal to “Laila and Majnun, sir!” (255). At the same time, the discussion between Ali

and Rita suggests all that is mentioned or known about the past that is not completed

and satisfactory: “You can’t know everything about the past, can you?”(294). This

concept of the uncompleted past is affirmed again. Hence, the narrator is asked by

Rita about his friend Gregory with the self-knowledge of his homosexuality but

nothing is mentioned to indicate that from the narrator’s side. Therefore, Rita

questions him, “What arrogance, Fernandes, to presume to peep into other lives – to

lay them out bare and join them like so many dots to form a picture. There are

questions that have no answer; … your history is surface” (The Book of Secrets 297).

This indication is a proof that no one can know and write all about the past especially

by using one single narrative strategy. Moreover, this knowledge is not really hundred

percent correct. Rita who supports the narrator with many views and ideas realizes

that it is not fair to discuss only what is discovered: “No, sir – Pius – this is the price

I’m going to ask – which you’ve known all along, and I hold you to it. Let it lie, this

past. The diary and the stories that surround it are now mine, to bury” (298).

The third short part of the novel “Gregory” has a very significant exploration.

It sets up an epigraph of W. H. Auden that serves as a reflection of the Britian

character, Gregory. In addition, some letters of Corbin from his past are included. A

letter from Sona informing the narrator of Corbin’s death in July 1971 is one example.

The main point of Sona’s letter is her asking and reminding the narrator of the

changing world today including the question of the new narrative at a conference in

Toronto: “Have our texts come to us interpolated by succeeding generations – a

question of reconstruction of another sort, but with certain similarities to your efforts”

(330). This is what New Historicists believe as the historiography written by the

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victorious from their partial perspective. But the importance lies in certain similarities

with certain efforts. That vividly presents and reveals the narrative-technique of

Vassanji which is “counter-narrative”. The novelist fantastically ends his novel with

the “Epilogue” in which he discloses the nature of his writing:

A book as incomplete as the old one was, incomplete as any book must

be. A book of half lives, partial truths, conjectures, interpretation, and

perhaps even some mistakes. What better homage to the past than to

acknowledge it thus, rescue it and recreate it, without presumption of

judgment, and as honestly, though perhaps as incompletely as we know

ourselves, as part of the life of which we all are a part? (331-2)

The first novel, The Gunny Sack, is Vassanji’s first voice of the South-Asians

who emigrate from India to East Africa and then to Canada. The counter-narrative

here displays the ethnic characterization of Vassanji in which his selection of

characters is based on the familial closeness and ethnic focus. Characters such as

Dhanji Govindji to the fourth generation of his descendent, Salim Juma is the main

focus of the novelist to reveal many personal and political chapters of their family and

ethnicity. The novelist’s central narration encompasses on the Ismailia family’s

characters through four generations which is opposite to the colonial characters.

The opening lines of The Gunny Sack reflect the narrative techniques and the

theme of the novel. The drab gunny sack which Salim Juma Huseni, the main

character and narrator (nicknamed Kala), is bequeathed from his mystical grand aunt,

Ji Bai, offers the author a narrative method approximating in its function the stream-

of-consciousness technique in the modern psychological novel. It offers him a process

to “excavate the past, the family roots of Salim Juma, the Ismaili community, and

along with that the past of the East African nation of Tanzania.” (Harb 182)

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 The gunny sack, nicknamed Shehrbanoo, is a comic combination of the well-

known characters of tales of Arabian Nights, Shehrazade and Shehriyar, this allusion

reveals the power of the Arab storytelling traditions. The effect is so persistent that

The Gunny Sack can justly be nicknamed (since everything in the novel has a

nickname) “The Thousand Nights and a Night” of East Africa, but satirically devoid

of the romantic ambience and cheerfulness of the original: “It [the gunny sack] sits

beside me, seductive companion, a Shehrazade postponing her eventual demise,

spinning out yarns, telling tales that have no beginning or end, keeping me awake

night after night” (Malak 115). To deepen this storytelling tradition, Vassanji employs

the character of Edward bin Hadith, a wandering storyteller who, as his name signifies

(Hadith is the Arabic word for story or discourse), makes a story of everything

regardless of how trivial it is. Artistically, the character of Edward bin Hadith

complements the narrative and the symbolic function of the gunny sack. By

introducing Edward bin Hadith, a black African, the author represents the collective

memory of the Ismaili community experience (Harb 183).

The setting of the novel is scattered in many parts of Africa. In the first

section Govindji arrives in Matamu in present-day Tanzania— from Zanzibar,

Porbander, and finally Junapur in North-western India. The diverse spaces affirm the

dislocation of this family, a part of Shamsi community, from the original homeland in

Junapur locating itself in East Africa. In the second part, the setting is moved from

Tanzania to Kenya to depict the third generation of the late Juma Husein’s family.

When Juma Husein dies in Nairobi, his family of Kulsum with her children including

the narrator, Juma moves back to Dar es Salaam. Finally, the third stage of the novel

sets in different parts in Dar es Salaam and Northern Tanzania including the

experience in the national service camps. The significance of this final part throws

55
light on the narrator’s crisis of knowing himself. Instead of his being sent to National

Service Camp near Dar es Salaam, the narrator feels that he has been sent wrongly for

the reason of his dark complexion due to his ancestry from Binti Tarratibu, the

African grandmother. He was the only Asian amidst the indigenous African

colleagues. At this stage, the narrator is in the exile in Canada due to his close

acquaintance with Amina, the radical activist of independent Tanzania, leaving his

wife and daughter in Dar.

