Bapsi Sidhwa, the distinguished internationally renowned writer, is Pakistan’s most prominent and leading English fiction writer. Born in Karachi in 1939, Sidhwa and her family later moved to Lahore which later became the background of her major novels. Sidhwa’s novels are social and historical documents that cover the contemporary realities of life and various cultures. Her odyssey as an author of fictional writing has been steady. Her novels are all about the life and cultures of her native subcontinent.Cracking India aka Ice-Candy-Man is Bapsi Sidhwa’s third novel is a fascinating account kaleidoscopic presentation of the com-munal violence and brutality that occurred at the time of India’s partition. Through the child narrator Lenny, a …show more content…
Perpetration of violence against innocent peo-ple was beyond imagination. Mass exodus, mass killings, mass abduction, mass raping of women and young girls shook the humanity. In Remembering Partition, Gyanedra Pandey writes: The character of the violence – the killing, rape and arson – that followed was also unprecedented, both in scale and method . . .” ( 2 ) Millions of people were forced to shift to the safer places, Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan, thousands of women were abduct-ed, raped and disfigured brutally. A large number of women were force to conversion. Thou-sands of innocent children met their untimely death in the hands of rioters. Innumerable number of houses were looted and burned to ashes. It was a nightmarish experience for those who witnessed these barbarities and survived. In an interview with Feroza Jussawalla, Bapsi Sidhwa recalls those …show more content…
Peo-ple fell in the grip of paranoia. Rumours fuelled the communal atmosphere. Sidhwa writes: “a few days later, in Lahore, we hear of attack on Muslim villages near Amritsar and Jullundur. But the accounts are contrary and the details so brutal and bizarre that they cannot be be-lieved.” ( CI 117 ) Fear encapsulated with rumour released great degree of anxieties among Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistani part of Punjab. Sidhwa writes: “Things have become topsy-turvy.” ( CI 157 ) With the brewing of communal troubles in Lahore, Hindus and Sikhs are forced to leave Lahore. Mr. Singh says: “Sethi Sahib, we have just received orders from our leaders . . . We are to leave Lahore forever . . .We have worked out plans for a complete Sikh evacuation. We’ll form our own armed escort. I’ll take our buffaloes . . . And whatever essen-tials we can pile into a truck. Each family is allotted a truck.” ( CI 156
Major newspapers around the world wrote about Masih’s story, even though it was often demoted towards the end of the newspaper. It was not long before both the media and the public disregarded it. A little less than seven thousand miles away from Pakistan, however, another 12-year-old boy in Thornhill, Canada devoted Masih’s story to memory, an undertaking that signified the beginning ...
Boo’s story begins in Annawadi, a trash-strewn slum located by the Mumbai International Airport. This “sumpy plug of slum” had a population of three thousand people living within 335 huts (Boo, 2011, xi). The land owned by the Airport Authority of India and was surrounded by five hotels that Abdul’s younger brother described as “roses” versus their slum, “the shit in between” (Boo, 2011, xi). Abdul is a Muslim teenage who buys garbage of the rich and sells it to recyclers to support his family. Abdul’s family, Muslim, is a religious minority in the slum of Hindus; in fact a major element of tension within the book can be distilled to these Hindu-Muslim tensions. This difference in religion makes Abdul fearful of his neighbors for two reasons: (1) they would attempt to steal the family’s wealth, and (2) if Abdul were caught, he would not be able to support his family. The other major character was Fatima, a woman who burned herself by attempting suicide through self-immolation. She accused Abdul, his father, and sister of beating and threatening her; in India, it is against the law to convince someone else to kill him or herself. With a corruption-ridden legal sys...
Very few are lucky enough to shake free of this vicious clutch. On October 25, 2013, three women (69-year-old Malaysian woman, a 57-year-old Irish woman, and the 30-year-old British woman.) from were about to escape 73-year-old Aravindan Balakrishnan and his 67-year-old wife Chanda’s wrath after 30 years. They were described as “deeply traumatized” after they suffered through the ordeal of abuse and isolation. What little freedoms they had led one of the victims to watch a movie on forced violence, which gave out the number of non-profit Freedom Charity, an organization that dedicated themselves to contacting the police after gaining the women’s trust. Later details of the story report that the three women were apart of a left wing...
It became a dangerous and overwhelming place to be. TV and music were banned for everyone and the women had it worse. They could no longer hold a job, go to school, and enjoy shopping. (Malala’s Dream: A Brave Teen From Pakistan…) Women were isolated.
Adding onto the to the dexterous disposals undergone in order to disencumber themselves from female infants shortly after birth, disdain and bigotry leading to death and sex-selective abortion are other ways by which many female children die each year. These circumstances are most predominant in patriarchal social orders in which females are devalued and a predilection for boys is incorporated within the developmental social ideologies. India is undergoing a female genocide. The primary cause as to why this occurrence does not jostle or provoke global advertence is because it is accomplished through abortion in oppose to killing the females post birth. In India, abortion in itself is a completely legal procedure and the latitudinarian a...
