Bapsi Sidhwa Analysis

Bapsi Sidhwa was born and brought up in United India. In this age of globalisation, it is really very difficult to categorise some writers; Bapsi Sidhwa is one of them. She likes herself to be described as a Punjabi-Pakistani-Parsee woman. Her fiction deals with both the pre-and postcolonial period of the Indian Sub-Continent. What is most remarkable about her work is her dual perspective which is based on both the Pakistani and the Parsee point of view. She speaks both for the Pakistani’s and the marginalised Parsee community. She picks some significant incidents from her own life or from the lives of other people and fleshes them out to create a larger reality of fiction. Her writing career began at the age of twenty-six. She has many novels

Bapsi Sidhwa belongs to India, Pakistan and the United States simultaneously but she likes herself to be called as a Punjabi-Pakistani-Parsee woman. She picks up some significant incidents from her own or from the lives of other people. She is unique because of her raucous humour, caustic wit, a sense of fair play and shrewd observations of human behaviour. Sidhwa has a distinctive Pakistani, yet Parsee ethos in her writings but above all a unique individual voice. Sidhwa’s novel Ice-Candy-Man examines the inexorable logic of partition as an offshoot of fundamentalism sparked by hardening communal attitudes. First published in 1988 in London, this novel is set in pre-partition India in Lahore. It is the second novel on partition by a woman author, the first being Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column. Both these women writers share similar perspectives on the calamities of Pakistan. The novel skilfully recreates the ethos of partition as a historical event through the view point of a precocious eight-year-old Parsee girl Lenny. The novel captures the effects of communal frenzy that follows partition through the innocent eyes of Lenny, the child narrator of the novel, much more like her creator, polio-ridden, precocious and a keen observer of the happenings around. Partition figures in all her novels set in the Indian Sub-Continent. Of her novels, Ice-Candy-Man is the serious and popular one. Effectively using the persona of a child narrator, the novel critically presents the kaleidoscopically changing socio-political realities of the Indian Sub-Continent just before its partition. The novel was filmed as a motion-picture by Deepa Mehta with the title “Earth 1947”. The movie does not include many incidents and characters of the novel, but the novelist feels that it