The vital point of the argument here is the novelist’s idea of choosing the

narrative locations. He intends to use mythical location to demarcate the position of

his community in-between the land of India, Africa and Europe, situating the brown

Asian between black African and white western. On the other hand, it can be a close

real setting of the novelist’s movement among several spaces. Therefore, the

imagined geography or setting has a supported element to bring the inner conscience

of its inhabitants. In other words, Vassanji’s settings are not only used for characters’

development but also for their marginalization and tragedy. Apart from that, various

settings are used to shed new light on the narrative development of the social,

geographical, descriptive background that reinforces the narrative structure. In this

sense, the different locations support the author to unfold the experience of his people

“in between”. For instance, the fictional location of Vassanji is described in such real

space such as:

Ma-tamu. The name always had a tart sound to it, an aftertaste to the

sweetness, a far off echo that spoke of a distant, primeval time, the

year zero. An epoch that cast a dim but sombre shadow on the present.

It is the town where my forebear unloaded his donkey one day and

made his name. Where Africa opened its womb to India…. (45)

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In The Book of Secrets the author satirizes the colonizers of their preoccupation with

Africa and its geography to be the colonial desires and the battlefield of the powerful

colonizers. Matama becomes a metaphor for the community’s experience and their

intricate milieu of clashes between Germany and Britain. In most cases, setting in

Vassanji’s novels reads as motives to enhance the themes chosen. In-between

experience is the consciousness of reality that is formed out of a politics of difference.

For example, the campus of National Youth Service is a multi dimension as a motive

to expose the profound exploitation and suffering as to create self-realization as the

reader finds in Salim’s situation to discover kinship ties of his family.

Characters and settings are used effectively with fluidity moving across the

borders of various countries. Vassanji’s remarkable technique makes it possible to

probe into the minds of his characters and distinguish their predicaments. Existing

victimization is discovered from the voices of characters who are globally and doubly

emigrated. The setting is also strongly interlocked with characters. Matama is a

narrative location in many sections of The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. The

function of Matama is as a powerful background as well as a sight of dislocation.

Among many critics who admire Vassanji’s writing, Neloufer de Mel comments:

“Vassanji’s work is a dynamic site which lays bare the paradoxes, incompatibilities

and ambivalence that are the central paradigms of migrant experience and discourse”

(qtd. in. Joseph John 744). The importance of Vassanji’s work lies exactly in the

projections of how such hybridity, if at all, can never include an equal integration of

contrasting strands. For identity is a site of negotiation which depends on the demands

of situation, it is always “anchored to political, economic and cultural hegemony, and

comes most unstuck at moments of crisis.” (De Mel 175-76)

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 Vassanji divides his novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall into four

parts “The Year of Our Loves and Friendships,” “The Year of Her Passion,” “The

Year of Betrayal,” and “Homecoming.” This novel is considered as a fascinating epic

of Asian people in Africa. It also focuses on the repeated real experience of the

intended community here and there, in their home land and host land. The writer

develops his themes of love, passion, identity and more importantly lost history. The

narrator, Vikram Lall, is a Kenyan born Indian whose identity is affected in rebellion,

confusion, and disruption of an unstable regime. In this novel the concepts of counter-

narratives are presented through the characters, themes, and settings.

The first section “The Year of Our Loves and Friendships” is an introduction

to the Lall family, who are residents of Kenya. The idea of cross-racial and cross-

cultural love is well portrayed as an essential theme inherited in human beings with

their different races, nations, languages, communities, cultures and countries. Vikram

and his younger sister Deepa befriend the son of their gardener, Njoroge. The rapid

growth of romantic passion and love between Deepa and Njoroge is immediately

obvious. Vassanji is illustrating here the inter-racial love that cannot be denied from

its innocent growth and from any difficult situation. He further emphasizes several

stories such as the portrayal of Vic’s romantic relationship with Annie, a British girl

whose brother was a friend of Vikram. This gives clue to the importance of the title of

the novel, especially the phrase “in-between.” It suggests how Asians occupy a

middle position between Europeans and Africans. The fact that Vassanji consistently

refers to is the external elements that force the reader to think about East Africans in

their “confused” time. Vassanji may be hinting at himself and his parents who are

from East Africa and who later lived in Canada. The author forms the reality in his

narration for the time of the British colonization of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.

58
Moreover, racism, discrimination and dislocation are elements used in the form to

show the understanding of Canada’s multiculturalism. The traumatic experience leads

them to dislocation and homelessness. As the narration progresses, the reader comes

to the point of knowing the tragic and sorrowful end of the narrator and his sister,

Deepa among many others. In the end, Lall’s family is forced to move into several

places, where their morality is corrupted by several outer forces as the narrator

declares his confession.

Each part depicts a different stage of colonial power accounting for more than

three generations: the imposition of rule, the initial occurrences of strikes against

colonial authority, and the effects of colonization on the immigrants and natives. In

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, several things fall apart with the imposition of

colonial authority. In a divided society, interracial love is repeatedly explored in the

works of Vassanji. An example of challenging the borders of a nation and its racism

can be found in the portrayal of Vikram’s sister Deepa with her childhood sweetheart

Njoroge; it is not only grimaced upon but it really leads to explosive and far-reaching

consequences— the lover Njoroge is killed at Deepa’s lap. What leads Deepa to run

away from her father’s house is only her resistance of the regulations of the society.

Vikram’s friendship with a Muslim girl in Dar es Salaam is another example which

underscores the way he is threatened by the racially-inspired attacks from her people.

Thus, the only option for Vic is to settle for a traditional Indian marriage. On the other

hand, the different patterns of successful interracial relationships have been portrayed

in this novel— Juma and Sakina Molabux, Janice and Mungai— and they seem to

mark the exception that goes beyond the traditional and cultural rule. This kind of

presentation of both strands of stories is the counter-understanding for the necessity of

multiplicity and erasing all the borders between human beings. Vassanji captures the

59
essence of reality that human beings indulge in. Therefore, the history of Deepa with

her African friend Njoroge can be independent story that has its independent plot.

Their love story occupies a gloomy middle ground which makes them suspect to both

the white and black communities. The shifting of narration (time and space) in all

Vassanji’s novels does not bother the reader and does not affect the structural

narrative because of its smoothness. It is not even considered as a negative way of

turning, twisting and repeating narratives because this type of narration reinforces the

argument of the novelist to be close to the real and rejects the linear presentation of

history.

