''Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer'' is a 2012 novel written by author and playwright
Cyrus Mistry
Cyrus Pallonji Mistry (4 July 1968 – 4 September 2022) was an Indian-born Irish billionaire businessman. He was the chairman of the Tata Group, an Indian business conglomerate, from 2012 to 2016. He was the sixth chairman of the group, ...
. Set in pre-Independence era of India, the book is about the
Parsi
The Parsis or Parsees () are a Zoroastrian ethnic group in the Indian subcontinent. They are descended from Persian refugees who migrated to the Indian subcontinent during and after the Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran in the 7th century, w ...
community of corpse bearers who carry the dead bodies for burial in
Bombay
Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial centre, financial capital and the list of cities i ...
.
The idea for the novel came to Mistry in 1991, when he was researching the subject for a film producer, who wanted to make a documentary on it by
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...
. The film could not be made so Mistry decided to write it as a novel.
''Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer'' won the
DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is an international literary prize awarded annually to writers of any ethnicity or nationality writing about South AsiaNote: South Asia for the purposes of the prize is defined as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka ...
in 2014 and the
Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2015.
[
]
Plot
Phiroze Elchidana is a Parsi corpse bearer also known as "khandhias", of the Parsi community whose role is to collect the dead, perform the last rites and rituals before the corpses are left to decay or consumed by the vultures. The son of a priest who is inept at his studies, Phiroze compounds his family’s disappointment by falling in love with Sepideh, the daughter of a khandhia. He later marries her and becomes a corpse bearer himself. Sepideh dies, leaving Phiroze and his daughter in sorrow.
Reception
Writing for ''Daily News and Analysis
The ''Daily News and Analysis'', abbreviated as ''DNA'', is a Hindi-language news program on Zee news that was earlier an English-language newspaper with multiple local city editions across India. ''DNA'' was first launched as a broadsheet newsp ...
'', Aditi Sheshadri called it an "interesting and uncommon account of social discrimination" but further said that it is not the "stirring, dramatic, intensely personal tale of love and loss that it could have been."[ Mahvesh Murad of '']Dawn
Dawn is the time that marks the beginning of twilight before sunrise. It is recognized by the diffuse sky radiation, appearance of indirect sunlight being Rayleigh scattering, scattered in Earth's atmosphere, when the centre of the Sun's disc ha ...
'' wrote: "''Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer'' is not a perfect book, but it is an important one." Jai Arjun Singh said in his review that the novel "reads less like a well-paced, internally consistent novel and more like fragmented socio-history, trying to say too much about too many things." Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy of ''Outlook'' said, "Peppered with grey humour, irony and tragedy, this well-crafted book is a winner."
See also
* A Chronicle of Corpses, a 2000 gothic art-house film
References
External links
{{portal, Novels
''Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer'' at Aleph Book Company
2012 Indian novels
Novels set in Mumbai
Sahitya Akademi Award–winning works
Aleph Book Company books