Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, in this fiction philistine’s view, is one of the best English language novels on independent India written for its time. The plot revolves around socio-economically oppressive structures in rural India and how they trigger migration to cities where the market and the state, along with its political underlings, are the chief oppressors rather than feudalism. The excesses of Emergency and communal riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination figure in the novel as well, which was published in 1995, not very far from the events in 1975 and 1984.

More than three decades after Mistry published his most critically acclaimed work, one could argue that his plot held a more pessimistic view of things. India has avoided the kind of political disruption and violence common in the 1970s and 1980s. Migration continues to be an engine of upward mobility for blue-collar rural workers, even though feudal oppression has been economically if not socially defanged to a large extent in villages. For every worker who meets the kind of misfortune Mistry’s characters did, there are millions who have made a small fortune via migration-driven higher incomes.

A true Emergency today would not be government officials forcing hapless workers into poorly managed sterilisation camps, as happened during Indira Gandhi’s version of it, and what befalls the two main characters in Mistry’s novel. It would be the government putting blue-collar workers inside villages and not allowing them to come to cities. Indians might think of it as unimaginable. But restrictions on rural-urban mobility are pretty much the norm in a number of East Asian........

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