SOURCE: Hai, Ambreen. “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 2 (summer 2000): 379-426.

[In the following essay, Hai discusses Sidhwa's Cracking India in terms of the rubric of border-crossing in postcolonial literature.]

Borderlands […] may feed growth and exploration or […] conceal a minefield.

—Margaret Higonnet, Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature

It is the intersections of the various systemic networks of class, race, (hetero)sexuality, and nation, then, that position us as “women.”

—Chandra Mohanty, “Cartographies”

In Rudyard Kipling's short story “On the City Wall,” the border between city and country, between British control and Indian resistance, and between colonizer and colonized is occupied by the fantastical figure of Lalun, the “exquisite” courtesan, entertainer, and artist, on whose hospitable grounds men of all races and religions amicably meet.¹ Literally located on the border of Lahore (now a border city of Pakistan), Lalun's house and body function emblematically as border spaces, sites on the “city wall” where sexual, political, and cultural capital is traded and lines of division crossed. This border status is, however, unexpectedly subversive, for it is Lalun's ingenious deployment of her seemingly non-aligned position in between many camps that enables her to hoodwink the narrator into helping a captive Indian revolutionary escape from British guards. Kipling, as the narrator, ruefully concludes: “I had become Lalun's Vizier after all” (243). While hybrid figures—such as interracial “Eurasians” or western-educated “Babus” in British India—were habitually derided in colonial discourse, this atypical colonial moment in “On the City Wall” seems more knowing of the strategic doubleness of borderhood, and of the radical potential of the in-between, or the unbelonging. As such, it might be read as a beginning, from which, more recently, postcolonial literary and theoretical writings have altogether re-valorized hybridity and begun to consider the paradoxical powers—despite difficulties—of many kinds of border crossers and border inhabitants.

In recent years, the problems and possibilities of borders and boundaries—of questioning, crossing, transgressing, reconfiguring, dismantling, and indeed inhabiting borders and border spaces—have become an increasing preoccupation for theoretical discourses in a wide variety of fields.² In such emergent fields as feminist, queer, race, postmodern, and postcolonial theories (as well as cultural and canon studies), examining the configurations of difference and the related task of rethinking disciplinarity provide the impulses for activating boundaries as lines of demarcation. In recent postcolonial work a focus has emerged that considers not only boundary crossing (which takes the border to be a signifier of division, constraint, or limitation), but also border inhabitation—on the “interstices” between, or the spaces of overlap—which regards the border itself (and the subjectivity of those positioned on the border) as a critical if ambiguous site of vital reconstruction, a position replete with contradictions and difficulty, but also with regenerative promise. Thus Homi Bhabha describes the border space as the productive “tenebrousness” of the “interstitial,” or the in-between: “These in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (1-2). “It is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices,” he continues, “that introduces creative invention into existence” (9). Border work, then, as undertaken by the in-betweens, by those who both belong and unbelong, who can offer crucial perspectival shifts, can have liberatory potential, because it can undo binaristic and hierarchical categories of opposition, offering useful critique and reconceptualization of either side of an opposition—be it cultural, political, or intellectual. Abdul JanMohamed, for instance, describes Edward Said as such a border intellectual, enabled precisely by his doubleness of belonging and not-belonging, and his ability to question as an insider/outsider in, for example, both “East” and “West” (97-118). Thus his “homelessness” (defined as a courageous refusal to ally oneself with a dominant ideological or political position) is useful as a form of Socratic challenge to either side.

Analogously, Emily Hicks's argues that “border writing,” which arises from the heterogeneity of multiple cultural effects, “must be conceived as a mode of operation rather than a definition,” because ultimately it promotes in its readers a “psychic healing.” This writing is located in border regions or heterogeneous cultures, bearing the marks and carrying the benefits of historical overlay. Speaking in many voices and to many audiences, it can have the political effect of “ultimately undermining the distinction between original and alien culture” (xxiii-xxxi). Indeed, I would add, not only does it offer “multidimensional perception” (the ability to see from both sides of a border) but in fact throws the very idea of “sides” into disarray. In Trinh Minh-ha's words:

The moment the insider steps out from the inside, she is no longer a mere insider (and vice versa). She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside [… and] she also resorts to non-explicative, non-totalizing strategies that suspend meaning and resist closure. […] Whether she turns the inside out or the outside in she is like the two sides of a coin, the same impure, both-in-one insider/outsider.

(When, 74-75)

Recent feminist and postcolonial work in particular has turned to the crossing and inhabiting of borders by third world women writers in an effort to reconsider their strategies of survival as they negotiate—often subversively—the contradictions of cultural heterogeneity, modernity, nationalism, or diasporic identity.³ It is not, of course, the fact of marginality per se (of gender or otherwise) that assures a border positioning, either for the critic or writer. Indeed, as I will discuss in more detail below, marginality is to be differentiated from borderhood because the former rests upon a binary opposition between a presupposed strong center and weak margin, while the latter suggests a third or non-aligned space between and unsettling to binarisms. Rather, perhaps because inequity tends to build upon Manichean dichotomies, a feminist or liberationist strategy seeks border spaces, the in-between that challenges the very structure of those oppositions. In discussing the usefulness of deconstruction for feminism, Mary Poovey has urged the notion of the “middle voice” or the “in-between” (53) as a politically useful strategy for “dismantling binary thinking” (59).⁴

Gloria Anzaldua's first book can be seen as an eloquent example of such an effort, taking the literal Mexican/U.S. borderland to articulate and assess the psychic borderlands of culture and ethnicity, historic dispossession, and gender and sexuality: “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras [“without borders”] / be a crossroads” (195). To “be a crossroads” is to be in-between, the site of salutary exchange, questioning and pushing both oppositions beyond their limits. Indeed, if as Heidegger suggests, “a boundary is not that at which something stops, but […] that from which something begins its presencing” (208), being a border zone or a boundary can be difficult but also enabling, the inscription of a limit that yet poses the possibility of transgression, and novelty. If the crossing of borders can be a form of transgression, resistance, and subject-formation, and the inhabiting of borders a difficult but productively destabilizing political endeavor, then the border work of both crossing and inhabiting borders performed by postcolonial women writers—confronted with a variety of historic constraints and situated between polarized oppositions of gender, ethnicities, and ideologies—is surely a complicated and crucial endeavor.

