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Reading South Asia
Reading South Asia
Between Hope and Despair: A Tale of Modern India
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
Friday, March 2, 1-3 p.m.
Price: $40 ($35 P&P members)
Book: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry (Vintage, $17)
The first in an occasional series, this two-hour class on A Fine Balance, by Bombay-born, Parsi writer Rohinton Mistry, will examine the arduous and ultimately heroic life journeys of the novel’s four main characters—a young Parsi widow, two Hindu tailors who are descendents from India’s chamar (untouchable) cast, and a college student from a mountain town in the North. Set in the 1970’s during Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency, the class will explore this political landscape through the interweaving of documentary film clips to reveal a Dickensian world of social injustice and misfortune that Mistry chronicles with compassion and rich detail. “Let me tell you a secret” says the aged proofreader in the novel, “there is no such thing as an uninteresting life.” Studying the convergence of the past with the present on the lives of this unlikely foursome as they struggle to overcome the constraints of birth and caste in a changing India, will be the lens into Mistry’s novel.
The class will require one academic reading (to be provided) in addition to the novel. A suggested reading/film list will also be provided.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Alexandra Viets is a screenwriter and journalist with a background in South Asia who received her MFA degree from Columbia University. Her first feature-length screenplay, Cotton Mary, won a New York Foundation for the Arts award and was produced by Merchant Ivory. She is currently in pre-production on Ask Me No Questions, a feature film about a Bangladeshi family fleeing NYC post 9/11, and Hijabi Girls, a documentary about Muslim-American teenage girls who wear the hijab. She has also completed Kashmir, a screenplay set in modern day Kashmir and The Bibighar, a wartime drama of 1857 India. A frequent contributor to the Asian Wall Street Journal, her film/theater reviews have also appeared in The International Herald Tribune and The Far Eastern Economic Review. She is the recipient of the Paul Newman Award for screenwriting and an award from the National Film Development Council in Mumbai. She teaches in Baltimore at Towson University's Department of Theater Arts, specializing in film and literature of South Asia. She is a 2011 Fellow with the National Endowment for Humanities in South Asian literature, history and art.