The novel is set in divergent parts of Africa to unfold profoundly the struggle

of this family that represents the community of the author and a symbol of scattered

nation. The several places including the “in-between” of the title in the novel draw the

striking technique of hybridity. This hybridity is not confined only to the setting but is

employed for the characterization as well. Vassanji selects five major characters from

different countries. Vic and his sister, Deepa, are African with Indian origin while

Njoroge is a native African. Annie with her brother Bill (Mrs. Bruce’s family) is

European. Through this kind of characterization, the novelist manages to explore the

trauma of human beings as Asian or African or European at a specific time in the past

during conflict and war. This suffering is not restricted to a group of people but moves

to all characters. First of all, Africans suffered due to the colonial politics. Next, the

Europeans not only suffered but were also killed by the resistance of the colonized. In

the post-independence period Indians or Asians are also in trouble due to Africans’

desire for freedom. The characters of the protagonist’s family unfold their

predicament in Africa due to the clashes between Germany and Britain. The

characters of different origins are wonderfully drawn to break the borders created by

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people of different countries, nation and race. But the novelist focuses more on the

dilemma of the Indians who are expelled from India and Africa and not accepted in

Canada. The Asian characters are motivated to move into several places by many

external forces. They are in-between Africans and Europeans.

The Assassin’s Song displays Vassanji’s manner of repetition of images,

phrases and the ethnic and religious aspects. It is set in Gujarat, India. The first person

narrator tells the powerful, historical tradition of Sufi Muslim community in Gujarat,

India. The use of dialogue, debates, conversation and miracles is a dominating

narrative device in this novel. The Assassin’s Song evidently employs written as well

as oral narration. The author’s methods of blending mythological and traditional

narratives are well-portrayed from Islamic and Hindu sources. The use of non-English

lexical terms in the text is a more widely used device for conveying the sense of

cultural distinctiveness. It shows the difference between cultures and emphasizes the

importance of discourse in reading cultural concepts. Vassanji has equipped his

readers with a glossary of non-English words at the end of the novel. When he

describes the truck, for example, he says that it is: “covered all over with pithy

sayings— ‘Jai Mata Di!’ ‘Horn Please …OK!” ‘Oh Evil-eyed One, Your Face Black

With Shame!’ ‘My India Great!’— and Om signs” (35). The use of oral tradition

enables the author to move freely between his past and present and provides him with

the possibility to counter the hegemonic narrative and to preserve his ethnic values.

The traditional technique of constructing tale and circling back from the present to the

past are features of Indian oral narrative tradition. This technique is ably employed in

this novel through his narrator, who recalls ‘his past’ dating back to thirteenth

century.

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 As a typical narrative device that characterizes Vassanji’s novel, The

Assassin’s Song opens with an epigraph that sheds light on the driving theme, “song is

being”. The novelist does not use only epigraphs but he also uses captions for each

section as a strategy to introduce his ideas and concerns. He lends the real story with

fictional invention of his own. He admits that “the verses purporting to tell the story

of Nur Fazal and appearing as epigraphs to certain of the chapters in this novel are

pure inventions” (369).

Vassanji’s framework of the novel, The Book of Secrets, comprises a story

within story with multiplicity of narration. His framework of Assassin’s Song is

developed with opening epigraphs in every episode and section. But his other novels

have their unequal divisions and frames with prologue and epilogue. Mistry creates

several intermingled stories in each novel with different size in his three novels.

Clearly, the concept of New Historicism is adopted by both writers to evolve a

method of describing culture in action. Vassanji and Mistry employ their immigrant

narrative techniques that prove their patient looking for vague material, their sharp

filtering and thoughtful analysis of various clues for exploring the hidden history and

reconstructing their own ethnic identity. Mistry’s novel, Such a Long Journey is a

striking paradigm that unfolds a new mode of writing. It is a narrative voice that

vividly

mobilised his talents for the common good, using his skills to weave a

tale that defied genre or description. It was not tragedy, comedy or

history; not pastoral, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral or tragical

historical. Nor was it epic or mock-heroic. It was not a ballad or an

ode, masque or anti-masque, fable or elegy, parody or threnody. (Such

a Long Journey 306)

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Mistry’s narrative defies definition. It is not a single narrative but it is an

amalgamation of narratives. Its themes and events are developed within the technique

of counter-narratives. These narratives prove the credibility and reliability of

construction of such events. More significantly, the novelist refers to this mix of

narration to affirm its strength and accuracy that defies limited and single genre. With

regard to narrative structure, the novel is constructed in episodic form wherein the

marginal sub-plot acquires a central position in the text. According to Uma

Parameshwaran, “the sub-plots of Such a Long Journey are much better constructed

than the actual main-plot” (23). With their divergent shades of concerns, the sub-plots

set off each other independently without hindering the development of the main plot.

Mistry makes skillful use of the narrative technique of developing events.

Many voices and resources are brought to the fore with reading of newspapers and

reports of past events which are interwoven to enhance the narrative structure. To

mention the news of the Major Bilimoria, the reader receives the story and news items

from many sources such as his friend and the newspapers. The narrator’s technique

with its emphasis on facts reinforce its possibility. This technique gives the novel,

Dodiya explains, “its free-flowing, unbound, unrestrained, unshackled quality not

manifested before in any Indian novel” (The Novels 106). Yet like most Indian novels,

it is full of life and vitality. A review of the novel serves to point out its greatness: “A

highly poised and accomplished work (The Observer). Such a Long Journey is an

absorbing book which caters to all tastes and provides fun, high seriousness, mystery”

(The Novels 107).

