Religious Fundamentalism Deprives Human Dreams in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters

Abstract

Mistry has become one of the prominent writers of the post colonial writing movement. He sets his novels primarily in his native Bombay. With attention to the details of his characters everyday lives, hi s book often explore the tragic circumstances of India's desperate poor, then he explores the loss of innocence of the protagonist. Mistry skillfully manipulates a diverse cast of characters seething together in the pot of history. His special stance is as a chronicler of the Parsi community, proud of its Persian inheritance and the Zoroastrian creed of manashni, gavashni and kunashni (good thoughts, good words and good deeds) but threatened by intermarriage, a declining birth-rate and secularism. He celebrates the rituals that mark the stepping stones of life, at home and in the fire-temples, while revealing at the same time what is lost by adhering to the group.