From Enlightenment To The Prison Of Light: Reverting To Parsi Fundamentalism In Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters

Abstract

Most of the characters in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters (2002) are members of the Parsi community in Bombay. The main story line covers roughly six months, from August 1995 to early 1996. There is a forty-page epilogue at the end, situated five years later, in 2000. The novel focuses on a spectacular reversal—one of the adult characters, forty-three-year-old Yezad Chenoy, veers, in the space of a few months, from a modern, “enlightened,” indifferent skepticism toward traditional Parsi beliefs and rituals to an intransigent, fanatical endorsing of the most orthodox tendencies of the Parsi religion. My aim is to analyze the subtle way in which the narrative voice chronicles this reversion and its causes: if Mistry’s own distaste for fundamentalist attitudes does transpire, it is in a discreet, oblique way, through the use of contrasting structural devices and multiple focalization. Thus, the narrative conveys a certain sense of pessimism and fatalism in the face of the reversibility of beliefs: bigotry can be an acquired and cultivated taste rather than the result of indoctrination at an early age, and “reform” is an unstable, reversible process. The narrative gives a great deal of importance to rabble-rousing forms of Hindu nationalism and sectarianism, which serve as a background and a foil to the description of orthodox Parsi attitudes.