In his interview with Geoff Hancock in 1989, Mistry unfolds reaction and

reviews on his writing. He replied: “In all modesty, I must admit that so far, I have

only received positive reviews. I haven’t felt the sting of a bad review” (147). He

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counters the question of Hancock about the nature of his writing, asking many

possible questions such as “Is it a gift? Or a fortuitous confluence of events? Is it

because Multiculturalism is fashionable?” (146). Explaining his “sense of audience,”

Mistry reveals rather majestically, “I suppose the world is my audience,” then

qualifies the claim by adding “At least, I wish it” (146). To a degree, “the English-

speaking world has become his audience, even though the wide reception of Mistry’s

fiction set in the milieu of a minority religious community and focused on Indian

political events does raise some questions” (Robert L. Ross 239).

Mistry uses irony, humour and intertextuality to make his narratives more

effective. Irony or the sharp criticism of society injects new life into the novel. As the

narrative opens into the familiar milieu of Bombay, food plays an indispensable role,

especially a live hen Gustad brings home that provides some comic relief. At first it

appears that the novel may turn into a family comedy. But the satire that directed

toward Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party turns less than subtle. Also, the chaotic

political, social, and economic conditions in India receive treatment suggested with

bitterness (Ross 242). Mistry’s metaphorical unfinished quilt is the central message of

the story. As the quilt is made of patches, Indian social reality is made of various

patches of different shapes and shades. All those patches put together go into the

making of the whole. It becomes a suitable metaphor to describe reality in fictional

terms as it is noticed.

The counter-narrative in the form of Mistry’s novels is an extraordinary

method that powerfully draws the attention of the reader and listener. The three

epigraphs of the first novel together reconstruct a universal spiritual journey as well as

a physical one moving from the past to the present paralleling as it is the nature of

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human beings. The first epigraph is taken from Firdausi’s novel Shah Nama which

reflects the grounds beyond their movement:

He assembled the aged priests and put questions to them concerning

the kings who had once possessed the world. ‘How did they’, he

inquired, ‘hold the world in the beginning, and why is it that it has

been left to us in such a sorry state? And how was it that they were

able to live free of care during the days of their heroic labours?’

This epigraph recalls both the glory of Iranian heritage and its destruction that results

in the downgraded condition of the Parsis today. The second epigraph is taken from

T.S Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” which proves that Parsi is the ancient

Zoroastrain religion and it is concerned with their present time in India as the worst

time living in hardship and suffering. Gustad’s life is like the journey of the Magi. He

wants to fulfill his dreams but unexpected forces hinder his way, thus forcing him to

undergo hardship to make things the way he wants them to be. The denial of his son

to join IIT, the death of his friend and colleague Dinshawji and the betrayal of his

another friend Major Bilimoria create the kind of confrontation leading Gustad to

submit for the surrounded reality and ignore his expectations. Gustad becomes like

one of those wise men who overcomes the hindrances of life and goes ahead with the

faith that this journey surely ends at a particular destination. Literally there is no

significant journey in the novel except the journey to Dinshwaji’s funeral which is

followed by the journey to New Delhi in order to catch Major Bilimoria that makes

Gustad understand the reality of another narration and accept it. Gustad comes to

know how to distinguish between the narratives from the side of power such as the

newspaper and the media and from the side of ordinary trapped man who narrates his

own dilemma. That is how the novelist employs the methods of narration. The lesson

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of the death of Dinshawji brings out the realization of Gustad that although Dinshawji

suffers from cancer, he never shows his pain. It enables him to employ the

performance of their rituals. It also teaches the central character the imperative need

for a philosophical acceptance of the finality of life in which Gustad inquires about

his journey: “Would this long journey be worth it? Was any journey ever worth the

trouble...And what a long journey for Dinshawji too. But certainly worth it” (Such a

Long Journey 259). At the end of the novel, a new journey of an endless quest begins

in the life of the central character which involves countless journeys. Thus the journey

is read as the recurrent motif in the novel and it also metaphorically reveals the

conversion from one state of inner experience to another.

The last epigraph is an extract from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali

indicating the continuity of the Parsis’ voices in the new environment that never stops

in any way: “And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth

from the heart: and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its

wonder”. Gustad tears off the black paper from his windows which not only

symbolizes new beginning and new birth but also affirms the degree of resistance and

determination towards the continuation of this long and boring journey. Thus, Such a

Long Journey celebrates metaphorically the journey of the richness of life and of

looking out optimistically at the whole world using many angles and lenses. These

lines depict the way Parsis move from one country to another and how they settle

down in a new environment and practice their faith. Moreover, it is significant for

exploring the immigrant writing and experience.

In Such a Long Journey, Mistry demonstrates a sufficient degree of art and

plot construction by successfully blending sub-plots with the main-plot. The main plot

focuses on the life of Gustad Noble, the protagonist, and the sub-plot revolves around

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Kutpitia-Dilnavaz episodes among others. The major events of the history of post-

independent India are included in the main plot. In fact, the plot-structure of Such a

Long Journey is simple but the history of the Parsi community and that of a certain

period of India make the story complicated. The plot-structure of this novel is planned

in such a way that one identifies Gustad Noble as a representative of ordinary people.

At the end of the novel Gustad Noble comes to accept the reality of life that he rejects

at the beginning of the story. He comes to understand that he cannot resist some other

external forces at work or at home, which are beyond his grasp. Therefore, the sub-

plots enhance the effect of the central event of the main plot in the novel. Like his first

publication, Tales From Ferozeshah Baag, a collection of short stories, Mistry’s

ability to construct the plot in short-fiction attains full dimension in his very first

novel. Uma Parameshwaran comments:

Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991) has recently won the

Governor General’s award and the Commonwealth Prize. Its strengths

lie in the authentic, and sensitive delineation of Parsi customs and way

of life, the nobility of the central figure, Gustad Noble, and the finely

crafted language and prose-style. The sensitive portrayal of everyday

routine in a Parsi apartment block is very admirable; this is somewhat

undercut by one of the subplots which involves superstitious rites

surreptitiously indulged in by Gustad’s wife. (23)

She further explains the strength of the two sup-plots in comparison to the main plot:

However, two other sub-plots, namely, Gustad’s alienation from his

son who gets admission into the coveted Indian Institute of Technology

but refuses to enroll, and Gustad’s compassionate relationship with

Tehmul Lungraa the halfwit, are much stronger than even the main

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 plot. The main plot is weak; it is centered around the Nagarwala

case… One Nagarwala was the main scapegoat in the activities of the

Research and Analysis Wing, The Indian equivalent of the CIA. (23)

Mistry’s narrative technique is based on facts, which turn out to be ‘faction’.

