SOURCE: Garebian, Keith. “In the Aftermath of Empire: Identities in the Commonwealth of Literature.” Canadian Forum 68, no. 780 (April 1989): 25-33.

In the following excerpt, Garebian contends that with Tales from Firozsha Baag Mistry has provided a significant short fiction that expresses a Parsi sensibility.

Indian fiction in English has long passed out of its nostalgic and nationalistic phases although its truths, as V. S. Naipaul has frequently complained, have tended to be rehearsals of old myths—perennial answers to perennial questions. But with the advent of such excellent writers as Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai, the province of Indo-Anglian fiction has acquired a sophistication based more on technical accomplishment than on sociological or thematic stakes. With Midnight's Children and Shame, Rushdie redrew the Indian literary map (as the New York Times asserted), showing on the one hand, a marvelous epic sense and feeling for contemporary history, and on the...