It is in this double context of self-conscious border positioning on the part of such writers and a critical climate that sometimes too hastily valorizes this work under the rubric of border crossing that I would like to read Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Cracking India, a postcolonial feminist text that can be seen both as a border crosser and border inhabitant as it explores the gendered pitfalls of the national construction of borders. Now beginning increasingly to be read (and taught) in the western academy, the novel creates a double feminist lens for the bloody history of 1947—the partition of British India into modern India and Pakistan. It offers both a self-narrated account of the growing consciousness of a little girl, a member (like the author) of a minority ethno-religious community, and a focus on the—until recently untold—experiences of the scores of women (of various ethnicities) who were raped, abducted, or mutilated in the ensuing violence. Implicitly it foregrounds its own position as border writing, and hence its capacity to intervene in male nationalist discourse and historiography via the belated remembering and retelling of this collective trauma.

However, while indeed creating a recuperative space—both politically and narrativally—upon the border, the text predicates its border status upon implicit assumptions of gender, class, ethnicity, nationalism, and sexuality that, I will argue, reveal contradictions and ambivalences that fundamentally undermine its project. I will distinguish border work (ideally both deconstructive and constructive as described above) from border trouble, where the aspiration to cross or inhabit some borders runs aground upon other unforeseen limits that throw that professed border work into disarray. A concurrent goal of this essay, then, is to show how a reading that focuses on the specificities of a particular kind of border politics can unravel problems that remain invisible under the rubric of a more generalized celebration of borderhood.

While I am committed to the radical potential of border work, I would also contend that this needs to be re-examined and deployed with caution in contemporary academic discourse, where the crossing or breaking of borders has begun to carry an automatic, ipso facto resonance of laudability. Critics who have recently sought advisedly to build transnational alliances among women writers in different locations and positions, who are concerned with both the urgent, recently learned needs for specificity and the imperatives of cross-cultural and cross-national alliances, or who seek to explore the increasingly complex and contradictory positionalities of diasporic and gendered subjects, sometimes revert to relatively uncomplicated notions of border-crossing, as if all border-crossing were in itself something deserving of approbation.⁵ Maggie Humm, for instance, generalizes across all women writers when she argues that because “the condition of patriarchy presupposes the reality of borders” (of language, genre, gender, sexuality, for example [1]), “women must make border crossings in order to use language at all” (3). Further, a recent special issue of the South Asian Review, entitled Crossing Borders/Finding Homes, implies in its very project, as do many of the papers, that the crossing of borders is congruent with heroism, and is to be rewarded teleologically with the settling happiness of a home.⁶

This conceptualization of border crossing is problematic on at least two counts: first, in some cases, as JanMohamed has argued, “home,” literal or otherwise, may precisely not be as desirable as “homelessness”;⁷ and second, as we will see, the crossing of borders does not preclude the concomitant enactment of other forms of violation and victimization. Moreover, an unquestioning celebration of a generalized “border-crossing” can either, as Minh-ha puts it, “empty it, get rid of it, or else […] let it drift” (“Acoustic” 2), or, as Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out, occlude crucial differentials of power, “gender, class, identifiable political location,” and directions of movement (“Politics” 287). Some border crossers (for example, third world cosmopolitan elites) can assimilate and celebrate their hybridity, while others (for example, migrant workers) cannot, while still others, such as travelers from first to third world areas, have no equivalent imperative or need to “assimilate.”⁸

The problems of boundary crossing that have usually been recognized tend to fall into two very divergent categories: either the troubles that befall the hapless, the displaced, the economically and politically disenfranchised border crossers such as refugees, or the homeless;⁹ or the pitfalls that await “first world” scholars in their well-intentioned efforts to represent subalternity.¹⁰ Thus Chandra Mohanty and Rey Chow, for example, crucially analyze, respectively, the strategies of feminist scholars (Mohanty, “Under” 51-81) and of “anti-colonialists” who seek to subjectivize the “native” but only to make themselves visible (Chow, Writing 37-38). Margaret Higgonet rightly cautions “border feminists”: “The trope can become hazardous when it conveys the claim that work on the margin brings an immunity to critique or a moral superiority; it then turns into an excuse that conceals the privileged status of most academics […]” (4).

In light of such vital arguments about the need for scholarly self-reflexivity and the examination of the politics of knowledge construction, I would like to shift attention toward critical self-questioning of a slightly different sort: as literary critics who valorize postcolonial women's border writing—imaginative, autobiographical, or auto-ethnographic—are we not also bound to examine their (as well as our) strategies of border work? A question that is not often considered is how such writers (often “cosmopolitan celebrities,” in Tim Brennan's words) can predicate (and unwittingly self-sabotage) their border work upon exploitative and exclusionary strategies.¹¹ Thus by “border trouble” in my title I mean not just the trouble that afflicts the figure of the border-crosser/inhabitant/narrator, but the trouble that is occasioned by her.

An understanding of border work that is too general can preclude an examination of the specific ways in which what we celebrate—in the work of writers—may itself be culpable of questionable practices. It may be time to ask: what kinds of exclusions and exploitations accrue in different types of border writing to underpin and undermine what are indubitably laudable goals? In what ways can literary border work be ideologically problematic? What are the costs of crossing or inhabiting borders if that is predicated upon, or achieved by, the reinforcement of other invisible borders along other lines of difference? And what are the costs of critical and pedagogical valorizations of border work that fail to recognize or question such moves?

Through intensive readings of a writer who purports to be a border crosser, and who is read currently in the western academy as such, I would like to tease out some of the nuances of specific narrative strategies and suggest ways to rethink our postcolonial or transnational feminist critical approaches to and assessment of border work. In reading a non-canonical Anglophone Pakistani woman writer's fiction in the light of these concerns, the issue I would ultimately like to address, then, is this: as postcolonial feminist readers and teachers of postcolonial feminist writers, surely our proper stance in reading and interpretation is not only to be explicatory or celebratory.¹² As someone who grew up in Pakistan, who was educated in the U.S., and who now works and teaches in the American academy, I find myself at once in the border position of being expected to bring third world texts to the “appreciation” of first world readers, and, in all honesty, wanting to critique both that expectation and the texts that I find problematic. The reading that follows assumes that both Sidhwa and I are not situated on either side of an east/west “divide,” but that both, to use Chow's terms, are “precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already ‘Westernized’” (Woman xi). As a Pakistani woman with Muslim parents who also migrated from India in 1947, I find Cracking India both compelling and importantly interventionist, but at the same time I also cannot read it without certain qualms, without pausing over its contradictions and ambivalences. This is not to say that any of us are exempt from ideological blindness, but as critics and teachers we are surely obligated to take into consideration what we might see as the implications of a certain narratival disingenuity or conflict between purported goal and undermining counter forces. Besides, regardless of our various “subject positions,” rigorous analysis should still be possible for all texts, and that indeed to read any text with an eye to its contexts, histories, and goals, and yet also to its troubles, is finally to pay it the best compliment that we can.

