Set in India in 1975 and 1976 under an impending political crisis, A Fine Balance follows the lives of four characters in a coastal city in India (Mumbai, formerly Bombay) and the many other figures to whom they are connected. These characters, marginalized in various ways, must work hard to preserve a fine balance between intoxicating hope and numbing despair.

At the center of the story is Dina Dalal, a seamstress and a widow of a certain age who rents a tiny apartment and maintains a precarious life by taking in boarders. At the time of the story, Dina’s boarders are three: the student Maneck Kohlah, the tailor Ishvar Darji, and Ishvar’s nephew Omprakash. Dina has been left impoverished after only three years of marriage, and she does not wish to be obliged to marry again in order to provide herself with financial security.

Maneck is the son of a friend of Dina’s whose family is threatened with poverty if the political and economic situation does not improve; as a student, Maneck also represents India’s hope for a better future. The two tailors are villagers attempting to escape from poverty and caste-based prejudice in their hometown; Dina markets the garments they sew through an export company. These people form the triple strands of the interwoven narrative, struggling to maintain their decency and humanity in spite of poverty and the predation of others wishing to take the little they have.

The political crisis is the “state of emergency” instituted by former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It was designed to save her own grip on power by undermining her opponents’ ability to organize themselves against her and was declared despite judicial decisions that ordered her to step down from her position. The novel contrasts the tight, secure, shared existence of the artificial family created in Dina’s apartment with the violent, ironbound, and indifferent actions occurring in the larger world and impinging on the four flatmates.

Each of them is harmed by the political disaster in which the country is mired: Maneck chooses to leave India after a fellow student is murdered, implying that India is driving away its best hope for the future. The tailors return to their village to visit and are forcibly detained and involuntarily sterilized. Dina is left alone, not knowing what has become of her family.

Critics have repeatedly compared A Fine Balance to the work of Charles Dickens in light of its large scope, its vast cast of characters, its grim honesty in portraying the ugliness of both poverty and human corruption, and its valorization of human decency, integrity, sympathy, and compassion. The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize; additionally, it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Winifred Holtby Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, and other awards.

Bibliography

Mantel, Hilary. “States of Emergency.” In India: A Mosaic. New York: New York Review Books, 2001, 181–193.

Moss, Laura. “Can Rohinton Mistry’s Realism Rescue the Novel?” In Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture. Edited by Rowland Smith. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000, 157–165.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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