Therefore, his narration of historical events in his novels is built much on facts. He

uses the first person narrative as well as the third person narrative in his novel. In

Such a Long Journey there are several other narratives along with the main story like

Peerbhoy Panwalla, Malcom Saldhana, Nagarwala episode etc., some stories join the

main story and some others deviate onto the secondary tracks. M. Mani Meitei

comments upon Mistry’s narratives in a broader and vivid manner. He states:

Mistry’s Such a Long Journey is in line with the realist tradition in

which the narrative is pushed forward in arithmetical progression and

is chronological rather than spatial in the development of the plot. It

gives comedy, tragedy, humour and satire. Along with them there lies

a rich fabric of beliefs, superstitions, magic, rites, nationalistic ideas,

humanism, radicalism, secular views and so on. In other words, it is

life in its fullness, freshness and variety that the novel ceaselessly

contemplates. Based on the sequential development of the plot the

book offers a powerful narrative that keeps a sustained intensity

throughout with a few surprising turns in order to effect a climax and

also to precipitate the hero’s fortune into a fall. (73-4)

These statements show the distinctiveness of Mistry that mark his writing as

an expression of an immigrant writer’s using of the counter-narrative mode. Thus, a

number of narratives are found in Such a Long Journey. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death

is one of them. Dr. Paymaster has a very high opinion of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Mistry

68
narrates the episode of Shastri’s death through his character, Dr. Paymaster. Shastri’s

sudden death at Tashkent brings out the possibility of a Pakistani or Russian plot. The

eye of doubt in the role of Mrs. Indira Gandhi is also considered. There are different

peculiarities and ethnocentricities of Parsi community that is observed in the novel.

Thus, the question arises as to who is actually responsible for Shastri’s death? Mistry

leaves it to the readers to infer. It is the possibility of alternative interpretation for

discovering the missing link of such historical events. Though many critics consider

the main plot of the novel as weak, the reality of its greatness can be discovered.

Mistry’s intent to tell the reality of his community overcomes other voices to prove

the strength of this model of narrative that goes beyond the narrative structure of fact

and fiction. The repetition of rituals, jobs, space and the dislocation of Parsis are

important not only as thematical concerns but also as structural aspects.

Mistry’s A Fine Balance, published in 1995, is conceived through flashback of

fragments of events that had taken place before Independence, during Partition and

the post-Independence period, when the political system was doomed to fail. It has

been compared to Midnight’s Children: its more traditional Balzacian mode,

foreshadowed by the epigraph may well involve its readers more profoundly. It has

already won the Canadian Giller Prize and competed strongly for the Booker. The

Emergency functions as a massive instance of post-Independent disillusionment with

governmental processes that destroy the middle class. The novel ends in a shift

onward to 1984, to the days after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards.

The novel works through a series of loosely threaded episodes relying for continuity

on a stable set of characters (Thorpe 255).

The episodes portray the personal histories of the central female protagonist,

Dina Dalal, an untouchable family of the young Parsi student, Maneck Kohlah, and

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images provided by the political history of India. Mistry’s narrative is intermingled

with the personal hope of his untouchable for accomplishment of their individual

freedom. One of these occasions of hope emerges in the rebellion against the

mandates of caste by Dukhi, Ishvar and Narayan’s father when he decides to

apprentice his sons to be tailors. When Dukhi gets away, that may be a result of

contemporary caste politics. This is the year 1939, the end of the decade in which the

Poona Pact is signed by Hindu leaders promising the end of the discrimination against

untouchables (Hiro 6). By using the name “Dukhi,” it is quite possible that Mistry is

invoking a literary genealogy for his depiction of untouchability, besides situating the

aspirations and efforts of his Untouchable characters within a history in which their

defeat is pre-determined. Mistry’s Dukhi is made of a more strong constitution; he

survives the privations of his position and turns his disillusionment towards a

constructive purpose, the release of his sons from the occupational stigma of being

leather workers. But a generation or two later, Dukhi’s efforts culminate in the

massacre of all of his descendants, except for a son and a grandson, who eventually

slide into beggary as a result of the government-sponsored mutilation of their bodies

during the Emergency. It also triumphs over narrative teleology controlling the

trajectory and determination of desire.

A Fine Balance is based on three major narrative components – the stories of

Dina, Ishvar and Om, and Maneck. The chapters move alternatively between past and

present. The first, third and fifth chapters narrate the past lives of the major

characters. The second, fourth and sixth chapters describe the present. Between the

“Prologue: 1975” and the “Epilogue: 1984”, the novel unfolds cultural, socio-political

and historical events of India. The novel technique develops through the seemingly

separate stories of the major characters. Dodiya affirms, “Mistry’s narrative moves

70
smoothly between the present and the past that formed the characters’ lives,

contrasting the illusory hopes of independence with the bitter corruption of a society”

where justice has disappeared (Perspectives 77). Significantly, Mistry employs an

omniscient narrator with several characters who reveal the author’s set of values. For

instance Valmiki laments: “What are we to say, Madam, what are we to think about

the state of this nation? When the highest court in the land turns the Prime Minister’s

guilt into innocence, then all this” (A Fine Balance 603).