It is rarely noticed that in the recent explosion of South Asian postcolonial and diasporic writings in English, there is a dearth of women writers from Pakistan.¹³ The numbers of male writers in English with links to Pakistan have begun to grow (in addition to Tariq Ali and Zulfikar Ghose, a new, younger group would include Aamer Hussein and even Hanif Kureishi); while increasing numbers of Indian women writers from Britain, North America and the Caribbean, and East and South Africa (such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Meera Syal, Suniti Namjoshi, Chitra Divakaruni, and Arundhati Roy) join the ranks of well-known ones such as Anita Desai and Bharati Mukherjee. However, although a fair number of middle- and upper-class women are educated in English in Pakistan (and some abroad), the paucity of women writers associated with Pakistan is perhaps inevitable given its dismally parochial and discriminatorily gendered systems of education, opportunity, modes of acculturation, and general devaluation of the arts. Sidhwa is one of the first women from Pakistan to be writing fiction in English and publishing internationally now.¹⁴

In addition to the characters she constructs in her fiction, Sidhwa herself occupies several border positions. She has always lived in Pakistan (where she wrote her first three novels, though she now lives in part in the U.S.), and she belongs to the minority Parsee or Zoroastrian community (to which Bhabha, the major proponent of hybridity in our times, also belongs). This community is historically diasporic (exiled from Persia since the seventh century), ethnically distinct, and founded upon an ancient religious tradition independent of both Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism and Hinduism.¹⁵ Thus it could be said that while Sidhwa has had different constraints imposed on her than have most middle-class Muslim women,¹⁶ she is enabled by her positioning to craft a unique critical lens: addressing (English-speaking) audiences within Pakistan and India and in the “West”; an “insider” to Pakistan by nationality and historical experience, but an “outsider” to the Hindu/Muslim divide; at once seeking to represent a minority (Parsees) and the national aggregate.¹⁷ Sidhwa thus faces the tricky position of having at once to justify speaking for—and to—the nation, and to build a critique of the Muslim nationalism that includes non-Muslims as citizens but in fact grants them only second-class status.

Sidhwa's first novel (though the second to be published), The Bride (1983), describes the multiple displacements of a young peasant girl who loses both her parents in the atrocities of cross-ethnic border-crossing of 1947, is adopted by a “tribal” man, raised in the city but then subjected to an arranged marriage amongst his hill-people (who live beyond the jurisdiction of Pakistani law), and finally escapes, despite rape and brutality, to a dubious urban freedom.¹⁸ Her second and fourth novels, The Crow Eaters (1978) and An American Brat (1993), more notable for their humor, both focus on family dramas within the diasporic Parsee community in Pakistan. The former describes a community split between Karachi and Bombay, the latter explores the possibilities and dangers of cross-ethnic marriage for a Parsee girl migrant to the U.S. It is, however, her most ambitious third novel, Cracking India (originally published as Ice-Candy-Man in 1988 in England and Pakistan), that has deservedly drawn the most attention, primarily in the context of postcolonial and border studies, and that will be my subject here.¹⁹

This semi-autobiographical-historical fiction recounts—in a discourse of immediacy and personal experience—the widespread bloodshed, raping, looting, and arson amongst Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus, the displacement of over ten million people, and the massacre of at least one million crossing in both directions over new national borders.²⁰ Sidhwa is by no means the first South Asian writer to address the events of a bi-national trauma that is only now beginning to be historicized.²¹ What distinguishes her account is that it locates itself at the nexus of a number of intersecting contemporary concerns: gender, violence, nationalism, cross-class representation, and ethnicity. Written at a time when questions of nationalism and gender were only beginning to be theorized, Cracking India is among the first (of a new wave of second-generation writing) to address an event that still remains shrouded in silence. If, as Linda Hutcheon has argued, postcolonial narrative is a form of trauma narrative, then its function is to reclaim agency both by remembering belatedly, and by trying to heal, to undo that trauma by recalling in a public venue—but in the mode of the personal—the violence of nation formation. To do this, this text situates itself upon various borders (generic, discursive, ethnic, political), while it also examines and celebrates—often by enactment—the inhabitation of such borders.

There are at least five ways in which the text can be read as doing what I will call border work. (I use the term here not as Higonnet does with respect to feminist and comparative critics, but rather, as the work done by the fictive text itself.) First, self-consciously locating itself in Pakistan's border city of Lahore, Cracking India explores the traumatic event of Partition and the construction of geographical borders (which “cracked” British India into two unforgiving enemies, modern India and Pakistan) to reflect on borders as sites of postcolonial national formation. It questions and ironizes the arbitrary and hurried imposition of borders via a child's anxious naiveté:²²

There is much disturbing talk. India is going to be broken. Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is? Or crack it further up on Warris Road? How will I ever get to Godmother's then? (101) […] Playing British gods […] the Radcliffe Commission deals out Indian cities like a pack of cards. Lahore is dealt to Pakistan, Amritsar to India. […] I am Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that. […] Did they dig the long, long canal Ayah mentioned?

(150)

The novel asks analogous questions: how will it cross those new borders to maintain earlier (familial) ties? How is such a division to be imagined, maintained, and policed? Indeed, as families were split and people assigned new identities, in a very literal sense neither the Pakistani nor Indian state could address the social and ethical problems of muddied boundaries: of children born of mixed Muslim and Hindu parentage as a consequence of rape and abduction, unwanted by either side and assigned in confusion either to the dishonored and reluctant mother or to the imputed father's country; or of women first raped and separated from their families, and then forcibly “rehabilitated” according to their religious affiliations, deprived by the Inter-Dominion Treaty of 1947 of their right to choose national citizenship.²³

A second way that the novel can be read as doing border work is as a self-consciously Parsee and self-problematized (because not Muslim) Pakistani narrative. Cracking India intervenes in dominant Indian nationalist historiographies, but ruptures the Hindu/Muslim binarism by producing a third perspective that allies itself to a nation and yet not to either dominant group. Although it cannot claim nationalist neutrality, it insists on ethnic neutrality as a basis for contesting both Indian and Pakistani nationalist discourses founded upon religious identity. In a subtle reminder, for instance, Sidhwa inserts the story of the beautiful Parsee wife of Jinnah, Pakistan's Muslim “founding father,” who broke his wife's heart by neglecting her for the nation—that in turn broke his (170-71). Yet this serves also to rupture the Muslim nationalist amnesia that idolizes Jinnah but erases his cross-ethnic alliances. Implicitly it reminds its readers that like Jinnah's marriage, Pakistan's secular nationalism was attached at its very foundation to non-Muslim minorities. Thus, to recall Hicks's terms, Sidhwa's border writing indeed undoes the distinction between “original and alien culture” since it too speaks at once from within and without, producing simultaneously a novel voice addressing Pakistanis from within yet questioning the homogeneity of “within,” and a voice addressing Indians from without that overturns the presumption of “without” as Muslim.

