Barbarism@partition of India. Review on Ice Candy Man - Bapsi Sidhwa

After having talked at great lengths about the confluence of history and fiction in my earlier essays I am not going to talk too much about the theme here, but all I want to say at the offset is that the book today I am going to talk about attempts exactly the same albeit with a different treatment. Sometimes I wonder why so less has been written on a monumental event like the partition, if there is one single historical event, which has the greatest impact on the geo-political apparatus, the socio-emotional psyche of millions of people on both sides of the Radcliff line, it has to be this one beyond an iota of doubt. I guess people who were alive then did not write about it, either because the hurt is still fresh, or they were ashamed of what happened to them or the evils they did to the others. The young writers tend to skip through it because of the emotional and political connotations a novel based on partition might have. Whatever be the reason but that doesn’t take away the fact that partition was indeed one of the most important historical event and more often then not the tales woven around it are sad, cathartic and at once makes the reader feel ashamed and abhorrent of what all had happened then in the name of religion, community and nationality.

Here I am again to talk about one of the finest piece of fiction woven around the partition saga, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India originally Ice Candy Man. In light of current political, religious, and social tensions in India and Pakistan, a more appropriate title could easily have been, “The more things change, and the more they stay the same.” Ironically, its adaptation in, Earth, by Deepa Mehta, attests to its timeliness. Set in 1940’s India, during the time of independence and the partition, Cracking India brings to life the deeply religious, national, social, and economic tensions marking both historical and current Indo-Pak political dynamics.

The story revolves around a young polio ridden Parsi girl, Lenny, the Muslim Ice Candy Man and the beautiful Hindu Ayah. The naïve observations of the young girl about startling images of violence, fear and hatred intensify considerably for the readers and one cant stop drawing a far reached parallel to the epic Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Franke. The co-mingling of innocence and experience allow the reader to view this extremely confusing and unstable chapter of Indian history through a simpler lens, a more objective voice. The people in Lenny’s life are reduced to physical or spiritual characteristics. People from different religions be it a Hindu, Muslim or a Sikh are painted in the colors of hatred that they espouse for each other. Religion to the young narrator is nothing but a superficial label, as characters switch from one to the other with such nonchalant ease. Though coming from a young narrator might have made things a lot easier to read but what makes it very complex is the socio-emotional and political turmoil that Sidhwa talks about so beautifully through this book. She talks about the colossal pain and sufferings of people cutting across the boundaries of religion and nationality, the latter being a concept, which was just being forced upon them from high up.

The novel though centered on Lenny boasts a series of sub-plots, each competing through the novel for the center stage. The alluring love story between the Muslim Ice Candy Man and the Hindu Ayah has been carved out quite delicately, what has to be noted is the deliberate religious divide between the two and the impact that a trivial thing like religion has on the lives of two lovers and all the other people around. In addition to that lot of subplots have been left unresolved leaving them open to the imagination of the readers and at the same time it also mirrors the experience many people had during those times of turmoil.

For all its qualities the novel does has some problematic areas as well. The depiction of power, sexual and political has gone a little over the board one feels. Sidhwa on her part defends it by saying that the plot is set in times when sexuality was repressed to a large extent and under such conditions it becomes obsessive and permeates one’s whole life. Also it is not factually correct if one talks about history per se, but yes if one allows the writer that bit of a leeway as compared to a historian then it comes out fine, also since the narrator of the story happens to be a young girl who might understand the emotional impact of an event rather then the historical nomenclature.

The real good about the book is the universal appeal it has, it can fit in per se to the happenings in Northern Ireland, Bosnia or for that matter till now strife-ridden Afghanistan. Sidhwa says in his nature man has not changed much as he always keep fighting for one or the other thing, sometimes he fights for religion, for land, for women, for position, for greed or sometimes just for the sake of it. Superficial things have come to take a center stage in our lives, something that robs from us the basic premise of our existence.

Through Cracking India, Bapsi Sidhwa has indeed brought to life the spiritual, emotional, and very real implications of the partition of India. In so doing, she has “cracked” the riddle of India and revealed to us the cultural difficulties that plagued South Asia before, during, and after its split from the British and the creation of Pakistan. I recommend this novel and encourage anyone to read it, if for no other reason than simply that it is one of the few works on this topic. I also favor it because it may call readers to view religion and social status in their own lives in new and different ways.

Questions

Religion is supposed to alleviate us from the materialistic and sometimes me’ism per se, but due to think the more religion preaches spiritualism, the more it binds us to the material comforts?

In the fast changing global world that we all live in, where nomenclatures and their implications are losing their identity what importance does nationality, religion and creed have on our day-to-day lives?

Why is there so few literary works done on a monumental event like the partition?

What for you is the learning from the novel Ice Candy Man?