Reunderstanding the City: Poverty, Survival, and Urban Spaces in Mistry's Mumbai

Rohinton Mistry’s fiction presents Mumbai not merely as a backdrop but as a living, breathing character that encapsulates the contradictions of postcolonial urban life. His works particularly Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) foreground the intersection of poverty, survival, and resilience in the city. Mistry’s Mumbai is a space of contestation where dreams of progress and modernity collide with the stark realities of slums, unemployment, and socio-political disillusionment. Through his characters, Mistry maps the precarious lives of the marginalized, whose struggles for dignity unfold against the pressures of caste, class, and political corruption. The city’s streets, chawls, and cramped apartments become symbolic sites of both despair and endurance, shaping individual destinies in profound ways. This chapter argues that Mistry rewrites Mumbai as a fragmented urban landscape, where survival becomes a form of resistance and poverty a shared, though unequally distributed, condition of existence. His narrative technique interweaving irony, empathy, and historical detail renders visible the hidden geographies of the city, exposing systemic inequalities while celebrating human resilience. By examining the socio-political undercurrents of Mistry’s Mumbai, the chapter highlights how the novelist negotiates between local specificities and universal human struggles, situating his work within the broader discourse of postcolonial urban literature. Ultimately, Mistry’s reimagining of Mumbai challenges the sanitized narratives of modernization, offering instead a poignant critique of survival amidst poverty in one of the world’s most dynamic yet unequal cities.