A Fine Balance is innovative in its technique in Canadian fiction because

Mistry makes use of the third person narrative more in the manner of the nineteenth

century English novel. The narrative, avoiding the linear mode, moves easily between

the past and the present. The forward and backward movement of the story creates a

lot of interest (Dodiya, Perspective 78). The reader is scuffled between various time

phases that mark each major historical upheaval. In the sub-plots of A Fine Balance

Mistry has created the stories of a Beggar-master and Rajaram, the hair-collector, who

turns out to be Bal Baba at the end of the novel. For Peter Morey, A Fine Balance

“uses a variety of literary tropes and discourses as it weaves its narrative fabric,

creating a quilt which sustains and supports both characters and readers as they

experience the giddy fluctuations of a menacing, topsy-turvy world” (172).

Bal Baba’s role in A Fine Balance signifies Indians’ faith in the so-called

spiritual persons. No wonder that they have a criminal history behind them. Mistry

expresses his views about life easily in the character of Valmiki, the proofreader. The

author has created a range of interesting characters to suit the main and the sub-plots

of the novel A Fine Balance. The sub-plots are so well structured and woven to the

main plot of the novel that the readers’ concentration is not disturbed at all while

reading it.

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 A Fine Balance is the most intense of Mistry’s three novels where his concern

for the poor, the deprived and the powerless becomes a field for attacking political

institutions. It is a novel where the middle class and the anonymous, unknown

working class meet, sympathize with each other, and display their underdog

conditions. The author in this novel starts with an image and later expands to include

the tailors to bring in the horror of caste exploitation and violence of rural India

producing the figure of Maneck Kohlah from Kashmir and Om and Ishvar from the

countryside of Bombay. Each character brings into the web of the novel the horrors,

incomprehension and injustice of their backgrounds. Each of these characters

becomes a representation of the suffering of the ordinary citizen in the India of the

1970s.

Victimization of the characters presented through the novel is the message

which Mistry believes to carry to the world. It is the reality which is hidden. These

characters not only represent rural and urban areas of the country but also the

exploited people all over the World. The homelessness of Ishvar and Om in the city

makes them victims of the central government’s plans for a city beautification project.

Unlike these two, Dina Dalal, whose fortunes begin to change with the death of her

father, self- sacrifices by serving her brother’s family and thus, she carries the burden

to live with dignity. Dina’s relationship with the two tailors is at first tyrannical as she

forces them to work long hours without light in a dark room and importantly without

food. She bans Maneck, a “nice Parsi boy” from socializing with them. But the

obstacles gradually vanish as they all get to know each other. The four become

stronger in their relationship with one another after their horrific experiences at the

construction factory. His suffering while studying in Bombay leads him to escape

abroad, giving up his study. Maneck suffers his father’s death, Avinash’s murder, the

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suicide of Avinash’s sisters and now, in the fate of Om, Ishvar and Dina, he sees life

being crushed with the misery of human beings. He eventually decides to give up his

life and steps in front of a moving train to let his-story be known to save the nation,

especially the common people whose suffering knows no end. His death might wake

up his ordinary people to gather their voices to face the powerful authority and

powerful people. Finally, through Shankar and Beggarmaster, we are introduced to a

world of subalterns who were worse off than the tailors — the beggars. Hence,

Maneck’s suicide is a statement of despair and a rejection of this type of

marginalization.

In this light, a statement by Paul Ricoeur in this novel serves best to illustrate

the way in which the narrative is always inherently an intersubjective, communicative

act; taken from one part of human experience, it has its characters, themes and ups

and down:

Storytelling displays its imaginative skill at the level of a human

experience which is already ‘communalised’. Plots, characters,

thematic elements, etc. are forms of a life which is really a common

life. In this respect, autobiographies, memoirs, … confessions [and

novels] are only subsections of a narrative bend which as a whole

describes and redescribes human actions in terms of interactions. (189)

In the Epilogue, Maneck finds himself in a city now fallen apart by the

religious violence. This novel is a narrative about the persistence against the odds of

collective life-incorporating but transcending the nation.

According to Michel de Certeau, the significant point is that the “space is a

practised place” (117). In other words, he distinguishes between mere locations made

73
static by cartography, and the movements between points which are also potential

narratives. Certeau argues that stories such as that of the tailors who share their lives

at their favourite café, the Vishram Vegetarian Hotel “traverse and organise places;

they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them.

They are spatial trajectories” (A Fine Balance 115). The stories of Ishvar and

Omprakash borrow heavily from different genres: the fantastic, the fairy tale,

newspaper reportage, etc. By narrativising their experiences in the spaces of the text –

village, town, city, slum, shop doorway, Dina’s flat – Ishvar and Omprakash not only

contribute patches to the symbolic quilt, but they also show how narrative structures

regulate changes in space (or move from one place to another), and are made by

stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series.

Jaydipsinhk Dodiya confirms Vinita Bhavanagar’s view adding that the major

fault that one can point out in the narrative of A Fine Balance is that everything ends

with a sad and negative note. Mistry talks of negative characteristics of India’s

political and social situation. Mistry builds all the narratives artistically. The shifting

from one narrative to another is seamless. Largely, A Fine Balance is a series of

connected narratives spanning over the pre-independent India to the assassination of

Indira Gandhi. Real India is drawn from the perspective of the novelist in all strands

of the narrative in A Fine Balance. Bhavnagar points out:

If Mistry’s “truth” is incomplete it is because it is in the nature of

fiction to be incomplete and self-contradictory. A text presents reality

partially or incoherently, leaving gaps. Through these gaps a reader can

see what the text was hiding from itself. In the case of Mistry’s A Fine

Balance this gap, this silence, is represented by the vision and the

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 experience of Avinash . . . Mistry attempts to prevent any disruption of

the narrative flow of his novel. (108)

What is significant in Bhavnagar’s words is the incompleteness of the truth and the

existing gaps, but it is the real work of narratives according to New Historicists’ view

of the personal anecdote incorporated with historical events. If Mistry’s truth is not

complete, no one is able to depict the past and his community with the completeness

of the truth.

