Suicide and Transformative Agency in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

This paper explores the ways in which Maneck’s suicide in Rohinton Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance works as a viable strategy for resisting and transforming the hegemonic order of postcolonial India. Rather than a mere sequence or repetition of events, Maneck’s death on the railway establishes a critical point of grounding and creates the metaphorical effects of a new community. The highlight of this research is to illustrate how oppression or abjection can be transformed into a mode of agency in the circulatory, recursive structure of transgression and protest. To that end, by arguing the importance of strategic essentialism coupled with everyday practice I emphasize the need to problematize the dominant concept of space and time so as to explore the potential reterritorialization of space and the repossession of time. Among others, I draw attention to how a carnivalesque gathering in Dina’s kitchen following Maneck’s suicide serves as a powerful metaphor for reasserting a place within the governing space. To explore suicide as a mode of resistance and transformation, I appropriate the theories of Bhaktin, Foucault, Bhabha, Ashcroft, and de Certeau.