Rethinking contemporary India with Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance:

The novel in question here is not based on any kind of survey, but on the experience of two Dalits during the state of emergency. By imagining their life experience, it does, however, probe certain aspects of this period which Indian studies failed to address until very recently. Considering that literary and scientific writing are increasingly bound to intersect and influence each other, it is useful to consider all the implications of this permeability, thus raising questions about the boundaries of the social sciences and the challenges of opening up to extra-disciplinarity. This novel, where pessimistic miserabilism rubs shoulders with moments of grace that are at the same time hopeful, redemptive, and fragile, offers food for thought for political anthropology, as an attempt to think about emancipation as a constitutive dimension of lived reality.