Analysis Of Bapsi Sidhwa's Novel Ice-Candy Man

Great Essays
Abstract: Bapsi Sidhwa’s third novel Ice-Candy Man was published in 1991. In America, her publishers Milkweed Editions published it under the title of Cracking India. Using a child narrator named Lenny, the novelist presents the Kaleidoscopically changing socio political realities of the Indian sub-continent just before the partition. This extremely sensitive story takes up the themes of communal tensions, using religion as a way to define individual identity, territorial cravings political opportunism, power and love, and brings them together in a very readable narrative. Ice-Candy Man 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 it has …show more content…
And Ice Candy-man, too, disappears across the Wagah border into India.(Ice-Candy Man 277). The traumas of partition as described in the novel are horrible. Naked women's parade, merciless butchering, rape, cutting off women's brats, massacre and looting belongings that were frequent in the days of the partition, earn the attention of Sidhwa in this novel. The Indian version of the partition depicts the Muslims when all is said in general and Jinnah in specifically as the miscreants responsible for the vivisection of the subcontinent. Bapsi Sidhwa's endeavours to put forward the other version i.e. Pakistani version of partition. Pleading for Jinnah and Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa says: And I felt, in Ice-Candy Man, I was just redressing, in a small way, a very grievous wrong that has been done to Jinnah and Pakistanis by many Indian and British writers. They've dehumanised him, made him a symbol of the sort of person who brought about the partition of India...whereas in reality he was the only constitutional man who didn't sway crowds just by rhetoric (Dhanwan …show more content…
This is the way Ice-Candy Man shows the Pakistani perspective of partition. More particularly, the loss of communal harmony is the more regrettable outcome of partition. The Hindus, the Sikhs and the Muslims used to live in an atmosphere of communal harmony before the partition yet when the partition development starts, this profound established communal harmony disappears. Jagjeet Singh, with a quick group of the Sikhs visits a Muslim town Pir Pindo in haziness to warn them of an approaching Akali attack. In Pir Pindo men, children and women are killed. Similarly the Sikh families are assaulted in Lahore. The neighbors of the Sethis, Mr. and Mrs. Singh and Sher Singh leave Lahore after Sher Singh’s brother-in-law are killed. Similarly the student fraternity of King Edward's Medical College is disturbed. Prakash and his family move to Delhi and Rahul Singh and his lovely sisters are escorted to a convoy to Amritsar. In Lenny's family the gardener Hari is circumcised and becomes Himat Ali. Moti progresses toward becoming David Masih. This is the manner by which distinctive individuals fall back on the legislative issues of trade off and survival at the season of the emergency. The Masseur's ruined dead body is found in a gunnysack. The events of partition come about into a progression of events and images portraying human agony and loss. The statistic change in Lahore upsets Lenny. She

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