11 - Rohinton Mistry and the Canlit Imperative

Summary

‘When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice: tell them that in Toronto once there lived a Parsi boy as best he could. Set you down this; and say, besides, that for some it was good and for some it was bad, but for me life in the land of milk and honey was just a pain in the posterior.’

Rohinton Mistry, ‘Squatter’

The work of Indo-Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry focuses on the personal struggles of individuals within society, largely within the Parsi community in which Mistry grew up in midcentury Bombay. His writing has been compared more frequently to Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy and other nineteenth-century European realists than to the more contemporary, postmodern idiom of South Asian writers like Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra. Mistry's transparent style, combined with great psychological insight into character, supports his popularity throughout the English-speaking world and his numerous international awards. However, the critical reception of his work in India and North America reflects complex aesthetic, political and theoretical debates among his serious readers. Particularly in Canada, scholarly work on Mistry's fiction is the site of an ongoing discussion about postcolonial issues and Canadian identity politics, as well as trends in literary criticism and the government funding policies that support it.