Tailoring Sustainability: Ecological Discourse in Rohinton Mistry's a Fine Balance

Patricia Haseltine

《Asian Journal of Management and Humanity Sciences》 1卷2期 (2006/07) Pp. 176-193

https://doi.org/10.6413/AJMHS.200607.0176

並列摘要

This paper suggests that Rohinton Mistry in his novel A Fine Balance (1995/1997) has a profound consciousness of the ecological crisis in India and through his novel interrogates the difficulties of maintaining natural, including human, diversity in the contemporary economic and social development on the subcontinent. Mistry realistically illustrates the lives of shopkeepers and students in an unnamed city through a multi-voiced approach: namely through the voices of a Hindu uncle and nephew from a country village and two Parsee characters, Maneck Kohlah, a university student from the mountains, and Dina Dalal, the daughter of a philanthropic physician. Symbolically, the occupation that the main characters assume, though not born to it by caste, is that of tailoring. In this paper, I use the theory of spatial psychology (Tuan, 1977; 1990; 1995) and concepts of ecology in Hinduism (Rao, 2000) to read the rich metaphors of the semiotic subtext in the novel's discourse on place and environment. I consider the ways Mistry writes of the shifting occupations of people in the changing structure of caste relationships in town and country as people ”re-tailor” the logic of sustainability in village communities, hutment ghettos, and urban residential shop-keeping establishments. The characters barely manage, that is, to keep a fine balance between utter destitution and survival in places on the brink of environmental disaster as their lives are made to fit the often crudely-fitting Procrustean bed of progressive developmental policies.

並列關鍵字

Rohinton Mistry ； ecocriticism ； Tuan Yi-Fu ； Hinduism ； sustainable development