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Chapter I

Introduction

Among all literary forms, fiction is the most vital

form of literature, which reflects and signifies social

conditions and values. Novel, with broad canvas, has

social and historical consciousness of the writer, and a

writer, especially a novelist, is by definition a

Socio-political being. The writers, therefore, cannot use

words merely for entertainment; they need to address more

serious issues and problems. So they not only reflect the

various discourses of the society they live in, but also

make an intervention to reform the society as well. Women

writers are well aware of the dynamics between their role

as a writer and the society they live in.

One of the most striking features of the contemporary

literature in English from the Indian subcontinent has

been the sprouting of Feminist fiction – feminist in the

sense of being created by women as well as in the sense of

giving voice to the pain, desire and assertion of women in

male-dominant society. Bapsi Sidhwa, internationally

renowned novelist from the Indian sub-continent, was born

in Pakistan and like other women writers give voice to her

feministic ideologies through her fiction.

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India and Pakistan have enjoyed a common literary

and cultural heritage till 1947 and have parted away in

trends and achievements after paritition. In Pakistan

women writers have traditionally found themselves doubly

marginalized. Bapsi Sidhwa is one of the first women from

Pakistan to write fiction in English and publish

internationally now. Bapsi Sidhwa and in later years

Kamila Shamsie and Sara Saleri who have found

ready-publishers and eager audiences abroad before

becoming “known” in their own country, not much is known

or read of contemporary women writers from Pakistan.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s all the five novels -- The Pakistani

Bride, The Crow Eaters, Ice-Candy-Man, An American Brat

and Water -- are about her perception of life as a Parsi,

Punjabi, Pakistani and American woman respectively.

Sidhwa believes that all her novels have some degree of

autobiographical elements. She picks up some significant

incidents from her own life or from the lives of other

people and flashes them out to create a larger reality of

fiction.

Bapsi Sidhwa, who is a new and important voice in

the world of Common Wealth fiction, is best known for her

book Ice-Candy-Man, which was made into a film, 1947:

Earth by Deepa Mehta. Bapsi Sidhwa was born in an eminent

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Parsi business family of Karachi in 1939. Soon after her

birth, her parents, Peshotan and Tahmina Bhandra, moved

to Lahore where Parsis were in a minuscule number, one

hundred and fifty in all. The family was, thus, cut off

from the mainstream of the Parsi life. Sidhwa was the

only child of her parents. Naturally, she felt very

lonely. Talking about her upbringing in Lahore, Bapsi

Sidhwa says:

If I were brought up in Karachi is again very

much a part of Pakistan, my experience as a

child would have been totally different. I

would have been brought up among the Parsis.

I was brought up apart from my cousins and

other relatives. My family was not a big joint

family. In my home, my parental grandmother was

with us for a few years, but there was not much

influence of the joint family caliber. I was

largely brought up by the servants. (“Interview

by Jussawalla” 207)

Bapsi Sidhwa admitted that she lived a typical

social life in Lahore and that her life was one of

unrelieved tedium. Bapsi Sidhwa being the only child of

her parents, felt very lonely. She was attacked by polio

when she was two years old. As she had to undergo a

series of surgical operations, the doctors advised her

parents not to strain her with the studies. An

Anglo-Indian governess was employed to take care of

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her education at home. Her interest towards reading

started at the age of eleven years when she was given a

copy of the book Little Women written by the American

novelist, Louisa May Alcott (1932-88). In a more detailed

interview with Feroza Jussawalla, Bapsi Sidhwa says:

From the age of about eleven to eighteen, I

read non-stop because I did not go to school.

I had nothing else to do, no other form of

entertainment to fill my life with, and a big

slack was taken up by reading. This did turn

me, I now realize, into a writer. I must have

read The Pickwick Papers atleast four times

during that period, I would laugh out loud. I

recently reread The Crow Eaters and reread

The Pickwick Papers and realized there were so

many parallels. I subconsciously absorbed a lot

of that book and years after when I wrote

The Crow Eaters, it influenced that book

without my being aware of it. I think all that

I read then was an influence - a lot of Tolstoy

has influenced my work, many British writers

and Naipaul was very good to begin with.(217)

She took her Metric examination privately and got

her Bachelor’s Degree in 1956, from Kinnaird College for

Women in Lahore. In 1957, she was married to Gustad

Kermani, a sophisticated businessman of Bombay. She lived

with him for five years, bore two children and then being

divorced, went back to Pakistan. She was allowed to have

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her daughter but was forced to part with her son only to

join after her father’s death. Bombay thus, left

indelible scars on Sidhwa. However, it is also widened

her horizons. She reminisces:

Living in Bombay, that big city, then visiting

it very frequently after my divorce, was very

important to my writing. The interaction with

the larger (Parsee) Community really opened my

eyes: the interaction with a big city opened my

eyes. (59)

In 1963, she remarried Noshirwan Sidhwa, a Lahore

businessman, son of a renowned freedom fighter and the

former Mayor of Karachi, R.K. Sidhwa. Twelve years her

senior, Noshir was very supportive when she started

writing.