Third, Cracking India challenges the centrality and exclusivity of Pakistani and Indian masculinist master narratives by impudently locating its narratival perspective in the figure of a female child of a minority community. By refracting national history through a gendered consciousness, Sidhwa shifts historiographic perspective to those not usually regarded as central to that history. Also, as we will see, by choosing a (relatively) unsexualized child as opposed to a woman as narrator, Sidhwa creates a border or alternative space to the binarisms of adult sexuality—though this is not sustained.

Fourth, in its very form and discursive choices, the text confounds the generic divisions between fiction, history, and autobiography, and between public and private space. Recalling “real” events experienced by the author herself in a fictive form (the narrator Lenny bears a strong resemblance to Sidhwa herself, including details such as a childhood illness of polio, and the discovery of a body in a gunny sack), it blurs the distinction between memory and fictive (re)creation, between personal and national experience.²⁴ Although it relies on a conventional stylistic mode of narrative realism and fictive personal reminiscence, it sets itself up quite self-consciously as a text on and about borders.

And finally, what is also potentially powerful and novel about this narrative is that Sidhwa offers the beneficial powers of a new kind of postcolonial feminism, what we may call “border feminism,” embodied in the Parsee women of the narrator's family: they cross class and ethnic borders (to rescue the “Ayah,” a Hindu servant woman both sexual and political victim to the antagonisms between Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men), and they themselves inhabit a “neutral” and regenerative political identity. By analogy, Sidhwa's narrative suggests that it too—as a narratival border feminism that undoes binary oppositions and that locates itself in the space in between—can describe, restore, and heal some of the damage done by what it represents as male neo-nationalistic discursive and political violence. Indeed, by constant parallels between the positioning and work of narrator and narrative, the text implies that its own work may be reconstitutive and salutary in revising national history and identity, or in working through collective trauma.

The main problem begins, however, with perhaps the most critical figure of the narrative, who is not, after all, the Parsee Lenny, but rather, her Hindu nanny or “Ayah,” the female domestic servant who is abducted, gang-raped, and forced into prostitution by an erstwhile Muslim admirer, and who becomes the sole representative figure of female violation in this text.²⁵ The nanny, always called the “Ayah”—as if she were no more than her function (she is named only once as Shanta)²⁶—indeed functions in many ways: as the center of fascination for the upper-class child narrator, for whom, in the first half of the novel, she acts as both an idealized self and other—beautiful, desired (before Independence) by men of all religious and class backgrounds—an adolescent body through whose adventures the narrator vicariously acquires dangerous knowledge from a safe distance. But the ayah's sexuality also has other functions that become more problematic for the text: in the second half, in a strange conflation of political and sexual violation, the ayah's ethnic, gendered, and class position enables her body to become the displaced figure for a nation that is brutalized and ravaged for telling a story otherwise too traumatic to be told.

Sidhwa's narrative thus attempts to draw attention to the consequences for all women as casualties of decolonization (her self-proclaimed goal, according to Graeber), to render the ravages of the history of decolonization as the ravages of a female national body, suggesting that some (border) women can succeed—at high risk—at healing the damages wrought by men. Nevertheless, as the next section will show, this narrative ends up rendering the class- and ethnically inscribed figure of the ayah both expendable and usable for its own purposes. One form of border trouble that this potentially productive border writing runs into is, finally, that it actually remains quite ambivalent about the borders of class and ethnicity it purports to cross. The border—as limit—then becomes literalized as the body of a female Hindu domestic servant, the only site upon which the unspeakable can be permitted to happen, and questions of boundary-crossing be posed and played out. In fact the work that this working-class woman does in the narrative is to become the epitome of absolute otherness, the “‘other’ of the other” (Chow, Woman 15). (In an increasingly tightening circle, Ayah is the only Hindu, while the narrator and her family are Parsee in the predominantly Muslim city of Lahore.)²⁷

As the multiply othered victim, Ayah serves finally as a tool to emphasize the goodness of the ethnically neutral and upper-class Parsee (border) women who volunteer to save her and others like her.²⁸ But as they try to find her a “home” they can only send her beyond the borders of Pakistan to an India that has no assurance of welcome—just as the narrative can only place such a figure of marginality finally beyond its own boundaries, within which she cannot find a home. Thus, as we will see, the Hindu ayah becomes the ground upon which the text can forge a Parsee-Muslim alliance, and the figure from which all duly sympathetic Pakistani middle-class readers may finally distance themselves. Hence, despite its good intentions, the narrative gets caught in its own ambivalences, fettered by its own inability to cross the boundaries of class, ethnicity, and religious nationalism. The Ayah ends up embodying the margin (finally opposed to a dominant center), at the expense of whom the narrator can construct her own border position.

Cracking India faces a strange problem: in a postcolonial separatist nation like Pakistan, how is a Parsee writer to represent at once Parsees within the nation as unique and separate from other ethnicities and religious identifications (not-Muslim, not-Hindu, not-Punjabi, not-Christian, not-colonizer, and so on) and represent the nation as a cohesive entity constituted also by a variety of non-Muslims? Given the historic vulnerability of the Parsee community—an endangered political minority—how is a writer from that community to at once assert distinctness from dominant (Muslim) culture and yet also assert its belonging to a nation upon which depends its survival (particularly when that nation justifies its own founding upon the logic of separation of Muslim minority from Hindu majority in India)? Who or what must become the ritual scapegoat for this text? To counter such difficult problems, however, this text finds a dubious solution: structurally, it sets one ethnic minority against another in a perilous move that reconciles one (the Parsee) at the expense of the other (the Hindu), as if implicitly arguing for rightful belonging based upon the dubious logic of class sameness rather than of ethnic difference. (It could be said that Sidhwa's plot device of expelling the Hindu Ayah could just as easily be read as an indictment of the political and cultural exigencies that allowed no place for such a figure in the new Pakistan. Yet the novel offers no discursive distance or critical attempt to point out the limitations of such a national logic. I am not suggesting that there is no sympathy with the Hindu ayah. But as the ayah becomes allegorized, the text does not seem to know how to reconcile the desire to build heterogeneous gender alliances across class and international boundaries with the conflicting need to construct an intranational homogenous Pakistani feminism.)

