SOURCE: Bharucha, Nilufer E. “‘When Old Tracks Are Lost’: Rohinton Mistry's Fiction as Diasporic Discourse.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 57-64.

In the following essay, Bharucha examines Mistry's writing as part of the Indian Diaspora and the expatriate's identification with and alienation from both his old and new countries.

As an Indian who now lives in and writes from Canada, Rohinton Mistry is a writer of the Indian Diaspora. However, Mistry is also a Parsi Zoroastrian and as a person whose ancestors were forced into exile by the Islamic conquest of Iran,¹ he was in Diaspora even in India. Like other Parsi writers,² his writing is informed by this experience of double displacement.

Within its broad frame, Indian Diaspora is a historical and economic phenomenon which can be divided into four distinct phases. The first is set in the colonial period when Indians were transported as indentured labourers...