Sidhwa met an Afghan woman on a plane who inspired

her to write and she wrote just a short piece, which was

published in a magazine with her help. A turning point in

Sidhwa’s life came when she and her second husband were

invited to a vacation in northern Pakistan for their

honeymoon. There, she heard the story of a young Punjabi

girl, taken across the river Indus into totally

ungoverned territory to be married to a Kohistani tribal.

After sometime, the girl ran away. Her husband with his

clansman hunted her down and murdered her. This atrocious

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act of the tribal society formed an embryo – the theme of

victimization of women for her novel The Pakistani Bride.

When Sidhwa arrived back in Lahore, she wanted to

narrate this story in the form of short story but her

experience was very vast that made her come out with a

novel and of course her first novel The Pakistani Bride.

While writing this novel, she finds her passion for

writing.

The Pakistani Bride took four years to complete

because, she wrote it then re-wrote it. But the

experience was so joyful and rich that soon after

completing The Pakistani Bride she started working on her

second novel, The Crow Eaters, a lively and humorous

story about the Parsi community of Pakistan. Success did

not come to Bapsi Sidhwa without a lot of hard work. She

wrote her first two novels in Pakistan where no one was

publishing in English at the time. So, after receiving

many rejections, Sidhwa decided to self-publish and

self-distribute The Crow Eaters. It was very frustrating

to visit publishers and request them to read the book.

Publishers would show little interest and often

criticizing the title of the book. The process was so

discouraging that Sidhwa stopped writing for about five

years: “It was very frustrating to peddle your own books

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as I did in Lahore... I would go from bookstore to

bookstore; saying Please read The Crow Eaters” (101).

In 1980, after receiving a copy of Sidhwa’s

self-published The Crow Eaters, Britain’s Jonathon Cape

decided to publish it. Sidhwa believes that as a writer,

all of her work has some degree of autobiographical

elements. She based the parents’ characters in

The Crow Eaters on her own parents. In Ice-Candy-Man

the child protagonist, Lenny, is reminiscent of Sidhwa’s

own childhood. Like Lenny, She speaks of her city, Lahore

fondly: “I can write a lot more in Lahore than I can

write anywhere else... Lahore does have a very romantic

atmosphere and it does release some type of a creative

energy”(11).

Sidhwa’s childhood was difficult. She contracted

polio at two, which paralyzed her leg and affected her

entire life. She used the experience to great advantage

in Lahore in her third novel Ice-Candy-Man about

partition, which is narrated by Lenny, a canny, Parsee

child. In an interview, Sidhwa said:

I started writing Ice-Candy-Man using the first

person narrative voice of a child; I had to at

once distance myself from the character of

Lenny. Had I not done so, I would have been too

self-conscious to write the circumstances of my

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life, but Lenny is a very different child. She

is feisty and shrewd, when I was quiet and

docile. I have based some characters, like

Mother, Father, and Godmother, on people l’ve

known intimately, but l’ve put them through all

sorts of fictional situations.(12)

Sidhwa is the author of five internationally

acclaimed novels and her novels have been translated into

German, French, Italian and Russian. Her first novel

The Crow Eaters was published in 1978 and was soon

translated into many languages. Although she wrote

The Pakistani Bride (1983) as her first novel, it was

published after The Crow Eaters. Her third novel

Ice-Candy-Man was published in 1988 and was declared

New York Times Notable Book for 1991. The novel received

laurels in the form of Liberaturepreis Award in Germany.

It was also nominated by the American Library Association

as a Notable Book of 1991. Bapsi’s fourth novel,

An American Brat, was published in 1994. Together with

these novels, she has also published Water (2006), a work

of fiction based on the movie of the same name by her

close associate and film director Deepa Mehta. Her major

works include (books) City of Sin and Splendour: Writings

on Lahore, Their Language of love, Jungle Wala Sahib, and

Omnibus. In addition, her stories, reviews and articles

have appeared in New York Time Book Review, Houston

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Chronicle, Harper’s & Queen, The Economic Times and

The London Telegraph.

Bapsi Sidhwa received numerous awards such as

Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest national honour in

Arts, in 1991 and Wallace Readers Digest Writer’s Award

in 1994 for her literary contributions. She held a

bunting Fellowship at Radcliff and was visiting scholar

at the Rockefeller Foundation Centre, Italy. She also

taught at Columbia University, University of Houston, and

Mount Holyoke College.She was the Fanny Hurst writer-in-

residence at Brandeis University in Waltham,

Massachusetts. Bapsi Sidhwa has shown keen interest in

the social works related to women and destitute

children.She has served as a voluntary secretary in the

destitute women’s and children’s home in Lahore. She has

also been on the Advisory Committee to Prime Minister

Benazir Bhutto on Women’s Development.