Indeed in both The Bride as well as Cracking India, Sidhwa uses ethnically alien figures as a mode of asserting belonging for the relatively less alien dominant narrative voice by establishing its reassuring sameness to a dominant middle class: using the opposition of urban versus tribal in one novel, and Parsee versus Hindu in another.²⁹ Thus I suggest that precisely because it is a text that makes such important interventions Cracking India is also worth reading against its own grain: questioning it for the ways in which it goes about its ends and tracing the boundaries that limit its own project. What follow then are critical readings of this text in terms of the problematics of border-work outlined above: my purpose here is to read theory and text contrapuntally, examining the implications of reading each for the other. This is then not a critique of either classism, or ethnic bias, or indeed of Sidhwa's proto-feminist nationalist discourse per se, though it includes the intersections of all of those; rather, I seek to examine the problems of a border positioning and practice that is founded—and that founders—upon a limited understanding of gender solidarity and an ambivalence about crossing more difficult borders of ethnicity and class.

Sidhwa's narrative constitutes itself on a peculiar triple displacement: first, a temporal shift of narrative subjectivity (self-confessedly autobiographical) to a pre- (and later) pubescent child; second, a mediation of this child's discovery of sexual and political violation via the story of her servant Ayah; and third, the construction of a gendered national allegory whereby territorial violence is deemed representable only via a Hindu servant woman's ravaged body. My reading begins with certain questions regarding all three: what narratival needs impel these shifts? What is too unspeakable to be rendered except via these obliquities? What advantages—and costs—accrue to these narratival displacements? And what is the role of displacement itself in a text deeply fascinated with borders?

The first displacement shifts the tension between Sidhwa's own childhood experience of Pakistan's turbulent, sanguinary early days of independence and her adult hindsight onto the uncomfortably, unrelentingly circumscribed vision of Lenny, the polio-afflicted child-narrator. At times, this shift creates an unease and awkwardness in the disingenuous disjunction between child and adult, rupturing the seamlessness of the naive perspective. If Lenny's innocence supposedly functions as a strategic tool for a fresh exposé of adult politics, then that conflicts with the narratival need to render what a child cannot know, leading to jarring moments such as a five-year-old ingénue commenting on white slave traffic or pubic hair (68-69). This is not resolved technically by the use of the usual autobiographical disjunction between experiencing and narrating consciousness. More importantly, the incapacitation of the child suggests a metaphor for the self-positioning of the narrative itself.

“My world is compressed,” Lenny begins the novel, in an unwittingly emblematic opening sentence (11). Indeed, this novel reveals itself to be self-imprisoned, struggling against the self-imposed bandages of a pre-pubescent discourse that jars against unexpected insertions of adult knowledge, as if suggesting with some complacency that such constraint might be an advantage. The first scenario of the novel, offered as four-year-old Lenny's earliest memory, presents Lenny in a perambulator pushed by her Ayah, abruptly stopped by an officious, “short, middle-aged, pointy-eared” Englishman, who demands to know why “such a big girl” is not yet walking by herself (12). Nonplussed by Ayah's broken English and Lenny's silent disclosure of her emaciated, leather-and-steel-strapped leg, the Englishman still insists (ironically) on the efficacy of self-reliance. But then, Lenny says: “Ayah and I hold our eyes away, effectively dampening his good-Samaritan exuberance […] and wagging his head and turning about, the Englishman quietly dissolves up the driveway from which he had so enthusiastically sprung” (12).

This opening scenario can be read as a fantasy suggestive of Sidhwa's postcolonial feminism: the British male's colonizing interference that first misreads ailment and then misdiagnoses treatment, is abashed and dispatched by his confrontation with two marginalized female figures. Sidhwa's rather undue optimism suggests that it is their silence and averted gazes in the face of his absurdity that sends him scuttling—as if independence were so easily to be gained or that the predicament of double marginality had so much power. This rather dubious paradigm of female resistance, then, is based on a solidarity built upon the faltering language of one and the speechless revelation of her weakened female body by the other.³⁰

But such alliance between the incapacitated child and her Ayah is not easily drawn, for this opening episode also suggests how the child narrator can become oddly aligned with the figure of the colonizer. In this episode, the Englishman is indicted as much for his harmful officiousness³¹ as for his self-serving desire, his covert captivation by Ayah's “stunning looks,” her “rolling bouncy walk that agitates the globules of her buttocks […] and the half-spheres beneath her short sari-blouses” (13). Yet this salacious vision is mediated through and shared by the child-narrator, who remains unaware (as indeed does the narrative) of her replication of what she indicts. Indeed, her language suggests that she projects onto him her own vision of the Ayah. “The Englishman no doubt had noticed,” she hypothesizes, what she saw. This narratorial complicity becomes paradigmatic of the novel's strategic modes: it illustrates in the very beginning how Ayah's heavily sexualized servant body will become available not only for multiple masculine desires, but also for certain budding feminine ones. Yet female desire for this other female body will always, in this text, forbid itself knowledge of itself, camouflaging itself in a castigation of what it will see insistently as exclusively male violation. Already within the discourse of personal affection and child's innocence, class difference seems to allow Sidhwa to take liberties, to render with some prurience a vision of available female sexuality that she will forbid herself in applying to women of a higher class. The ayah's female body will thus become both the site upon which this narrative of feminist recuperation will see fit to ground itself, and a defining limit for what will be censored in her narrative.

Lest it appear that my reading unwarrantably equates the perspective of child narrator and author, let me clarify that I do take Sidhwa's frequent separation from and displacement of point of view upon the child as a narratival choice. It clearly serves at least a couple of functions: one, educationally, to build a reader's awareness and understanding of an unfamiliar world via the child's; and two, somewhat self-servingly, as we will see, to allow the avoidance of certain issues via a coyness of childlike innocence that remains unrevoked by adult retrospection. It is never clear at what age Lenny is telling her story, since the temporality of narration is not located as it is, for example, by Saleem in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Nevertheless, as in the reading above, I do interpret as congruent certain narratival strategies and effects that are created both by the child and by the narrative. (I hesitate to over-assign authorial intention and prefer to focus on the strategic moves made by the narrative as well as by the child-narrator in the narrative.) Certainly Sidhwa builds in a certain irony at the child's expense (when, for example, Lenny does not understand adult sexuality); but the double irony of this irony is that authorial choices and unselfconsciousness become congruent with narratorial ones, especially when they require making use of the Ayah. On such occasions, the level of the narrative echoes the level of the narrator, while the text lacks markers that might indicate some reservation or distance between the two.

