Discourse of Sympathy, Violence, and Victimhood—I: Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Murlidhar Jadhav's Karyakarta

This chapter examines how the representation of the Dalit protagonists in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is devised to merely evoke sympathy and suffering. It demonstrates how the discourse of sympathy used in the novel represents Dalit protagonists as passive, mute, submissive, and subordinated victims without considering the possibility of empowered, insurgent, and rebellious personhood. It draws conceptual tools from critics like Charu Gupta, Rebecca Wanzo, and Toral Gajarawala who discuss the discourse of sympathy and politics of sentimentality. The argument is then substantiated by analysing how caste appears in Marathi Dalit narratives with reference to Murlidhar Jadhav's novel Karyakarta. Jadhav's novel is designed to be contrastive with A Fine Balance to exemplify how an Ambedkarite text responds to suffering and victimization, and how that response is collective rather than individual—even though it might have an individual facilitating it. The nature of such a collective response has three dimensions—to educate, to mobilize, and to agitate—an Ambedkarite formulae.