She takes special interest in movements for women’s

rights. Bapsi Sidhwa belongs to Parsi Zoroastrian, a

distinctive minority community. Writers from distinct

minority communities within a country are likely to have

different relation to it than writers from the majority

communities or culture. There are many good Parsi writers

in India, Pakistan, England, Canada and the United States

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of America as well. Like Bapsi Sidhwa, they encompass a

double migration, and they are Diasporic writers in South

Asia and America. G.D. Barche observes:

Sidhwa is recognized as Pakistan’s only

international novelist and her attempt to

exemplify the role of women in a patriarchal

society makes her not only a significant figure

in women’s literature but also a singular one

as well. In Sidhwa’s work, themes diverge from

traditional to contemporary. Her concern ranges

from a pre-independence social scene to

partition and its aftermath, her timeframe is

fifty years. Being a writer, she relies more on

her imagination than on values.(99)

The emergence of promising writers like Rohinton

Minstry, Firdaus Kanaga, Boman Desai, Farrukh Dhondy,

Ardashir Vakil and Bapsi Sidhwa have given a new

direction to Parsi novel in English. Steeped in the Parsi

myths and legends, these writers use English as an

instrument of the self-assertion. In asserting

themselves, they re-define the identity of the

Zoroastrian community. At the same time, they are not

blind to the challenges confronting the minuscule

community such as mixed marriage and demographic decline.

Novelists like Karanji and Sidhwa prefer re-thinking in

the Parsi community whereas expatriate like Dhondy, Kanga

and Boman Desai take a skeptical stance.

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Life in Lahore was uneventful compared to life in

Bombay. All these aspects helped her in writing; though

initially there were hurdles, Sidhwa gives her view

pertaining to the life in U.S.A. and the writing skills:

As a woman, it has given me a tremendous amount

of freedom, the sense of being able to just

take off on your own, without having to have

company. In Pakistan and India, we tend to move

in bunches and do things together, and you’re

always part of a family, or a group. Here, you

don’t carry so much “baggage” with you when you

take off. No, it wasn’t that hard really.

Phillip Lopate at the University of Houston

suggested that I teach, to which I replied,

“How can I teach with just a bachelor’s degree

from Punjab University?” and he said, “You’ve

published two very good novels - that is like

getting several PhDs! You’re qualified to teach

Creative Writing.” I went into it with a lot of

hesitation because I didn’t have role models.

But, I did it and I have enjoyed it.(13)

Bapsi Sidhwa is one of the first Pakistanis to write

novels in English. She gives her views pertaining to

writing. She believes in the viewpoint that well began is

half-done. According to her, if things are set right in

the beginning, automatically things fall in line.

She says:

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The first paragraph of any novel sets the tone,

voice and mood. A book’s DNA is contained

within these first few words. The subconscious

has worked it out, and one paragraph gives

birth to another. There are so many lines and

threads, which enrich a story.(14)

Bapsi Sidhwa is Pakistan’s leading diasporic writer

and her novels in English reflect her personal experience

of the Indian subcontinent’s partition, abuse against

women, immigration to the U.S., and membership in the

Parsi/Zoroastrian community. She is a born storyteller.

G.D. Barche observes:

She has a “natural inclination to see humour

even in tragedies” - which critics generally

agree is the mark of a brilliant storyteller.

At another place, she is quoted as saying that

being a member of a minority community in

Pakistan, she could see things more objectively

than others in the ultimate analysis though,

it is her subjectivity, her sensitivity to

the subject she has chosen to write on,

together with her love for being precise yet

subtle in her description of certain situations

that she has written about, that makes the

internationally acclaimed mix. It is true of

her, and true of all writers of ‘merit’. The

precision comes after a writer works at her or

his craft, and should usually include a course

on how to write on a subject without

necessarily stirring a public controversy.(16)

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Sidhwa’s Pakistani perspective is evident in her

writing. As a Pakistani writer, Sidhwa feels it incumbent

upon her to explain her Pakistani background to those

unfamiliar with her milieu. Because she is also a Parsi,

she attempts to explain this culture as well. Sidhwa

shares with other third world writers, particularly those

writing in a non-native language, the compulsion to

explain her culture to an audience unfamiliar with that

culture. The great Urdu poet of the subcontinent, Faiz

Ahamed Faiz, has praised Bapsi Sidhwa for her comedy and

shrewd observations of human behavior.

“Woman” encompasses many faces within it: sometimes

a woman is a daughter, sometimes a sister, then a wife

and most importantly a mother or a bearer of new life on

this earth. The status of women in our society has been

very sympathetic since ages; they have never been given

the importance they deserve. Our male chauvinistic

society has always been eager to use women but never

ready to give them the high pedestal that they justify.

Over centuries, women have been leading a life that

has been maneuvered by the patriarchs. They have had

their set behavioral roles in a pattern so designed by

their biology and culture from their childhood that it

naturally leads to the subordination of women. It is for

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this reason that one comes to realize that women have

unquestionably accepted what come in their way and that

they have been unable to recognize the subjugation

conspired against them. In doing so, they have shown

active participation in their subordination. The reason

for this is the routine ideology, which has made women

passive, docile and above all ignorant.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s focus is on women’s experience in the

time of partition in India. She explores abuse against

women justified by a patriarchal society. A witness of the

partition that took place in India 1947, she came to the

realization that victory is celebrated on woman’s body,

vengeance is taken on woman’s body, which inspired her to

actively contribute to the cause of women’s rights.