Mistry’s writing is captivating whether it is about a client’s life, the birth of a

child, family quarrel about money, family matters, endless tragedy and comedy which

are the true history of the ordinary people. The experiment of the theatre which is

concerned with serious social issues in short plays reveals the objectives of Mistry

which is beyond both catharsis of Aristotle, pity and fear, to be a state of engagement

into the arena of epic realism. Like other postcolonial Indian writers, he also uses the

form of alternative narratives and sometimes employs anti-realist modes of narration

to define the truth. As can be seen above, A Fine Balance has received mixed

responses from the critics mainly because of its portrayal of India. The novel was

nominated for the Booker Prize. In her interview with Mistry, Linda R. Richards

reports Mistry’s criticism by Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist writer, during a

BBC-TV panel discussion before the 1996 Booker Prize award ceremony. Greer says:

“I hate this book, I absolutely hate it. . . It’s a Canadian book about India. What could

be worse? What could be more terrible?” (Interview). Therefore, in this discourse,

Mistry replied, “asinine.” So, in his next novel Family Matters, Mistry is amazed by

“foreign critics” who came to India “for two weeks and become experts.” How she

can judge in four months teaching the daughters of high society and be “in a better

position to judge India than I am in, having grown up there and spent 23 years before

75
emigrating? . . . If she wanted to make the case that she did not like the book there

were far better ways to do it than to say something so, so” (Interview, Richards). But

the real justification of Geer is dissatisfactory. As a writer and critic, she should be

aware of how, why and what Mistry has incorporated in his narration to enhance the

realist mode in his writing. Therefore, Mistry confirms his authenticity in his attack of

Greer.

It can be said that Mistry uses hyperbole and exaggeration to satirize the

deformities of his society or to touch the real in this kind of writing. Mistry’s A Fine

Balance provides us with a horror of poverty and misery prevailing in India that

cannot be denied at that time. He has used both his memory and imagination to focus

on India’s political and social issues. He has done enough justice to all those silenced

constituencies to be represented in A Fine Balance.

If Mistry is preoccupied in Such A Long Journey with his Parsi community, in

the second novel, he liberates himself to write about the marginalized, untouchable,

poor and minor people. His revived interest in the predicament of his people over the

history in Family Matters deserves to be examined profoundly in order to discover the

counter-narrative techniques employed to emphasize the ethnic issues.

Mistry’s mixture of narrative complicates the reader’s point of view about his

perspective. He uses this as a technique implicitly to mask his subjectivity. He varies

his choice of narrator in each of his novels. In Such a Long Journey, it is the first

person narrative with several narratives but in A Fine Balance, it is the third person

narrative with first person as the omniscient along with many other narratives whereas

in The Family Matters, Mistry employs the first person mostly through the stream of

consciousness. There are no barriers of time and space in the novels of Mistry as he

fuses tenses allowing the reader to move smoothly from one narrative to another. The

76
setting of the novels is worth mentioning because all are set in Bombay except the

second novel A Fine Balance where the novelist avoids mentioning Bombay though

the features of the city are always felt in the background.

No wonder, then, if Mistry in his third novel, The Family Matters, too

problematises one single mode of narration. For so many narratives are mingled such

as the story of Hussain’s family; the story of beating and raping the Parsi lady in her

house; the story of Rangarajan telling Nariman about his working in Kuwaiti hospital

and the predicament of his coming back because of Sadam Hussian’s attack on

Kuwait; the story of Coomy’s fate and the handyman Edul during their work at

Chateau Felicity. Mr. Kapur’s murder by Shiv Sena gets merged into the main

narrative.

The technique of playing with metaphors is another highpoint of Mistry’s

novel. It reminds the reader of Wuthering Heights with its two different settings or

locations. The use of metaphors of Chateau Felicity with its painful and complicated

nature in comparison with the peaceful Pleasant Villa is the major phase that enhances

the narrative structure. The metaphor of the Fire temple and its role of bringing

tranquility and peace to Yezad’s mind are highly sketched. The metaphor of the

“tower of silence” and the methods of presenting the ritual norms and belief of the

Parsis are skillfully portrayed. Mistry carefully crafts a narrative that heightens our

sense of the vital life of a Parsi family—one filled with sibling rivalries, lost loves,

secrets, and also the growth pains of the young alongside the deep sufferings of the

old (Aldama 76). It is not the history or the actuality that attracts attention in Mistry’s

fiction, but the way he uses these elements. As in his treatment of Parsi society, he

transforms the historical situations and the reality of Indian life into a metaphor that

shows how the individual reacts to widespread corruption when entangled in its grasp,

77
as in Such A Long Journey, and how people respond to the endless forms of tyranny

that government and society inflict, as in A Fine Balance (Ross 240).

The narratives are developed on the differences and debates between Murad

and his father Yezad. The binaries of thought between them in terms of purity and

impurity, old generation and new generation, and narration with its counter-narration

foster the idea of rituals that explore the misuse of religion like a weapon refusing to

accept these crazy ideas. The same predicament of difference that Murad, the older

son of Yazad and Roxana, is going to fall in love with non-Parsi girl is similar to his

grandfathers.

The Family Matters is drawn on the flashback technique which is always

marked in italics. In the italicized passages, Nariman Vakeel recreates his guilt-laden

past. In a psychoanalytical sketch, the novel traces Nariman’s subconscious. It

usually occurs in a dream-like state between sleep and walking. When Nariman was

young, he loved a Christian woman named Lucy Braganza. Nariman had pursued her,

in defiance of her strict family, by simply standing outside her window during the

monsoon, gazing up at her, ignoring her brothers’ threats. In Family Matters, finally,

Mistry deeply affirms the role of storytelling as the glue that brings family members

together and, as an older Jehangir reflects at the end, as a way to gain a better

understanding of the topsy-turvy, postcolonial India and the complexity of its people

(Aldama 77).

