Caste, corruption, and the collective: Crow’s Theatre’s A Fine Balance confronts India’s enduring inequities with humour and heartbreak

The highly acclaimed Canadian novel A Fine Balance is getting the theatrical treatment this month, three decades after it was first published. Commissioned by Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre and reimagined for the stage by playwright Anosh Irani, the heartbreaking saga confronts the realities of caste violence, poverty, and corruption in 1970s India. 

Released in 1995, Indian-Canadian Rohinton Mistry’s writing has been celebrated for its capacity to offer levity and hope among his unflinching accounts of tragedy.

Irani’s adaptation does the same. “Humour has to come naturally, but it can come only because the book is humorous, as well. I mean, these characters are fighting the odds, but there’s a sense of humor there and that’s something that I find makes the book more painful. Because it brings some joy and some hope,” Irani says. 

“A fine balance between hope and despair, that’s what the script needed to show.”

The story follows the lives of four unlikely characters in India, struggling to survive amid the historical backdrop of the “Emergency”—the state of emergency declared in 1975 by then-prime minister India Gandhi. 

Largely known for its controversial and unconstitutional policies, the 21-month-long state of emergency saw mass incarceration of Gandhi’s opponents, journalists, students, and activists. Hundreds of thousands of people living in slums were displaced when their homes were destroyed. 

Millions of men, largely of lower socio-economic status, were forcibly subjected to vasectomies as part of a campaign to curb India’s population. Many protesters of this brutal policy were killed.

While the prospect of adapting a 600-plus page book into a two-and-a-half-hour show was daunting, Irani says he thinks in terms of both compression and expansion. 

“I look at how I can take one log and expand it into something that might not necessarily be there in the book, but is a seed and it opens up this tiny window of existence where the characters reveal inner life on stage.”

He says his job is not to repeat the events of the book on stage. 

“For me, accuracy is truthfulness. Do I accurately capture the truth of the novel?”

Omprakash (Ben Yoganathan) and his uncle Ishvar (Anand Rajaram) are poor tailors belonging to a caste of so-called untouchables. They’re travelling from their village to the city in hopes of securing work with Dina (Zorana Sadiq), a widow who runs an illegal garment business from her home. Along the way, they meet a Parsi student named Maneck (Siddharth Sharma), who is staying with Dina while he attends college nearby. 

Throughout the story, Omprakash and Ishvar toil under a repressive government and society that treats them as less than human. 

At first, Dina is cold and stringent. As time progresses and with the urging of a young, socially progressive Maneck, her heart softens and she begins to treat them as family. 

While the book weaves in and out of the characters’ life stories, Irani’s adaptation focuses on the present. He says he scoured the book for scenes providing forward momentum. 

“Backstory is a novelistic device, and one of the reasons the novel is so powerful is [partly because] of the backstory, the depth, the detailing that we understand who these people are, what they have survived, how wounded they are. So I carried those wounds on stage,” Irani says.

“But you have to find ways where characters reveal their past without necessarily going into backstory.”

Omprakash and Anosh live as “untouchables,” navigating a world that treats them as expendable. When we meet them on a train heading to the city, it’s clear they’re in dire need of employment, and Dina’s small business becomes a lifeline. Dina herself is fierce and independent, driven by the need to keep her business afloat, even as that pressure strains her compassion.

Maneck, a gentle student from a quiet mountain town, arrives as her boarder, but while his background grants him some privilege, he’s unsettled by the inequities he witnesses.

While the quartet form an unlikely household, each balances hope against hardship and faces moments of darkness. Ultimately, one can’t outrun their despair. 

Despite their individual tragedies, the ensemble finds comfort and reprieve in each other’s presence. 

The right person

Irani says he first approached Crow’s Theatre several years ago with his own plays, but he was later asked by then-artistic director Paolo Santalucia if he’d be up for adapting A Fine Balance. The rest is history. 

According to Sherrie Johnson, executive director of Crow’s Theatre, Irani was the right person for the job. 

“He has the right sensibilities as an author and connections to the same kind of storytelling as Rohinton,” she says. 

Both Mistry and Irani are from Bombay and later immigrated to Canada. 

The show was developed through Crow’s Theatre’s Canadian Literature Adaptation Fund and directed by Chris Abraham.

“We created [the fund] during COVID because we wanted to put money into the hands of artists. We started looking around at books that we could option and commission through this program,” Johnson says. 

“We have about ten different options right now and commissions out there of new Canadian work, so A Fine Balance just fell in line with the script being in just such a perfect place. We had optioned the book in November 2023, and Anosh just delivered an amazing adaptation.”

Crow’s Theatre, which operates as a non-profit performing arts company, tends to see the most success with plays that have been adapted from books, Johnson says. 

Other Canadian novels-turned-plays in their upcoming season include Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996) and Mona Awad’s All’s Well (2021). 

“What we like to do is take big swings and take artistic risks. We like to create Canadian IP. Commercial producers [like Toronto’s for-profit theatre] Mirvish do a lot of road shows that come from either New York, from Broadway, or from London, the West End … We’re a theatre that likes to create new work … It’s sort of a business model. We’re very entrepreneurial,” she says.

While Crow’s A Fine Balance will premiere in Canada for the first time 30 years after it hit shelves, Johnson says the book’s main ethos of traversing the line between hope and despair is an evergreen sentiment. 

How the audience chooses to interpret the adaptation is ultimately up to them, she says. 

As for Irani, he hopes the show will resonate with audiences, just as the book did. 

“The human condition will always be relevant, you know … I just focus on characters and thematically what the adaptation is doing,” he says. 

“Am I able to move people? This is what I’m interested in. Am I able to make them laugh? Am I able to capture their attention to hold them for two and a half hours? That’s my job. I don’t look at anything else.”

A Fine Balance officially premiered on Sept. 9 with a sold-out opening night and runs until Oct. 18. 

This story series was made possible through the financial support of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. The foundation is a federal Crown corporation mandated to raise public awareness of the causes and manifestations of racism in Canada. The CRRF has no involvement in story selection, editorial decisions, or interview choices. All journalism is produced independently by Future of Good.