Still in her humorous style, she presents her

characters in the light of universal foibles and follies,

making the effects of large-scale social, political, and

economic upheaval. Her novels are translated into a number

of European and Asian countries, and some of them are

adapted to film and stage. Stages Repertory Theater in

Houston staged the novel An American Brat under the title

“Sock’em with Honey,” while Cracking India was adapted to

film by director Deepa Mehta as “Earth”. The film was

nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

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Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels very categorically and

systematically analyze the universal problems of women

victimization and their suppressed desire to survive

with bare minimum level of self-respect in all the

five novels: The Pakistani Bride, The Crow Eaters,

Ice-Candy-Man, An American Brat and Water. The author has

vehemently portrayed the torn sentiments of these

womenfolk in order to achieve harmony in the subdued

means of survival in the male dominant society. Though

the novels speak about Pakistani society or the Indian

subcontinent, the issues discussed are entirely universal.

Her novels are written with a genuine social

purpose. In all her novels, the position of women is

debated. The central consciousness of her work rests on

the steady growth of women’s essential feminine identity

and the quest for selfhood. All her novels tell about the

oppressive structures of customs, traditions and religion

that victimize women.

The protagonists in Sidhwa’s stories struggle with

the system of their community. The Crow Eaters details

the life of a Parsi woman who lives according to the

dictates of patriarchal norms. The Pakistani Bride is

about unjust traditions in a Kohistani community that

oppresses women. Ice-Candy-Man covers Partition and its

16

ramifications on women. An American Brat focuses on the

life of a young Parsi girl in USA who challenges the

patriarchal and religious norms related to women’s

issues. Water narrates the cruelties against women.

Bapsi Sidhwa brings forth the question of women’s

situation in South Asian societies. Her novels depict the

collective subjectivity of women as already constituted

by others. Through the sufferings of her female

protagonists, Sidhwa protests against antiquated social

beliefs, religious fundamentalism and male supremacy.

Sidhwa’s five novels, though notably different from one

another, explore women’s victimization in particular

settings.

Among the salient features of her novels are

autobiographical elements and the perfect blending of

fact and fiction. Two of her novels, The Crow Eaters

(1978) and An American Brat (1903), discuss in detail the

Parsi culture with its problems on women. Among the

remaining three novels, The Pakistani Bride (1982) is

based on a true story, Ice-Candy-Man (1988) graphically

portrays the impact of a new affair, and Water narrates

the cruelties of widowhood in the society, all speaking

about victimization of women. Her contribution can be

acknowledged from the fact that she has represented

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Pakistan on several occasions as part of a delegation on

women’s rights. She is an avowed feminist and activist.

Sidhwa’s novels accurately depict women’s

victimization. It is interesting to note that Sidhwa’s

vision changes with each novel. The prime determinants in

Sidhwa’s views largely responsible for women’s

victimization are patriarchy, tradition, and the conflict

between the individual struggling to be heard and the

authoritarianism of the society seeking to impose rigid

conservatism, clogging the personal growth of an

individual.

Sidhwa’s presentation of women in The Crow Eaters

is a conscious effort to give a picture that could awaken

the thought and give a scope to analyze the muddle that

women are ensnared into, so that it can serve as an

active agent and work for the betterment of women.

Though one gets an idea that Faredoon Junglewala,

alias, Freddy is central to the novel, the fact is that

women characters occupy the novel most. The first woman

character taken for this study, Putli, is methodically a

traditional housewife with a philosophy that it is her

relationship with her husband, children, relatives that

can make her complete and happy. Sidhwa writes:

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Putli was content. She fulfilled herself in

house work and in the care of her children and

husband… Blissful in her knowledge, she would,

over the years, produce seven children. From

the joyous climax of conception to the

delivery, Putli would enjoy it all.

(The Crow Eaters 23)

It gives an impression that Putli is in a

domineering position, but it needs to be mentioned here

that such an arrangement is a premeditated act of the man

of the house. A woman is given a free hand as long as

things go in the desired direction. This is suggested by

Freddy when he claims that he controlled his wife Putli

with certain maxims:

If she did or wanted to do something that he

considered intolerable and disastrous, he would

take a stern and unshakable stand…. If she did,

or planned something he considered stupid and

wasteful, but not really harmful, he would

voice his objections and immediately humour her

with his benevolent sanction. In all other

matters, she had a free hand.(13)

Sidhwa also highlights a major aspect that accounts

to demean the position of women. She depicts how a

woman’s biological function of menstruation is manifested

as impure and accursed, thus forcing women to be

segregated during menstruation. The author outrightly

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points to the treatment a woman receives and the

superstition attached with it:

Thither they are banished for the duration of

their unholy state. Even the sun, moon and

stars are defiled by her impure gaze, according

to a superstition which has its source in

primitive man’s fear of blood. (70)

It is little understood that such a segregation of

female body as impure or a polluting agent tends to

cripple the psychology of women. But this has been the

state of women over the years and is witnessed in smaller

or greater degree everywhere.