The narrator Lenny frequently presents herself as marginal and “abnormal,” both incapacitated and privileged by her painful polio (by implication, the narrative also presents itself as analogously disabled and enabled).³² Yet I would argue that instead of being marginal (the lesser of two), she is a borderer (an in-between third). She has the power of what Victor Turner has called a liminal figure (94-130): as a not-yet-sexual, not-fully-classed being, she gains access as an observer into realms of adult politics, village life, and servant sexuality that would otherwise be denied to an adult of her class or gender. While such liminality enables her to produce her distinctive narrative, Lenny's embodiment of this privilege prevents her from becoming the “crossroads” “sin fronteras” that Anzaldua describes. As Turner remarks, the transitional, “betwixt and between” (95) condition of liminality “implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low” (97). But, he continues, in a dialectical move, “men are released from structure (heterogeneity, hierarchically ordered society) into communitas (homogeneity, liminality) only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas” (129). Thus the temporary disenfranchisement of the liminal figure only prefigures a return to reaffirm the status quo. This seems precisely the function of Lenny's (and by extension the narrative's) liminality, which does not dismantle or re-order the hierarchies that she/it inhabits—but reaffirms class/religious/ethnic hierarchies in the uses it makes of a lesser figure.

In Lenny's fondly evoked colonial childhood, the ayah functions as the romanticized center of fascination for the middle class child narrator at first because she is a beautiful object desired by men of all religious and class backgrounds, and as the instrument through which Lenny acquires a vicarious knowledge from a safe distance. This surrogation of Ayah is by no means simple, for Ayah is at once Lenny's double and her antithesis. Lenny's adoration for her beautiful servant, and her voyeuristic pleasure in Ayah's various sexual encounters, become continuous with the tale of her own growing understanding of sexuality and politics, so that the servant-woman in many ways becomes the “subject” of Lenny's story, the object-lesson of her own (bisexual) adolescence. Indeed, her Ayah is for Lenny simultaneously both intensely desired self and other: she embodies a desirable adult femaleness that Lenny herself both ardently desires and desires to be. Her repeated descriptions of Ayah's warm, fragrant, curvy body, her “chocolate softness” (104) and her beautiful “kohl-rimmed eyes,” testify to a double vision that sees Ayah as the object of her own desire and as the object of desire of the men that Lenny observes. It is perhaps Lenny's desire for this body for which this body will later be punished, and Lenny's desire subsumed by accusations of male violation. Of course, this is a complex form of desire: it is at once both desirous of the projected sameness of the “other” body and also relieved at its difference, relishing the distance which allows Lenny as subject to watch Ayah become object—to violation.

At first, as if allowing her to learn heterosexuality by example, Ayah's body mediates Lenny's own sexual awakenings. A secret sharer in Ayah's adventures, Lenny shadows her sexual arousal: as one lover murmurs to Ayah, “something happens in (Lenny's) stomach” (128). Or, as Lenny gazes at the “radiant, amber eyes between bushy lashes” of Ayah's Pathan lover gazing at Ayah, she reports:

Something happens within me. Though outwardly I remain as thin as ever I can feel my stomach retract to create a warm hollow. “Take me for a ride—take me for a ride,” I beg and Sharbat Khan, tearing away his eyes from Ayah, places me on the cycle shaft. He gives me a turn round the backyard. […] He smells of tobacco, burnt whetstone and sweat. He brings me back and offers Ayah a ride. […] and with a great show of alarm Ayah wiggles on to the shaft in front […].

(86; emphasis added)

Such thinly disguised sexual metaphoricity does not require psychoanalysis—the point to be noted here is that Lenny demands service not only from Ayah's lover, but also from Ayah herself, desiring Ayah to redirect her lover's attentions to Lenny herself. (It is clear from the beginning that Ayah is able to consort with her admirers—while taking her young charges to the park—by depending upon Lenny's indulgence and silence, bought by “candy bribes” [29]). Thus Ayah's servant body and her sexual accessibility make her available not only to surrounding men—over whom she can exert some semblance of power in coquetry and refusal—but also to Lenny's desires (which Ayah cannot withstand), and indeed, to Sidhwa's narrative, which, bound within Pakistani neo-Victorian class decorum, can thus more comfortably adumbrate Lenny's budding (hetero)sexuality. Here the narrative functions in a parallel relation to the narrator, as it calls upon Ayah's pliable class and ethnically inscribed body for analogous service(s).

But another point to be noted here, if we read this text yet more closely, and against its grain, is that Lenny identifies not only with her Ayah in this sexual scenario, but also with Ayah's lover. Like the incident with the Englishman earlier, this is another occasion of triangulated desire (to adapt Eve Sedgwick's adaptation of René Girard's theory of male homosocial desire), in which the female narrator's fascination for her servant's body is catalyzed by her intense observation of male fascination for the same—as if both Lenny and Ayah's men were rivals for Ayah. But this is not a compulsion that this text will allow itself acknowledgment of—in fact, I would argue, it is precisely in attempting to repress this knowledge of cross-class, cross-ethnic, same-sex tension that this text will displace upon the cliché of male desire/violation its own unknowing desire/appropriation of Ayah's body.

Before the onset of violence that bursts upon Lenny's fondly nostalgic evocations of childhood and pre-Partition, Ayah is rendered, rather like Kipling's Lalun, as the magical goddess of racial harmony, the locus of convergent desire, the border terrain that neutralizes ethnic or religious difference. Surrounded by her circle of admirers in the park where she takes Lenny every evening, Ayah reigns under the presiding shadow of Queen Victoria's statue over an ethnic spectrum of working-class males: cooks, gardeners, masseurs, traders, butchers, wrestlers, and Ice-Candy-Man (the popsicle vendor). As their massaging fingers and toes darting under Ayah's sari inculcate the watching Lenny in the mysteries of bodily odors and servant sexuality, their political talk filters into her absorbent attentiveness. Then change, a disintegration into communalism, is tangible in the air at Queen's Garden: “And I become aware of religious differences. It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves—and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah—she is also a token. A Hindu” (101). For a while Ayah still seems sacrosanct, safe: “Only the group around Ayah remains unchanged. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsee are, as always, unified around her. I dive into Ayah's lap” (105).

