Rayees Ahmad Ganaie, International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Sciences, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact Factor: 6.565, Volume 09 Issue 01, January 2019, Page 173-175 Identity Clash in the Works of ROHINTON MISTRY Rayees Ahmad Ganaie (Ph.D. Research Scholar, School of Comparative Languages and Culture, Department of English, Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore, MP, India) Abstract: Identity plays a major role in the life of an individual. It makes a person unique or different than others. In different subjects the word identity gives different meaning. It is multidimensional term, in sociology and psychology it the identity of an individual’s conception of an individuality in a particular group or nation, it may be national identity or it may be cultural identity. A child can get his identity through his parents and one can get his identity through his personality. In Indian writing in English the identity crisis became of the recurrent theme. As we know India was under the British rule and the Britishers bow their seed in our country. After 1947 when India got freedom from the Britishers many families settle down out of India. The Indian culture, tradition, values and ethics are totally different than other countries. Those people who live out of their country cannot adjust themselves in an alien land. They faced many difficulties and cannot get their identity. Indian writing in English became a platform for those people who are facing such clashes in their life. Among all the authors who raised the diasporic issues, the name of Rohiton Mistry is at the top. He also exhibited the problems of diasporic very honestly. He portrayed his own experience of immigration and feeling of belongingness for his country. The present paper aims to explore the clash in the works of Rohiton Mistry. Keywords: identity, Alienation, Belongingness, Culture and Nostalgia “Home is where your feet are, may your heart be there too, and I would hope that we write about the world around us and not about the world we have left behind” The above lines illustrate the quandary of those authors who are facing to select the theme for their works. Everyone in the world loves their country and no one wants to leave his home town. The circumstance prompts to leave their country and settle in a new land. In an adopted land the migrate person face some many problems. Writers expressed the emotions and feelings of immigrants very frankly. Those who left their home country and went in an alien land feel more sufferings and pain in their heart, but the diasporic authors too feel this pain and they used the literary brush in order to remove the pain of immigration. Rohinton Mistry immigrant parsi writer was born in 1952 in Mumbai. He is not a literature student but he developed his interest in literature. From St. Xavier College he graduated in Economics and Mathematics. He grew up in a parsi colony in Bombay now Mumbai. At the age of 23 he went Canada and start working in a bank. During his bank service he starts writing short stories and acclaimed a lot from their readers. Rohinton Mistry produced a bulk of literature; his first collection of short stories entitled Tales from Firozsha Baag consists of eleven short stories published in 1987. After short story he wrote a novel Such a Long Journey published in 1991.he received Canadians Governor General’s award, Best Books prize and W. H Smith Award. His name was also shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and for the Trillium award. His first novel was appreciated across the globe, and published the translated version in German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Japanese. The novel Such a Long Journey was adapted into movie with the same name. His novel A Fine Balance published in 1996 and won Griller Prize. His third novel The Los Aangeles published in 1996 won times Booker Prize. This novel was also shortlisted for booker prize. After the long gap of seven years he wrote Family Matters in 2002. His works mainly focused on cultural values and issues. The Tales from Firozsha Baag is a story about complex commonly known as Firozsha Baag. Parsi resident are separately residing in this complex Firozsha Baag are totally different from the other community of India in terms of religious and belief. The minor religious community of Firozsha Baag complex havinf clash with Indian society and they were often neglected by both Hindus and Muslims. The main concern of Rohinton Mistry was to highlight the issues of those parsi communities who do not get any identity in his own community. Tales from Firozsha Baag exhibits the community who are trapped between the tradationality and modernity. It is very clear that the theme of alienation is one the recurrent themes in the works of Rohinton Miatry. Aamer Hussain in observed: Mistry is caught between the urge to write a novel and the desire to experiment with style and form in search of a distinctive personal voice. A pattern does eventually emerge; the final impression is of a diffuse, overcrowded novel, a bildungsroman which one of Mistry's multiple narrators emerges as the artist/hero; he leaves Bombay for Canada, settles in Toronto, longs for Bombay, and eventually writes the http://indusedu.org This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 173 Rayees Ahmad Ganaie, International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Sciences, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact Factor: 6.565, Volume 09 Issue 01, January 2019, Page 173-175 book which, in the concluding story, his parents are reading with the alacrity of literary critics. Unfortunately, Mistry's spontaneity is lost once his narrator leaves India; the final stories are replete with the shck self-consciousness of creative writing classes. (1637) Like most of the fiction of Rohinton Mistry, Tales from Firozsha Baag attempts to establish the identity of the Parsi community, then the narrative shifts to Canada in three short stories, which form the immigration stories, hi these immigration stories, Mistry raises the significant and challenging issue of alienation that affects his community. Here, in these stories, alienation is depicted through the portrayal of the main Parsi characters and their lives in India and the West. In a sense, not only these short stories present how racial prejudice