Academic literature on the topic 'Mistry, Rohinton, 1952- Family matters'

Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Mumbai, but settled in Canada, is a well known contemporary postcolonial writer. His novels portray modern India, focusing on conflicting situations and redemptive moments. His works Such a Long Journey (1991) A Fine Balance (1996) and Family Matters (2002) emphasize poverty, corruption and injustice intertwined with humour and tragic beauty highlighting the perception of life of the urban poor. Mistry uses both myriad and mixed experiences of a particular family to present the brokenness of modern society which is compounded by various and different memories and feelings. The paper throws light on community and the individual in Family Matters, it was published in 2002, and is Mistry’s third novel. It has been rightly acclaimed as a masterpiece and also shortlisted for Man Booker Prize in 2003. The writer’s humanity and compassion towards human beings relations and problems have been delicately portrayed. Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters focuses upon the problems of un- belongingness and preservation of family values. The novel reveals the mutual equation of family members and family politics in the post modern society. The novelist delineates the importance of belongingness and preservation of family values through the most trustworthy institution named family and reflects the psychological stance of the members of family towards their aging and dying elders. The novel is a representation of harsh realities and selfish human nature of the characters who expresses the status of an individual in relation to family, community and society.

‘Gerontology’ is a term that refers to the scientific study of old age, the process of aging and the special problems of old people. This paper will discuss about the problems of the old man, Nariman Vakeel from the novel Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. Though the definition focusses on the three aspects of old age namely (i) scientific study (ii) process of aging and the (iii) special problems of old people. Mistry as a literary writer focusses mainly on the last one that is the special problems of old people. Mistry also concentrates on the aging process; the aging refers to a multidimensional process of physical, psychological and social changes. With these perceptions in his mind he narrates the story of an old man aged 79 affected by Parkinson disease. He faces health problems and because of it, he faces problems with his children, his familial relationship as a father and as a grandfather is spoiled; and that affects him psychologically day by day throughout the novel. This paper aims at suggesting a few solutions to the problems of old age people which may contribute to better understanding of individuals at home and in society.

Rohinton Mistry is one of the award winning Indian Writers. He is now living in Toronto. His famous novels are: “Such a long Journey”, “A Fine Balance” and “Family Matters”. Being a Parsi writer, he probes deep the problems of Parsi community in his novels.

In a family, power relations can be seen in a father-child relationship, where the father has the authority to control the life of the child and the child must approve the father's decision. Not only the father, however, the son might also have different objective that he wants to achieve. Here both parties will usually try to keep pursuing their own objectives. In other words, both parties will look for strategies of how to win their objective in the power relation by acting certain ways. Hence, strategy can be used as the means to obtain victory (Foucault, 2002). The purpose of this paper is to analyze power relations that occurred in a family in a fictional work, namely Family Matters novel by Rohinton Mistry, particularly between Nariman Vakeel and his father, Marzi Vakeel. Nariman’s objective is to acquire his father’s approval for his desire to marry his girlfriend, Lucy Braganza, who is a Catholic. This is the opposite of Marzi’s belief, that his family should marry a Parsi. Power relations and strategies used between Nariman and his father were examined using the theory of power relations from Michel Foucault. The findings show that each character implements different strategies in imposing power and confronting each other. As for Nariman, his strategies include persuading his father, and when this does not work, he started to show a clear insubordination every time. On the other hand, Marzi’s strategies include writing a letter to newspaper to let other people know his opposition to interfaith marriage, objecting Lucy’s presents in his house by rejecting Nariman’s suggestion to invite Lucy over for dinner, and being patience in confronting Nariman’s insubordination for eleven years. During these years, Marzi never utilized violence. In the end, Marzi succeeded in achieving his objective to make Nariman marry a Parsi woman when Nariman was finally tired of confronting his father, and let his father choose a Parsi woman. Nariman ended up having an arranged marriage.Keywords: Family, Foucault, power relation, strategies

I investigate the spoken dialogue of four Indian novels in English: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935), Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan's The World of Nagaraj (1990), and Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters (2002). Roger Fowler has said that literature, as a form of discourse, articulates ideology; it is through linguistic criticism (combination of literary criticism and linguistic analyses) that the ideologies in a literary text are uncovered. Shobhana Chelliah in her study of Indian novels in English concludes that the authors use Indian English (IndE) as a device to characterize buffoons and villains. Drawing upon Fowler's and Chelliah's framework, my investigation employs linguistic criticism of the four novels to expose the ideologies reflected in the use of fictionalized English in the Indian context. A quantitative inquiry based on thirty-five IndE features reveals that the authors appropriate these features, either to a greater or lesser degree, to almost all their characters, suggesting that IndE functions as the mainstream variety in these novels and creating an illusion that the authors are merely representing the characters' unique Indian worldviews. But within this dialect range, the appropriation of higher percentages of IndE features to specific characters or groups of characters reveal the authors' manipulation of IndE as a counter-realist and ideological device to portray deviant and defective characters. This subordinating of IndE as a substandard variety of English functions as the dominant ideology in my investigation of the four novels. Nevertheless, I also uncover the appropriation of a higher percentage of IndE features to foreground the masculinity of specific characters and to heighten the quintessentially traditional values of the older Brahmin generation, which justifies a contesting ideology about IndE that elevates it as the prestigious variety, not an aberration. Using an approach which combines literary criticism with linguistic analysis, I map and recommend a multidisciplinary methodology, which allows for a reevaluation of fictionalized IndE speech that goes beyond impressionistic analyses.