On one hand, Billy wants Tanya to be ideally a

traditional wife, but at the same time, he wants her to

be smart and illustrated. Like all tradition-bound women,

Tanya too is submissive towards her husband and

compromises on all the problems.

The Pakistani Bride is a story of strong will and

mental courage of Zaitoon, an emblem against

victimization of women in the name of age-old tradition.

Ralf J.Crane Correctly points out:

The area that Sidhwa has taken for her subject

is a significant human experience, and in her

treatment of it she does her best to make it a

successful, contemporary issue concerning the

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extent to which women crave psychologically

for freedom to change their lives. The

restriction Sidhwa had faced as a girl and

women, the fight she had to wage against a

suffocating patriarchy makes her turn against

herself or against her identity as a woman.

In almost all her novels there is a better

understanding between women and they also share

their pressures and pains inflicted by a male

world.(22)

The violence against women in the tribal society is

more shocking because of its savagery. At the core of the

book, it is the struggle of the heroine, Zaitoon fleeing

from the brutal, tribal society of Kohistan into which

she had been married.

As a social thinker, Sidhwa gives voice to the

victimization of women. In The Pakistani Bride, the

novelist adds a dimension to Qasim’s Character by

revealing man’s wish to realize his own dreams even by

victimizing his own girl child in order to re-establish

his own friendship.

The girl attends the school till the age of ten, and

Miriam and Nikka object to it as a total waste of time.

The scene shows that women are victimized not only at the

hands of men but they also prove a helping hand in

suppressing other female members of the society. During

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earlier days this practice was started by the egocentric

male members of our society who feared that the learned

women might stand parallel to them and these women might

question their (men’s) supremacy. Thus, they injected in

the veins of women the notion that the four walls of the

house are everything for them. Miriam takes it as her

primary duty to transfer all the expertise of household

tasks to Zaitoon. She says:

‘Poor child ... had she a mother she’d be

learning to cook and sew... does Bhai Qasim

think he’s rearing a boy? He ought to give

some thought to her marriage...’ ‘But she’s

only a baby’, protested Nikka. A baby? She’s

ten! I can already see her body shaping. The

pathan doesn’t realize she is in the hot plains

of the Punjab: everything ripens early here...

She’ll be safe only at her mother-in-law’s...

A girl is never too young to marry... (53).

Here the writer has tried to describe the means by

which the society tries to shun the responsibilities of

the parents to bring up the female child by citing

innumerable vague reasons.

Sidhwa in further section of the story gives a very

clear description of the society. The inner and

comparatively darker portion of the room is given to the

females to keep them safe from the outside world:

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Rooms with windows open to the street were

allotted to the men: the dim maze of inner

rooms to the women–a domain given over to

procreation, female odours and the interminable

care of children. Smells of urine, stale food

and cooking hung in the unventilated air,

churning slowly, room to room permeating wood,

brick and mortar. Generations of babies had wet

mattresses, sofas and rugs, spilled milk,

sherbets and food, and wiped hands on ragged

curtains; and, just in case smells should fade,

armies of new born infants went on arriving to

ensure the odours were perpetuated.(56)

Zaitoon, the young girl, is taken to her

stepfather’s ancestral home in the mountains to be

married to one of his kinsmen. This allows Sidhwa to

contrast the often brutal and primitive ways of Qasim’s

people with the gentler and modern life Zaitoon knows in

Lahore. She sets the scene for an exploration of the

cultural divisions within independent Pakistan, and

perceives between two essentially male dominated worlds,

which have strong interest in the position of women in

Pakistani society.

This interest in women is skillfully highlighted by

the introduction of the young American woman, Carol, who

is married to a modern/western educated Pakistani

husband. Women, unlike men, are expected to have silenced

23

voices inhabiting the shadows cast by their fathers,

husbands and other male members who deny their individual

identity.

It is Carol through whom Sidhwa speaks when she

cries out against the oppression of women. She says:

Women the world over, through the ages asked to

be murdered, raped, exploited, enslaved, to get

importunately impregnated, beaten up, bullied,

disinherited, It was an immutable law of

nature… the girl had locked a mystery,

affording a telepathic peephole through which

Carol had a glimpse of her conditions and the

fateful condition of girls like her.(89)

The 1947 partition of British India into two

independent nations (India and Pakistan) was accompanied

by communal violence unspeakable in its brutality and

ferocity, leading Mushirul Hasan to label it a “bloody

vivisection.”

In the months immediately preceding and following

the creation of “free” nation-states, untold number of

murders, kidnappings, rapes and arsons were committed by

ordinary citizens of all the major religious groups

(Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs) caught up in the turmoil.

Many historians have documented the horrors that

unfolded, often, like G.D.Khosla in Stren Reckoning, with

painstaking thoroughness.

