The Marginalised Society in Cyrus Mistry's " Chronicle of A Corpse Bearer”

Abstract

Cyrus Mistry, an Indian Parsi novelist, conjures up within the campus of his DSC prize winning novel "A Chronicle of A Corpse Bearer” the appalling conditions of the nearly invisible community of Parsi corpse bearers, the khandias. Mostly the ordinary penury-afflicted Parsi people take up the job of khandias for alleviating their aching poverty. They do such an emergency service as the corpse bearing. They carry the bodies of the deceased from the bereaved family to the Towers of Silence for performing the ritualistic purification of the corpses and then leaving them exposed to be eaten by the scavenger birds, the vultures. The khandias  are the marginalized sub-caste of the Parsi community. They are described as the socially outcast, ‘the god of unlean', ‘the untouchables to the core'. They are deprived of their due payment and hypocritically convinced of the benevolent mentality of the Parsi Panchayet.