The fall from this child's paradise of colonial harmony occurs when political and sexual violence bursts not upon Lenny, but upon her Ayah. As borders are struck to “crack” mother India's body into India and Pakistan, and the outbreak of religious and ethnic genocide follows upon decolonization, racial harmony crosses into racial murderousness—which translates into sexual atrocity. While on both sides villages are plundered and burnt, men and women are mutilated and sexually tortured, and trains of migrants crossing in opposite directions arrive full of dismembered bodies and gory sacks containing sexual organs, the Hindu Ayah is kidnapped from her protected domain of domesticity and servitude, raped, and forced into prostitution by her former Muslim devotee, the Ice-Candy-Man.

Sidhwa's attempt to render this history of a grotesque national boundary crossing itself treads strangely the boundaries between what can and cannot be said, between what cannot be (re)covered by her language and what can be forced upon the reader as the disconcertingly sensationalistic and gritty—as if some kinds of bravely fervent naming could become alibis for other kinds of not-naming, or as if crossing some boundaries could make up for the refusal to cross others. As she watches Ice-Candy-Man's mob of angry men drag Ayah away, Lenny reports: “The last thing I noticed was Ayah, her mouth slack and piteously gaping, her disheveled hair flying into her kidnappers' faces, staring at us as if she wanted to leave behind her wide-open and terrified eyes” (195). With this central image, the dismemberment of Ayah into body parts, into empty spaces, is begun—both in and by the narrative—as her speechless mouth underscores the unspeakability of what she will undergo, and her eyes can report only that they wish themselves absent.³³

In this central passage in the novel, Lenny depicts her own position as helpless—but complicit—observer: in a literal betrayal, it is she who gives away the Ayah's hiding place. But Lenny—or any woman of her class—cannot even be allowed to function as witness. And like Lenny, the narrative cannot report what will happen to Ayah; it directs the imagining of horror in her direction but refuses to follow, redirecting attention instead to its own stance of separation. As it conflates rape and prostitution into the unspeakable, it shrinks from the scene of the rape into a child's disingenuous innocence, leaving a gap at the center of Lenny's narrative, from which, at this key moment, Ayah emblematically drops out.

When finally Ayah is found, that silence is never recovered. (In the few sentences that Ayah utters, she can only beg Lenny's godmother for help in escaping her tormentor and insist upon being returned to her “folk” [275]). It is Lenny's Godmother who fiercely confronts Ice-Candy-Man: “‘Why don't you speak? Can't you bring yourself to say you played the drums when she danced? Counted money while drunks, pedlars, sahibs, and cut-throats used her like a sewer?’ Godmother's face was slippery with sweat” (262). The power of speech, of making oneself subject, is shifted both from the victim and the perpetrator (the Muslim lower-class man, who also cannot speak) to rest finally with the self-righteous upper-class rectifier of violence. (As the narrative courageously indicts Muslim violence upon non-Muslims in this Muslim country, it also ends up appeasing its Pakistani readers by shifting that blame onto seemingly unreasoning lower-class male culpability.) As Ayah becomes the silent representative of female violation in this text, what, we may ask, is the role (central, peripheral, or self-distancing) of the narrator who can only represent in one sense (as reporter) but not in any other (as representative)?

In narrating the self-congratulatory, fantasized recovery and restitution of the ravaged Ayah via the intervention of a grandparental matriarch, Sidhwa's belabored focus on the graphic details of that over-used body deflects attention from and substitutes for what could not be imagined about upper-class female bodies, allowing proximity only by expending its indignation upon the permissible distance of class and ethnic difference. It becomes a decoy that disallows the surfacing of other issues—such as the rapes and abductions of Muslim women by Muslim men, or of upper-class women—that may be perhaps much more disturbing to Pakistani readers. The motor force behind the ultimately unspoken, the unspeakable and censored horror is the possibility that “respectable” female bodies may be equally vulnerable—or rapable by lower-class men.

Let me distinguish here between at least two kinds of silence: one, the silence of the victim—about what happened—who cannot or will not tell her own story, or whose story can only be adumbrated but not told within this narrative; and two, the silence of the narrative—about what else happened—that in its very structure and obsessive focus on lower-class victims, telling (their) stories as victims, renders impossible the generalization from lower- to (our) upper-class women. The former kind of silence, as I discuss below, may be legitimate for certain reasons, but the latter, I would suggest, which creates a dichotomy of “us” and “them,” is not.

To begin with the silence about what else happened: first, on its own terms of historical accuracy, if Sidhwa's narrative seeks to correct earlier omissions by representing the violence perpetrated upon women as a casualty of decolonization, then why does it halt at representing only lower-class violence? While valuably drawing attention to subjects ignored by national histories, why does it still erase the effects upon other women? Historically, rapes of upper- or middle-class women did of course occur, but such possibilities seem not permissible within the bourgeois imaginary of this text, which reflects the still prevalent classed cultural silence about families owning to the rape of their women. In describing the accounts of survivors or social workers, Butalia acknowledges the absence of class markers in these accounts, though, she adds, that violence did not recognize class divisions, even though upper-class women were more protected since they traveled by car, air, or ship instead of by foot (246). If the official estimate of abductees (which does not include those killed) was 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan (Menon and Bhasin 71), then surely not all could be peasant or working-class. From the records, Menon and Bhasin quote a Civil Surgeon who reluctantly testified in revealing language: “even the ladies of the most respectable families had the misfortune of having undergone this most terrible experience” (41). In Sidhwa's novel, at best Lenny can be allowed to play sexual games with a manipulative older cousin, or her parents can be daringly portrayed as enjoying conjugal sexuality, but its imaginary cannot—or will not—allow any but rural or working-class women to be violated within its bounds.³⁴

The issue here is not to insist on the telling of one or another kind of story, or to pose a rivalrous comparison between the violations of privileged or under-privileged women. Rather, it is to explore the manifold troubling implications of this narratival unspeakability. This silence about certain kinds of violation, for one thing, acquiesces to, indeed, reinforces, the cultural system that dictates that rape signifies a woman's shame and the dishonor of her male protectors. Moreover, it suggests that the dishonor of upper-class women is somehow more disturbing, or qualitatively different from and greater than that of lower-class women, and that therefore, it cannot be touched. More importantly, in terms of the work and politics of representation, if a narrative constructs its world as divided into lower-class rapable victims and upper-class rescuers, then it results in the intensification of the very distances it seeks to breach. It ultimately creates stultified roles for both these artificially created, hermetically sealed groups of women: one must remain eternal silent victim while the other may have the sole privileges of subjectivity and heroic agency.