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Sidhwa not only observes but also analyses man’s

degrading attentions towards women, voraciousness of male

sexual desires and women; who are reduced to the status

of sexual objects. Ice-Candy-Man is a saga of famele

suppression and marginalization. It projects

realistically women’s plight and exploitation in the

patriarchal society. It exposes how men establish their

masculine power and hence fulfill their desires by

brutally assaulting women. On the other hand, it

poignantly depicts how women endure the pain and

humiliation enacted upon them.

The Ice-Candy-Man, which records the partition

riots, remains her most powerful and polished work. It is

also the first Pakistani English novel to employ a

narrative written in Pakistani English and is the only

one to focus on the partition riots, which irrevocably

changed and brutalized this region. Alongside Khushwant

Singh’s famous Train to Pakistan (1966), Chaman Nahal’s

Azadi (1975) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body

Remembers (1999) also focus on the traumas of partition.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India, which has

gathered considerable attention as a trenchant portrayal

of the violence surrounding the partition, can profitably

be explored as an examination of this issue, for it

25

depicts a broad cross-section of Lahore society both

before and after the city became a part of Pakistan.

Deploying a child-narrator, Lenny, the novel’s plot

focuses on Lenny’s Hindu nanny or Ayah and her abduction

by a mob led by one of her suitors, Ice-candy-man, and

her eventual escape from his clutches. The Ayah’s story

is paradigmatic: like her, thousands of women were

abducted and/or raped by men of the “enemy” community

during the chaotic months before and after Partition.

Lenny herself is a child of privilege, born into an

upper-middle class Parsi family and is thus a doubly

“neutral” narrator, by virtue of her age and ethno-

religious affiliation. While her perspective is that of

the upper-class child, her attachment, both physical and

mental, to her Ayah allows her (and the reader) access to

the working-class world of cooks, gardeners, masseurs and

ice-cream sellers. Thus, the novel belies its own opening

statement that Lenny’s “world is compressed”(11) for

Lenny roams well beyond the boundaries of her own Parsi

family and community. Sudhir Kakar, perhaps the most well

known psychoanalyst in India today, has noted the

connection between social mores and sexual violence in

his book The Colours of Violence:

26

The chief reason for the preponderance of

specifically sexual violence in the Partition

riots in the north is that, as compared to many

other parts of the country, the undivided

Punjab was (and continues to be) a rather

violent society. Its high murder rate is only

one indication of a cultural endorsement of the

use of physical force to attain socially

approved ends such as the defence of one’s land

or of personal or family honour. There is now

expirical evidence to suggest that the greater

the legitimation of violence in some approved

areas of life, the more is the likelihood that

force will also be used in other spheres where

it may not be approved. In this so-called

cultural spillover effect, there is a strong

association between the level of nonsexual

violence and rape, rape being partly a

spillover from cultural norms condoning violent

behavior in other area of life. (38)

In Ice-Candy-Man, discrimination in the name of

religion and sex is unconsciously experienced by Lenny,

the Parsi child and the protagonist. Ice-Candy-Man is set

in the partition period when the colonzing power,

partitioned the nation into two as India and Pakistan.

Lenny, the girl child is herself a wounded creature. She

is maimed by polio. The lameness of narrator-protogonist

becomes suggestive of the handicapped woman creative

writer in the male world. Writing being an intellectual

27

execise, she decided to wield the pen. Her physical

deformity is symbolic, suggestive of politics and

feminism. Narendra Kumar writes about Sidwa thus:

She wrote Ice-Candy-Man from an objective point

of view. Here treatment of history is typical

of a patriarchal novel. Recent feminism and

post-colonialism in particular have turned to

the crossing and inhabiting of borders by Third

World women writers in an effort to reconsider

their strategies of survival as they negotiate

often subversively the contradiction of

cultural heterogeneity, modernity, nationalism

or diasporic identity.(89)

Ice-Candy-Man is implicitly suggestive of an

unbridgeable emotional rift between the sexes. The

violent molesting of women and children under the excuse

of communal revenge basically highlights the gender

divide, which is more absolute and hostile than racial

fundamentalism. Women, once they fall prey to men’s

violence like Lenny’s two Ayah’s cannot hope for their

restitution to their own families. The following

conversation between Lenny and her Godmother is pathetic

one in the whole novel:

“What a fallen woman? I ask godmother….

“Hamida (the second Ayah) was kidnapped by the

Sikhs”,

28

Says Godmother seriously… Once that happens,

sometimes,

The husband – or his family won’t take her

back.”

“Why? It isn’t her fault she was kidnapped!”

‘Some folk feel that way–they can’t stand their

woman being touched by other men’.(215)

This conversation between the two reflects how

inscrutable the unwritten laws of patriarchal

constitution are. Lenny recognizes the biological

exploitation of women as she grows. As a child, she

cherishes her mother’s love and father’s protection but

the terrible episode of Ice-candy-man and Ayah destroys

all her thoughts about love. She was puzzled to see

Ice-candy-man pushing his wife Ayah into the business of

prostitution. The incidents of Hindu and Muslim women

being raped during the 1947 riots petrify her. She

watches men turning into beasts leaving no room for moral

and human values. Women including Ayah were becoming prey

of men. Lenny was shocked to see the human mind which was

built of noble materials getting so easily corrupted. Men

were declaring superiority over each other by sexually

assaulting women.

