
Instances that deny the Dalit people their basic human rights and strip them off their dignity if they dare to break free from their caste or vocation. Instances where lower caste women are shaved and paraded naked in the village if they refuse to lie with Zamindar's sons. Through his narration, you realize the hypocrisy of upper-caste men who avoid touching the lower castes but had no inhibitions when raping the lower caste women. They belong to the Dalit community and through them, he takes you through the atrocities heaped on the lower castes, where they are beaten up for even glancing at a temple during the time of prayer. He chooses the Darjis to narrate the caste-based horrors during the time. A period where India swaggers in the terrible hangover of independence, slowly nursing itself to a new normal. The story starts in a tense atmosphere in India post-partition. He chose his protagonists with great care as each of them blend seamlessly into the historical events while simultaneously highlighting a segment of the society that suffered the most during this period. Mistry weaves history around these characters. Dalal takes on a paying guest as well, Maneck Kohlah a student from Kashmir valley. To make ends meet, she hires two tailors, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji. Dina Dalal, a Parsi woman, widowed young, trying her best to be independent. The plot is built around four central characters. You will find me raving a bit too much about the book in subsequent paragraphs, only because I loved it too much. ( Sidenote: If a book makes you read up on history, I think it’s worth a read. Once I finished the book, it prompted me to do some digging of my own.įind books on and about the emergency of 1975 here. Going into this book, I only had a vague idea of the Emergency, because one: my ignorance, two: my history textbooks never chose to include these dark days of democracy. "When educated people behave like savages when the ones in power have lost their reason, there is no hope"Ī Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is a delve into the infamous Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, a conveniently muffled part of our Indian history.
