Differential Standpoints, Differential Resistance: Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Epistemic Cartography of Women in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), set against the Internal Emergency of 1975–77, has been widely read as a pan-Indian portrait of suffering under authoritarian power. Less critical attention has been paid to the novel’s differentiation of women’s experiences across caste, class, religious community, and rural–urban geography. This paper argues that the novel functions as an implicit critique of universalizing tendencies in feminist criticism by staging an epistemic cartography of women’s lives. Working with Sharmila Rege’s Dalit feminist standpoint position, inflected by Patricia Hill Collins and situated within ongoing Dalit critiques of intersectionality’s adequacy to caste’s graded inequality, the paper analyses six configurations of women’s location: Dina Dalal, whose Parsi middle-class urban position yields partial and bounded resources; Roopa and the unnamed Tanner woman, whose Dalit rural location forecloses articulate protest; three Chamaar granddaughters whose narrative erasure marks the limit of the framework itself; and Mrs. Gupta, Mrs. Kohlah, and Ruby, whose economic power, perceptual clarity, and household authority vary independently of any critical consciousness. The paper distinguishes the mainstream Indian women’s movement of the 1970s from the theoretical positions of Mohanty and Rege, and argues that the Emergency’s coercive vasectomy programme, though directed at men, produced a displacement of reproductive coercion onto women that has persisted for five decades.