The fall from this child’s paradise of colonial

harmony occurs when political and sexual violence bursts

29

upon her Ayah. Mother India’s body cracks into Modern

India and Pakistan, and the outbreak of religious and

ethnic genocide follows upon decolonization and racial

harmony turns into racial murder. Villages on both sides

are plundered and burnt, men and women are mutilated, the

Hindu Ayah is kidnapped from her protected domain of

domesticity and servitude, raped and forced into

prostitution by her former Muslim devotee, the Ice-Candy

Man.

Sidhwa depicts the events overtaking the partition

in their naked cruelty and ruthlessness. Sabash Chandra

writes thus:

In a “patriarchal social set up,” ‘masculinity’

is associated with superiority whereas

‘feminity’ is linked with inferiority, and

while masculinity implies strength, action,

self-assertion and domination, feminity implies

weakness, passivity, docility, obedience and

self-negation.(88)

In examining the lives of Papoo, Kenny, Mrs. Sethi and

Godmother, we can see the violent acts (or contemplated

acts), often sexual in nature, directed at women. Cutting

across class line, Sidhwa’s representative canvas alerts

us to the fact that the brutality directed at women in

the context of partition was hardly surprising. The

30

social world recorded in the pages of Cracking India is

replete with gendered violence, and while the number of

women kidnapped and raped around the time of the

partition can seem extraordinary. The prevailing cultural

attitudes, which permitted sexual violence, go a long way

in explaining why women’s bodies became a contested site

for battles over religion and nation. Praising Sidhwa,

Daruwalla notes:

Sidhwa deals with the partition of India a

subject as harrowing as the holocast. Before

our disbelieving eyes, she performs the

remarkable feet of bringing together the rib

old force of Parsee family life and the stark

drama and horrors of the riots and massacres

of 1947.(129)

Before Sidhwa has hinted at the problem of inter-

community marriages, the first Parsi novelist to

highlight the contentious issue of inter-community

marriage was Perin Bharucha. In The Fire Worshippers,

Bhurucha tries to reject the concept of ethical purity

through Nairman, an idealist, who wants to marry outside

his community as Nirman’s father Postorji Kanchawalla,

resists distingration of his community beginning from his

own family through the proposed mixed marriage of his son

with Portia Roy, a non-Parsi girl. The younger Parsi

revolts against such artificial restrictions. Later

31

Parsi novelists also show that the racial rigidity to

inter-community marriage is gradually getting eroded.

An American Brat is an account of a Pakistani

immigrant to the United States who struggles to blend

dual cultures and thereby victimize herself. The novel

depicts the victimization of innocent Feroza by exposing

her to varied experience of life in the New world and

it also explores the possibilities and dangers of

cross-ethnic marriage for a Parsi girl migrant to the

USA.

Though expatriate experience constitutes the core of

the narrative in An American Brat, Sidhwa brings in a

variety of relevant issues such as mixed marriage and

oppression of women. Mixed marriages are not permitted in

the Zoroastrian Community. Parsis who marry outside the

community forgo all the privileges enjoyed by the other

Parsis.

Feroza’s emotional involvement with David Press, an

American Jew, comes as a potent threat to the orthodox

Parsi Community of Lahore. Zareen, Mother of Feroza,

comes to dissuade her stand on mixed marriage and

conversion to Zoroastrian faith. She begins to question

the rigid code which prevails in Zorastrianism, “How

could a religion whose prophet urged his followers to

32

Truth of his message in the holy Gathas – the songs of

Zarathustra – Prohibit conversion and throw her daughter

out of faith?” (287). She muses:

Perhaps the teenagers in Lahore were right.

The Zoroastrian Anjuman in Karachi and Bombay

should move with the times that were sending

them to the New world. The various Anjumans

would have to introduce minor reforms if they

wished their tiny community to survive.(288)

Feroza has experienced from the restraining

traditions, the disturbing ordinances, the sight of

poverty, the insecure social ties, the oppression and

victimization against women and refuses to let it go.

The sense of dislocation and of not belonging is the part

of her existence throughout.

Zareen, Faroza’s mother flies to Denver to dissuade

Feroza from taking a step that would lead her being

ex-communicated and expelled from the faith. The parents

think that such a marriage of a female child would bring

shame to the family honour. The family’s opposition to

Feroza’s impending marriage represents the predominant

traditional view of women in Parsi community.

Shashi, her friend at the university, tries to

comfort the dejected Feroza, after her break-up with

David, moulded in American culture and style, Feroza

33

again feels left out when she goes to Pakistan on a

holiday and sees for herself the measure of things

changed.

Feroza is heartbroken after David’s departure.

