Ihab Hassan's Theory Of Postmodernism

Ihab Hassan’s intervention in the postmodern argument was a moment to celebrate. He defined postmodernism as an “anti-formal anarchism” and brought together the different trends and undercurrents that constitute postmodernism. According to him, postmodernism was an urge to negate and unmask, “a celebration of silence and otherness” that has always been there but in a state of repression in the Western culture. Hassan outlined postmodernism as an impulse to decentre, “to create ontological and epistemological doubts” as the society accepted and became intimate with disarray and chaos prevalent in the age. (Waugh, 407) These trends slowly got filtered from the Western society to the entire world and the writers belonging to non-western society

Though pioneers in fields as diverse as medicine, law, aviation, industry, and politics, the Parsis today face a unique demographic challenge rather distinct from the still rapid population growth observed in India as a whole. While the population in the country grew by close to 185% between 1951 and 2001, the Parsi population experienced a negative growth of 37.7% during the same period (Registrar General of India 2001). The decline of the Parsi population has been observed for over five decades, and has raised serious concerns amongst social scientists and the community itself of a possible extinction (Unisa et al. 2008). This would represent a tragic loss of cultural diversity for India and the world. The Parsis have played an influential role not only in the economic improvement of the country but also in social upliftment. Hence, the extinction of this ethno-religious, minority group would be a huge loss to the multicultural tradition of India.

Rohinton Mistry’s fictional imagination primarily revolves around the cultural space of the Parsi community as they struggle to find space as well as voice in the cultural and political history of the country while maintaining the uniqueness of their religion. Similarly, the dichotomy of ‘Self/Other’, ‘Dominant/Submissive’ is one of the major areas of concern of the writer that often raises the issues of identity, alienation, belongingness, etc. Here,