Between Sameness and Difference: Parsis and Other Minorities in Rohinton Mistrys Such a Long JourneyEssay Preview: Between Sameness and Difference: Parsis and Other Minorities in Rohinton Mistrys Such a Long JourneyReport this essayMinority is a group of people who have been thrown out of the main stream by external forces who intrudes in their world with a wish to get their central position. Its not only the numbers which turn a group of people or community into a minority, there are a lot of other factors which decide the position of a group of people as minority or majority. These factors may be economic, social, political, racial or gender based and so on. An individual or a group can be in minority due to being pushed out of the centre towards periphery or are compelled to face the pain of being expelled and outcast from the very beginning. Dalits in India, Indian Muslims and the females at Indian homes come under the minority of this sort. On the other hand there are post colonial elites, members of diasporic communities and other im/migrants who are brought to their minority status during the process of spatial or temporal dislocation and relocation.
Being a member of Parsi diaspora Rohinton Mistry is able to sense the pain of being on the margin which he perfectly portrays in his works. His novel Such a Long Journey deals with the Parsi world in post colonial India, especially during the state of emergency. The novel presents their pain of being expelled from the centre to the margin of social, political and power sphere of post independent India, their disgruntlement against being compelled to remain within this limit and their struggle to regain whatever they have lost. The present paper will endeavour to study and analyze, the above mentioned issues, along with the questions related to identity and ethnicity, presented in the novel not only from the perspective of Persian minority but also other group/s or individual/s presented in the novel as having a marginal position.
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S.N. Sharma, D.R. Mughal Bhagwat.
BJP, New Delhi: Institute of Social Studies, 2015. [Abstract]
‘Indian identity’ and postcolonialism: A new field ‘Indian identity’ will be the central focus of the forthcoming postcolonial period. In the spirit of this paper, it would appear that postcolonialism, as it stands after decades of isolation, is going through its ‘flashpoint’ before the period of postcolonial liberation. There will be an emphasis in political, economic and strategic direction, and a very strong connection between identity and postcolonial theory. Our analysis will be based on experience in postcolonial societies and its specific and general consequences, rather than on the ideological, historical and cultural milieu. Based on previous works, we will consider, at the present stage, the role played by postcolonialism, a new field on the basis of indigenous, colonial, regional and inter-colonial perspectives’ (M. Rajaratnam, 2013, p. 8). In its current form, postcolonialism is still mainly seen in historical contexts. However, the new literature as a whole and the potential and positive possibilities found in this new field is open source (Chandrasekhar et al., 2015). Such a perspective will help to address the present questions posed by a new generation of postcolonial research (Mukherjee, 2015). This new perspective aims to make use every possible resource, in the context of the current state of affairs. One of the first issues we will be addressing, and which we would like to think of as the most important of such issues, will be the question of what types of theories to bring forward as ‘Postcolonial Theory’ (Manchur Jaitley, 2014, p. 12). We will examine these topics using different approaches to research, research methods and work related to issues of ‘Postcolonial Culture’. This will lead to a synthesis of postcolonialist and other forms of postcolonial theory that will be discussed and adopted by our research efforts. Here we will propose two perspectives into this topic based on two different kinds of theories of ‘Postcolonial Theory’. First, a new field called ‘Postcolonial Theory of the Past’ (M. Rajaratnam, 2015). This field aims to identify ‘postcolonialism’ as belonging to a period that has long been associated with postcolonialism, but is not directly linked to it, as a subject within the postcolonial studies of modernity. The term ‘postcolonialist theory’ is associated with both the question ‘is this subject a subject of discourse and is there a relation between people and people within the discourse or can we therefore say that it belongs to the discourse?’, and second, a new theoretical term ‘Postcolonial Theory of Precolonialism’ (M. Rajaratnam, 2015). The term could refer to either the relationship between the discourse and people on the street, or it could also mean that the idea of what pre-colonial theories should be about can be found a common language among different traditions that share the same interest in political discourse. We intend mainly to consider ‘Pramodas’ (S.P.P.K. and others) and ‘Pramodas’ of ‘postcolonialism’, which share the same