against Indians in Canada alienates the characters and aggravates their sense of displacement. But, also, they show how the immigrants' lives are entangled between the old country they leave behind and the new country to which they immigrate. Lend Me Your Light is a story narrated by the leading character Kersi who is settled down in Canada. His past memories awake in Canada when he was spending his days with his siblings and friends in school. The days which he spent with his brother Percy and his friend Jamshed was very memorable days. Jamshed, belongs to rich family and during his chihood days his family prepare his mindset for America to which now he is immigrant. His rich family provides him with such life since his childhood. Kersi recalls how he and his brother use to have their lunch with other students in the 'school's drill hall-cumlunchroom'. However, their friend Jamshed alienates himself from all students during lunchtime, as he takes his lunch at the back seat of his family car. "His [Jamshed's] food arrived precisely at one o'clock in the chauffeur-driven, airconditioned family car, and was eaten in the leather-upholstered luxury of the back seat, amid this collection of hyphenated lavishness" (Tales from Firozsha Baag 210). The onset of the story shows how Kersi himself alienates himself from what is fridian and he holds fascination to what is foreign. After finishing his studies in hidia, Kersi immigrates to Canada. To him, immigration is a painful process, which entails complex involvement and frequent ties with his homeland. Although, Canada guarantees affluence and success, his iimer self remains in disorder. Therefore, in Canada, he experiences alienation from his homeland and he feels the guilt of leaving behind his family for the sake of this immigration: I saw myself as someone out of a Greek tragedy, guilty of the sin of hubris for seeking emigration out of the land of my birth, and paying the price in brunt-out eyes. I, Tiresias, blind and throbbing between two lives, the one in Bombay and the one to come in Toronto.... {Tales from Firozsha Baag 217) That Alienation is one of the thematic concerns in ‘Tales from Firozsha Baag’. In Tales from Firozsha Baag, Mistry creates diverse characters using shades of identity crisis which is the result of expatriation on the life of young Parsi protagonists who have moved abroad. The characters in the collection present search for personal and communal identity through the recollections of a homeland and responses to the alien and new land. Mistry explores both Canadian and Indian identities in these stories and then he pictures how these identities are created and destroyed and how they coincide with each other. The process no doubt is painful and is very much similar “to dealing in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.’’(2) The same way, Kersi feels the guilt of having no concerns for the Indian poor people back in India. In Canada, he receives a letter from his brother recounting to him his experience with the poor farmers in the remote villages in India. Kersi becomes increasingly introspective as he blames himself, "There you were, my brother, waging battles against corruption and evil, while I was watching sitcoms on my rented Granada TV. Or attending diimer parties at Parsi homes to listen to chit-chat about airlines and trinkets" (Tales from Firozsha Baag 223) Kersi, here, admits his partial alienation from his country and its poor people. Moreover, he feels unhappy with himself when he compares what he does in Canada to what his brother does back in their home country. He is torn apart between Canada and homeland. CONCLUDING REMARKS In the immigration stories in the short stories collection Tales from Firozsha Baag, Mistry presents a complete picture of the Parsi immigrants' lives in the West. On one hand, Mistry portrays the immigrants' reactions towards the host land and their native homeland. On the other hand, he depicts the hostile nature of the people in the host land and their discriminative attitudes towards the no-white immigrants. Throughout these stories, Mistry tackles almost all immigration related problems and their impact on the immigrants. He, vividly shares his immigration experience with the readers with reference to his characters. This is done, in order to disclose the fact that, Canada, like other immigration destination is not 'the land of honey and milk'. Mistry intends to highlight the negative aspects of immigration as an inevitable dilemma of the modem world in which we live. http://indusedu.org This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 174 Rayees Ahmad Ganaie, International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Sciences, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact Factor: 6.565, Volume 09 Issue 01, January 2019, Page 173-175 Lend Me Your Light reveals the alienation of the immigrant characters from their native country and its people. Mistry depicts the ugly truth of immigration and its impact on other characters like Jamshed who despises his native people and their way of living. This way, Jamshed completely dissociates and alienates himself from India. Even in his short visits to India, he waits impatiently for the time to pass, to return to America as soon as possible. Kersi is unable to cope with his life and the Parsi immigrants in Canada. In this story, Kersi and Jamshed represent the typical immigrants' dilemma. They are caught between the two worlds the one they abandon and the other, which fails them. They are neither able to find happiness in the new land nor they are able to renounce the old world. WORK CITED [1] [2] [3] [4] Hussain, Aamer. "Review: Home and Exile." Third World Quarterly, 10. 4 (Oct.1988): 1636-1637. Web, 14 March 2012. Mistry, Rohinton. Tales from Firozsha Baag. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Print. Morey, Peter. Rohinton Mistry. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. Print. Nantnlya, Paul."Sudan: Causes of Conflict and the Peace Process." University of Pretoria: Centre for International Political Studies, 55(2004):1-10. Web. 13 April 2012. [5] Saha, Amit Shankar."Exile Literature and the Diasporic Indian Writer." Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities I. 2 (Autumn 2009): 186-196. Web. 14 December 2012. http://indusedu.org This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 175