LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13 : 1 January 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Shifting Identities in Contemporary Indian Society –
A Study of Meher Pestonji’s Pervez

Arijit Ghosh, M.A. Ph.D. Scholar

Meher Pestonji’s novel, Pervez (2003), set in Mumbai is a thought-provoking work that focuses on contemporary issues in India at the same time providing details and insight into the Parsi lifestyle. The narrative follows the protagonist’s labyrinthine path leading to her maturation as a political being. The protagonist Pervez is a young Parsi woman whose failed marriage to Fred, a Christian rock-band-music singer, through a series of events leads her to the activist movement in the time preceding the demolition of Babri Masjid. She finds herself in confrontation with her understanding of equity, justice, religion and secularism.

Most of the works of Pestonji concentrate on the characters on the margin of society, and bring them to the center of her discourse. Her first book, Mixed Marriage and Other Parsi Stories, a collection of short stories is filled with stories like ‘The Verdict’ - about a Parsi couple whose first child suffers from cerebral palsy. ‘Riot’ is another story which records the experience of a Parsi social worker who walks through an unfamiliar locale of Dharavi slum during the disturbed period of Bombay riots. Her latest novel Sadaak Chhaap though, does not deal with Parsi life and identity, but it is about the street urchins of past Bombay and present Mumbai. It is a fictional account of a ten-year-old street urchin who finds an abandoned infant girl on the railway platform. To her the boy plays the role of a foster father. The dire situation of the street children is not a distant reality in Bombay and other cosmopolitan cities in contemporary India. In almost all the works of Pestonji we see the characters bogged down in some adverse conditions from which they aspire to come out.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Arijit Ghosh, M.A in English and Comparative Literature, Ph.D. Scholar
Research Scholar
Department of English
School of Humanities
Pondicherry University
Pondicherry
India
arijit2net@gmail.com
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