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The Parsi novelist, Bapsi Sidhwa, has emerged from Pakistan’s colonial past. Set in the historic year of 1947 her novel Cracking India (originally published as Ice-Candy-Man) deals with the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. Although many critics accuse Bapsi of presenting a Pakistani version of the history of Partition, we must keep in mind that instead of a social documentation Bapsi’s work is a novel; it limits itself to one girl child’s perspective. ... Focusing on the narrator of the novel, this essay will show that the point of view Sidhwa adopts is the most effective tactic to reiterate the history of the Partition; the reader witnesses the events of Partition through the eyes of an innocent child but it is made evident that the adult Lenny is actually reliving the past in order to make sense of the events that puzzled her when she was too young to comprehend them. ... Lenny’s religious background, her privileged position, and her naïveté give her account of partition a quality that lacks in other novels about this gory period in Indo-Pakistani history.
Sidhwa suggests that to understand Pakistan it is necessary to understand the events which led to its creation. In Cracking India, the partition is the shaping-force. Sidhwa chooses a marginalized narrator, an eight-year old child, a Parsi, a victim of polio; a narrator who according to one critic “is so marginalized that in less-skilled authorial hands she could easily have vanished off the page altogether” (Crane 49). ... ” (Sidhwa 88) This “I” is not the child narrator, but an adult Lenny who is looking back in her childhood past. ... Further, some critics argue that Sidhwa’s choice of narrator is not a wise one. For example, Marianne Wiggins suggests that “Much of Sidhwa’s trouble in telling this tale lies in her choice of narrative voice,” and “As character fails, so does any sense of the politics of the time—so does any sense of place” (Wiggins 23). ... Definitely, Cracking India has a strong sense of place because Lahore and rural Punjab are vividly portrayed all through the text. ... The episode where Yousaf and Lenny’s “shadows violate Brahmin Pandit’s virtue” is worth mentioning:
He [Brahmin Pandit] looks at his food as it is infected with maggots. ... One man’s religion is another man’s poison. ...
(Sidhwa 125, emphasis mine)
Here, once again, the narrative voice of adult Lenny is exposed; she compares religious prejudices to the various prejudices against women in her society. Further, by using a child narrator Sidhwa is faithful to her own childhood memories than if she wrote the novel through the prejudiced eyes of an older narrator. Sidhwa’s own childhood experiences of Pakistan’s turbulent days of independence are mirrored in her adult perception onto vision of Lenny. Sidhwa was a young girl in Lahore in the years leading up to Partition. Thus, like Lenny, Sidhwa witnessed the historical events of Partition through her childhood eyes. “My world is compressed,” Lenny warns us in the beginning of the novel (Sidhwa 11). The main and far most important function of the child as a narrator is to educate the reader, to build the reader’s awareness and understanding of an unfamiliar world through a child’s perspective. ... She gives us explicit details that help us to explore the extent at which the religious and political changes took place during the years of Partition; to illustrate, she tells us, “Imam Din and Yousaf are turning into religious zealots” (Sidhwa 101).
Approximate Word count = 2775
Approximate Pages = 11.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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