When discussing the controversial authors of Indian literature, one name should come to mind before any other. Salman Rushdie, who is best known for writing the book “Midnights Children.” The first two chapters of “Midnights Children” are known as “The Perforated Sheet”. In “The Perforated Sheet” Rushdie utilizes magic realism as a literary device to link significant events and their effects on the lives of Saleem’s family to a changing India. In fact, it is in the beginning of the story that the reader is first exposed to Rushdie’s use of magic realism when being introduced to Saleem. “On the stroke of midnight/clocks joined palms” and “the instant of India’s arrival at independence. I tumbled forth into the world”(1711). Rushdie’s description of the clocks “joining palms” and explanation of India’s newfound independence is meant to make the reader understand the significance of Saleem’s birth. The supernatural action of the clocks joining palms is meant to instill wonder, while independence accentuates the significance of the beginning of a new era. Rushdie also utilizes magic realism as an unnatural narrative several times within the story to show the cultural significance of events that take place in the story in an abnormal way.
Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children employs strategies which engage in an exploration of History, Nationalism and Hybridity. This essay will examine three passages from the novel which demonstrate these issues. Furthermore, it will explore why each passage is a good demonstration of these issues, how these issues apply to India in the novel, and how the novel critiques these concepts.
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
For women in India, the last century has marked a great amount of progress, but at times it has been as stubborn as all the centuries before it. Women have been expanding their roles in society, at home, and even politics with female Prime Minster Indira Gandhi. Gender roles are ingrained deeply, however, and that is no more apparent than in the current rape epidemic. Specifically the last 40 years have been some of the most promising for Indian women, but they have also seen an 875% increase in rape cases (Park). The answers to why this is happening, and why it is happening now may open up a much deeper issue. The social climate is changing; a power struggle between genders steadies the quantity of violence against women. Meanwhile, their empowerment to speak out and hold a rapist accountable brings it to the attention of the world. A longstanding injustice that has been occurring right bellow the surface for years may have reached its boiling point.
Bhan, T.N. Weblog post. An Eyewitness Account of the 1947 Raid by Tribals from Pakistan. N.p., 22 Nov. 2007. Web. 15 May 2011. .
The cases which have made headlines of Karachi in the past few months include the gang rape of five-year-old girl abandoned on a railway line, a baby girl thrown into a river by her father, an abandoned newborn discovered in a burning garbage dump, in-laws suffocated the baby girl with a pillow and much more on the same issue. The number of Pakistani children who have been murdered by cruel and insensitive people of the society has risen exponentially over the past five years. What’s even more troubling? The increasing numbers of deaths amongst infants are baby girls. The numb...
Violence. Just mentioning the word conjures up many images of assault, abuse, and even murder. Violence is a broad subject with many categories. Some types of violence are terrorist violence and domestic violence. Violence can arise from many different sources; these sources whether biological, cultural, and social all can evoke violent behavior. All cultures experience some sort of violence, and this paper considers violence as a cultural phenomenon across a range of various settings. Violence plays a part in both Islamic and Indian cultures according to the articles “Understanding Islam” and “Rising Dowry Deaths” by Kenneth Jost and Amanda Hitchcock, respectively. From an anthropological perspective, violence emphasizes concerns of meaning, representation and symbolism.
Lawrence Auster wrote an eye-opening blog excerpt titled India and Pakistan: Why the Mass Killing Occurred. The content of this excerpt explore the fundamental issues of identity and religion that led to the violence in 1947. The author makes his point by utilizing current event such as the train massacre in 2002, in which 50 Hindu women and children were burned alive. The blog is for an audience with some prior knowledge on the topic and continues to expand upon that knowledge. The blog is a secondary source because it introduces its own unique ideas regarding the issue and was written after the time of the event. It was very helpful to my research because it simplifies the wordy information often found on scholarly sites and condenses it into something comprehensible and relatable to the reader.
Clear Light of Day highlights how a war affects a family and a nation. In the novel, parental absence escalates sibling conflict, which leads to the characters escapement, ultimately resulting in Bim’s anger. While some readers may think that Clear Light of Day just represents a single family’s struggle, the novel clearly represents India’s struggle as well. India’s independence from Britain consequently leads to the formation of Pakistan and continual religious and political conflict. This novel is an allegory that explains political combat in an accessible way because everyone is part of a family. This novel not only models the reasons for conflict in India but for other nations and even families as well. Clear Light of Day shows how understanding family dynamics and creating strong familial bonds can help reduce conflict and promote peace throughout the world.
At this stage it is important to highlight that the South Asian community is characterized by vast diversity and complex nature. The members of the group are heterogeneous with respect to their cultural norms and religious inclinations (Khan, 2000). The sheer rapid growth in the size of this community calls for researchers and practitioners to explore and develop a better understanding of how these women folk face and experience violence in the context of being a sub-group in