The Precarious Balance: Cultural Dilemma of Acculturation in Rohinton Mistry's Tales from Firozsha Baag

Cultural identity and challenges of faith have constituted as well as created conflicts while reckoning with the forces of ethnic homogeneity for a stable society. A constant struggle to maintain faith in the light of religious doubt and formidable dangers of dislocation from one’s chosen place in a community problematizes an individual’s position while adjusting to the trends of progress. One such is being the Parsee community after their exodus in 7th century AD in the wake of Muslim onslaught. Often considered one of the most enterprising among minority communities, the Parsees have internalized a hybrid existence. Living between constant economic and political changes, conflicting philosophy of life and faith, they have displayed a strange acclimatization, both within the societies they have migrated to and simultaneously away from it. Like many Parsee writers, Rohinton Mistry’s nostalgic fiction addresses and seeks a preservation of this dubious positioning of an ethnic identity for his community. He has done it primarily through the effective medium of memory and imagination, remaining quite aware of the discernable drawbacks of living in Canada while basing his stories in Mumbai, where he spent a significant part of his youth. While cherishing the partial memories of his country (India), Mistry keeps on smoothening his inner self by writing about his community that forms the bridge between his own imagined motherland and the contemporary. These aspects have given rise to an amalgamation where one’s identity has become a product of divergent forces seeking reconciliation not only between past and present but with growing sentiments of religious doubts and otherness. Thus, this paper attempts a literary analysis for exploring these themes through his collection of short stories, comparing it with his other works, to find a closure to such unsettling stances.