However, she does not compromise and remains firm in her

resolve not to submit to the dictates of Parsi laws

against inter-community marriage. She expresses her

convictions towards the end of the novel thus:

There would never be another David but there

would be other men who know perhaps somebody

she might like someone enough to marry him.

It wouldn’t matter if he was a Parsee or of

another faith. She would be more sure of

herself and she would n’t let anyone interfere.

As for her religion one could take it away from

her, she carried its fire in her heart.(217)

Though Feroza breaks up with David, Sidhwa says that

Feroza is a changed girl, very different from the one

that had left Pakistan. Their preoccupation with children

and servant and their concern with clothes and

furnishings did not interest her. Neither did the endless

round of parties that followed their parents’ mode of

hospitality. However, as a newcomer, Feroza does feel a

sense of dislocation of not belonging, but it is more

tolerable, because it was shared by thousands of

newcomers like herself. Moreover, she has become used to

34

the comforts that America has to offer: “Happy Hour,

telephone that worked, the surfeit of food, freezers,

electricity, and clean and abundant Water, the malls,

skyscrapers, and highways”(312).

In short, this novel Sidhwa depicts expatriate

experience, cultural clashes and theme of inter–community

marriages and their impact on the lives of women

characters, which ultimately leads to victimization of

women.

Along with the four novels, Bapsi Sidhwa has also

worked on the screenplay of the much-acclaimed Award-

winning film Water by Deepa Mehta. The renowned author

Bapsi Sidhwa and the equally renowned film-maker

Deepa Mehta share a unique artistic relationship. Though

Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water is based on the script of

Deepa Mehta’s controversial film “Water,” it is a

powerful and moving book that complements the film and

also holds up well as an independent work with quite a

few passages that are more compelling than their

cinematic equivalents.

The book tries to show the love between Narayan (who

is educated) and Kalyani (who is widow), but the main aim

of the book is to show the exploitation of widows by

other people and how they are dragged to prostitution.

35

Water follows the life of eight-year-old Chuyia,

betrothed at age 6 and widowed at age 8. According to

Hindu tradition, she is transported from a carefree life

and a loving family to a widow’s ashram on the fringes of

society, after the death of her forty-four-year old

husband. In the widow-ashram, her head is shorn and her

life is given over to penitence:

According to Brahmin culture in those times,

“once widowed, a woman was deprived of her

useful function in society - that of reproducing

and fulfilling her duties to her husband. She

ceased to exist as a person; she was no longer

either daughter or daughter-in-law. There was

no place for her in the community, and she was

viewed as a threat to society. A woman’s

sexuality and fertility, which was so valuable

to her husband in his lifetime, was converted

upon his death into a potential danger to the

morality of the community”(Water 32).

Unwilling to accept her fate, she becomes a catalyst

for change in the lives of the Indian widows. Slowly,

Chuyia overcomes her sense of dislocation, makes friends

with other women in the ashram and stirs a few hackles

with her directness in situations where others simply

follow the letter of the ancient texts.

Despite the fact that the ashram has its own

internal politics and that we are constantly rooting for

36

some characters(Chuyia, Kalyani, Shakuntla) against

others, we are never allowed to forget that all these

women are victims of a cruel, unthinking tradition which

exists for no better reason than that it has always been

so.

Even Madhumati, variously compared to a ‘beached

whale’ and a ‘satiated sea-lion,’ and despicable in her

treatment of Kalyani, has a human side. Water ends on a

tenuous note of hope. But the story is still just

relevant; the violent protests that nearly aborted

Mehta’s film are a reminder of how unthinking adherence

to tradition can lord it over reason and humanity.

There is a substantial need to critically evaluate

and recognize the contribution of the Pakistani writers

both on national and international levels. Writers from

south Asia have been the subject of many critical

studies, but Pakistani writers, unfortunately have never

been in the critical limelight. The situation regarding

critical studies about Pakistani fiction is quite bleak,

that is, their frustrating lack or total absence of such

studies. Except for some newspaper reviews and brief

commentaries scattered in some journals there is no

systematic study available as yet. Criticism on Bapsi

Sidhwa’s work is a case in point.

37

Though there is a rapid growth of science and

technology, the status of women remains in a wretched

state in a male chauvinistic society and all conflicts

prevail in women only and these conflicts in turn lead to

women’s victimization. The author being a woman looks at

the world and its writing with a clear purpose and

design. She depicts the world with which she is most

familiar, and this world can be no other than the

feminine world of her times. The voice of Sidhwa is the

voice of thousand women in various places.

The victimization of women in various levels is

sketched skillfully in all her novels. The central

consciousness of her work rests on the steady growth of

women’s essential feminine identity and the quest for

selfhood. Though her novels are different from one

another in theme, the core of all her novels deal with

the victimization of women.

My research intends to highlight how Sidhwa as a

social thinker, protests against women’s victimization

through women characters in her novels: The Pakistani

Bride, The Crow Eaters, Ice–Candy-Man, An American Brat

and Water.