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- ISSN: 2582-9823
Anjali Raman
International Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (IJLLC), Vol-6,Issue-2, March - April 2026, Pages 59-66, 10.22161/ijllc.6.2.9
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Article Info: Received: 20 Mar 2026, Received in revised form: 19 Apr 2026, Accepted: 23 Apr 2026, Available online: 27 Apr 2026
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The novel, Trying to Grow (Kanga, 1990) is a microcosm of the Parsee community, its dilemmas and mixed feelings of living in India. They are too westernized for the common run of people around them and yet India is their home. By itself the novel doesn’t pretend to have any revolutionary political views, but the Bombay shown in the novel has vanished and along with it the Parsee community which was thriving there has all but vanished. There is an air of the transience of that world in the novel. The Parsees were very much like the secular Indians of post-independence India. The Congress party under the leadership of Nehru, Gandhi, and later Indira gave daily sermons on unity in diversity. The essentially secular ethos which it embraced had a place for all religions be they Hindu, Muslim, Parsee or Christian. The world which has been banished by the emerging belligerent politics of current day India, where the ruling regime is proposing a majoritarian, pro-authority, where dissent is a sin not to be attempted, where even the neutral appellation of India must be replaced by the Sanskritic Bharat. This world view is narrow and parochial. The paper identifies with the nostalgia the book evokes, unknowingly in the children born in the 70’s because they recognize the lost world of an inclusive, secular, less commercialized, more free and more forested, less peopled, greener, more Westernized India with no pollution.