It is also the realism in his narrative which makes Mistry so well known. The

quality of the prose asserts artifice over what is common and brings to it a level of

significance otherwise unavailable to realism. This quality of Victorian fiction is

found in the best writing of Mistry. Laura Moss defends Mistry’s use of realism by

rejecting the idea that universalism has to be attached. She rightly observes: “Non-

78
realist writing is frequently privileged by the critics because of the assumption that its

various forms are inherently conducive to political subversion because of their

capacity for presenting multiplicity” (158). Moss argues that Mistry’s version of

realism is not universalist, Eurocentric, or simply imitative, but intensely radical and

subversive. Her justification of Mistry’s style serves as a vital reminder that realism is

not necessarily inadequate and that experiment is not by definition the most

appropriate strategy for postcolonial fiction. She rightly puts Family Matters as a

better twenty-first-century work rather than as a Victorian novel. She wholly distances

Mistry from the tradition of Victorian writing. Her idea proves a new narrative of

twenty-first century that might be the counter-narrative in a proper strategy of the

radical and subversive mode.

Mistry’s unique achievement in this novel is the weaving of the complex tale

of Nariman Vakeel and his gradual degeneration of bodily functions. He is redeemed

by the love and caring of his children and grandchildren, who look beyond the body to

the goodness of the man. But parallel to the story of his illness, the story of his

disastrous past is gradually unveiled—the story of a brilliant and madly-in-love young

man who is forced because of the bigotry of his parents to abandon his marriage with

the Catholic woman he loves and agrees to an arranged marriage to a widowed Parsi

woman, already mother of two children. The proximity of the former lovers, the

shame of the Parsi parents and the selfishness of the employers, gradually unfold into

disaster as both the former lover and the angry wife die, leaving Nariman with eternal

regret, grief and guilt. Nariman’s story is itself a commentary on excessive

community exclusiveness within communities and the disastrous consequences of

tyrannical parental authority. By the time Nariman dies, his death appears natural and

timely, both in terms of the people around him and the narrative. His is a life lived

79
fully, having traversed love, rejection, grief, guilt, generosity, disease, desertion and

redemption. In this novel, Mistry relies less overtly on national politics for his main

plot and maps his literary world clearly through his detailed exploration of human

weakness and the redeeming qualities.

The frameworks of Mistry’s novels are unique. In Such a Long Journey,

Mistry employs epigraph at the beginning of the novel to foreshadow the coming

events, while in A Fine Balance, he uses the prologue and epilogue to blend his

narratives and to achieve his idea of melting modernity with classic. In The Family

Matters, however, he employs only epilogue that gives a shock to the readers at the

end. This diversity and variety are the hallmark of Mistry’s narrative strategy.

Mistry’s style “appears to have evolved its characteristic features – the measured

clearity of the European novel leavened by the dialogic energy of eastern storytelling

traditions – to deal with the multiple interpellations of conflictual ideologies.” (Morey

173)

Both novelists, Vassanji and Mistry, attempt like many immigrant writers in

Canada, to find new techniques for their narration. Therefore, the novels discussed in

this chapter are not set in Canada. Vassanji’s novels are set in Africa, except The

Assassin’s Song which is set in India. Mistry’s novels including the recent novella The

Scream are set in Bombay, India. Besides, the setting is confined to specific and

precise chosen narrative locations that show care for their respective communities.

Both writers counter the narrative of location of both countries. The language which

has been employed by both writers is not only postcolonial in nature but a mixture

and variety of different languages including terms, images and proverbs.

For analyzing any text, New Historicists argue that knowledge of the writers’

backgrounds and the books they have been influenced with should be taken into

80
consideration. It appears that both authors are influenced by more than two cultures.

In fact, the narrative technique of both writers is a combination of cultures. It is

observed that both writers employ the earlier culture of their native land, “Itihasa”, the

narration of historical events and religious stories for what happened in the past are

intermingled with the Western literature. The novelists have been influenced by three

great epics of India: the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad Gita (Itihasa).

Based on Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, Mistry’s Such a Long Journey

and Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack unfold a first person narrative that describes colorful

and painful memories in incoherent and imperfect form. Their narratives endeavor to

retell these memories as they were / are experienced; that is, as disturbing and

mysterious. Wilkomirski argues:

My earliest memories are a rubble field of isolated images and events.

Shards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges, which still cut flesh if

touched today. Mostly a chaotic jumble, with very little chronological

fit; shards that keep surfacing against the orderly grain of grown-up

life and escaping the laws of logic. (4)

Indeed, counter-narratives are Fragments of narratives without beginnings or

endings; neither familial origins “nor historical causes are available to give form or

meaning to memory. Moreover, history is not experienced in the form of events;

neither the liberation of the camps nor the end of the war can be said to occur within

the author’s memory” (Carroll 111).

Mistry and Vassanji’s methods correspond with Clifford Geerts’ “The Thick

Description of Cultures” and the leaders of New Historicism in “the touch of the

real”. It is observed that the intermixing of styles and the insistence upon everyday

81
events by Vassanji and Mistry is a highly efficient technique. It is “a mixed style-

without aesthetic restriction in neither subject matter or form” (Greetblatt, Practicing

34). It is described by Auerbach as genius literarius—the creative, generative power

of language in a particular historical period. Auerbach assumes: “Thus there is no

need for anecdotes that take the form of miniature narratives, with beginning, middle,

and the end” (Greetblatt, Practicing 39).

Multiple narratives of resistance are incorporated in the writing of Vassanji

and Mistry. Robert Young observes, “[a]lthough the claim for active resistance . . .

inevitably offers a certain political allure, it has to be said that documentary evidence

of resistance by colonized peoples is not at all hard to come by, and is only belittled

by the implication that you have to read between the lines to find it” (149). There are

several narratives that disprove the grand designs and historical destinies that are

constructed as management practices in coping with irreducible differences. Vassanji

and Mistry achieve what Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin describe as a radical

questioning of easy assumptions about the characteristics of the genres they usually

employ as structuring and categorising definitive. In this sense, both novelists aim at

destabilizing a single genre which is the hegemonic form of writing and apply several

narratives that are promoted in New Historicists.Vassanji and Mistry plunge the

reader into their lost history, locations and identity using divergent methods and

strategies.

82
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