The Pakistani Bride Essay

Fiction, the most vital branch of literature, records facts of human life, social conditions and values. And a novelist can be defined as a socio-political person whose main aim is to make this earth a better place by formulating and fostering certain principles. A novelist is expected to provide some serious socio-political, religious issues and problems wrapped by entertainment. Bapsi Sidhwa be-longs to the writers, who are well aware of the dialectical relationship between a culture and its art; who are conscious of the dynamics between their roles as writers and the society they live in. Though Bapsi Sidhwa belongs to India, Pakistan and the United States simultaneously, she prefers to be described as a Punjabi-Pakistani-Parsi woman. All

Zaitoon, a girl, brought up in the liberal environment of Lahore can never cope with the tribal savagery. Similarly, Carol, an American woman cannot adjust Pakistan’s fundamental and conservative outlook. The novelist, here, also brings the theme of partition crisis which killed Zaitoon’s own parents. But her main focus in ‘The Pakistani Bride’ is always on the plight of women. ‘The Pakistani Bride’ exposes the same fate of many brides whose stories remain unspoken; whose tears, the world can never see; whose sacrifices have never been admitted or admired. From this thorough analysis of the major themes of the novel, it is clear that the justification of the title ‘The Pakistani Bride’ is beyond question. It exactly antici-pates the themes Sidhwa has dealt with in this novel.

The title of Bapsi Sidhwa’s third novel, ‘Ice-Candy-Man’ (1988) was changed from ‘Ice-Candy-Man’ into ‘Cracking India’ in 1991 because Sidhwa’s American publishers feared that an American reader might mistake the unfamiliar name for a drug pusher. The title ‘Ice-Candy-Man’, first, was titled after a character named Dilnawaz who is a street vendor. In order to understand the implica-tion of the title, first of all we should have a glance at the