The text's silence about Ayah's story, moreover, has other ramifications. The rape of Ayah—absent and untold—occurs structurally at the center of the text, the point from which the narrative separates Lenny (in every way) from her erstwhile double. In fact, upon her disappearance, it shifts unexpectedly to a segment entitled “Ranna's Story.” Ranna, a Muslim village boy and Lenny's cook's great-grandson, arrives suddenly to give his harrowing account of his escape from the mass violence perpetrated upon his family by Sikhs. While perhaps the most graphic section of the novel, it is structurally set aside from the main narrative. The only part of the novel not told in Lenny's voice, this oddly juxtaposed, artistically awkward device bespeaks a desire perhaps to bring in the horror in some other way, but not to bring it too close. Ranna and his lost women relatives appear briefly only to vanish quickly from the main narrative, as if their only function was to substitute for what happened to Ayah, who substitutes for Lenny. Interestingly, Lenny acquires another “ayah,” who is a lower-class peasant Muslim woman in turn a victim from the other side. While the narrative's inclusion of Hamida here suggests an impulse to render equally the violence enacted upon Muslim women too, it does not attempt to grant her even the agency or centrality given to Ranna. Moreover, it solidifies the illusion that rape is a lower-class affair and serves to enhance the rehabilitatory generosity of the family that takes her in.

Again, it is important to note the valuable feminist border work underlying Sidhwa's attempt to empower and exhort a notoriously apathetic middle-class society of Pakistani women to forge cross-class, cross-ethnic gender alliances, and to undertake—at risk to themselves—the responsibility of helping less privileged women. Even though such an alliance is imagined in bourgeois terms, Cracking India urges action, of a kind, and prescribes a politically active role for its readership. However, it remains unconscious of the problematic ways in which that work remains insufficient, or conflicts with its narratival strategies and self-contradictory ideologies.

In her important essay “Life after Rape: Narrative, Rape and Feminism,” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan insists that, in addition to a “thematics of liberation, […] feminist texts of rape must also engage in textual strategies to counter narrative determinism” (73). She notes two features of narrative determinism that occur even in proto-feminist rape narratives such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa or E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. The first feature, she argues, is the replication of the centrality of the rape in the very structure of the narrative: “literary representations of rape have difficulty in avoiding the replication of the act in the very movement of the narrative” (76). “The moment of rape is made the center, virtually the exact structural center, […] so that the plots describe a graph of climax and anticlimax around that point” (74). Instead, focusing on survival and continued existence after rape may be a narratival and political mode of diminishing the power of rape to define subjecthood, because to continue to define a woman as a rape victim is to maintain the rape as definitive of her being. To center the narrative elsewhere is to disallow rape from being the single shaping force of the subject and of the narrative itself.

Second, Rajan explains the silence of even these narratives, and the ensuing absence both of the scene of rape and of the raped woman (via death or disappearance) as emanating from a conformity with the very system of cultural misogyny from which rape as an act of violence gains its power: “their reliance upon, and doubts about, the woman's ‘unsupported word’ about her ordeal are the symptoms of a deep underlying male fear that rape could be a female lie, or fiction” (75). Feminist texts, on the other hand, Rajan concludes, “counter narrative determinism” in several ways, including “representing the raped woman as one who becomes subject through rape rather than merely one subjected to its violation, […] structuring a post-rape narrative that traces her strategies of survival, [… and] counting the cost of rape […] in terms more complex than the extinction of female selfhood in death or silence” (76-77).

Rajan's argument is useful in helping us see how Sidhwa's narrative may also—despite its “thematics of liberation,” or feminist desire to indict sexual and political violence—end up reifying instead of undermining that cultural system by its unwitting choice of narratival structure and strategies. As Lenny describes the search for Ayah, the narrative turns to silence and unspeakability after rape, positioning the absent Ayah as no more than the victim, the one who must be recovered by the subject of the narrative, but who cannot be the subject herself. However, in this case, the silence and double disappearance of Ayah (after her abduction and after her recovery) are based not, I think, upon male fear of a woman's word.³⁵ Rather, that textual uninterest in Ayah's consciousness seems based upon a need to separate the Hindu servant-as-victim from the Parsee upper-class subject-as-rescuer/storyteller, foregrounding the latter at the expense of the former, to forestall the danger that the two may collapse into one.

It may be said in defense that Sidhwa's effort is precisely to mark the real silence that still haunts the violence of Partition and to represent the reality where such women were silent, and continue to be so. Even survivors' accounts such as those included by Butalia and Menon and Bhasin describe murder but do not acknowledge rape. Indeed, many rape victims may not wish to speak of the rape precisely as a strategy of survival, in order to put it behind them.³⁶ Furthermore, I certainly would not want to suggest that speech alone (and not silence) can be a form of agency or resistance. Nor am I arguing that it is incumbent upon a feminist novelist to represent rape in order to break the silence that shrouds it in shame, since that would produce the opposite problems of replicating the violence or sensationalizing its impact.

Granting this, however, I still have a couple of responses to this defense. First, we need to distinguish between the kinds of silence we are talking about and the various motivations for them: if silence about rape is a strategy of survival, or a decision not to replay the violence, it should command our respect; but if the silence is an acquiescence to the system that regards the event as a woman's humiliation, or if it results from a desire to foreground the rescuer at the expense of the victim, it might be called into question. Hence, the problem lies not in representing silence but in being the agent of silencing in the very mode of representation. One problem of silencing in Sidhwa's narrative is not that the Ayah fails to speak of what happened to her, but that the narrative disallows any entry into her mind or feelings or consciousness, or her construction as a sentient subject. Her fate after rape is to be found or to be packed off by other women, not to act but to be acted upon. There can be no “life after rape” or accession to subjecthood for Ayah in Sidhwa's text.

Second, surely the effort—or hope—of fiction or of visionary border work is not only mimetically to represent or correspond to reality, but also to construct and imagine alternatives or alternative modes of representation. As Said has cautioned in describing orientalism, the issue at stake is not one of verisimilitude or (mis)representation, of falseness or truth, but rather, of the complex relation between power and representation. “Orientalism is more […] valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than as [the] veridic discourse […] it claims to be” (Orientalism 6). Analogously, postcolonial representations too must consider their responsibilities in implicitly reaffirming or challenging the power structures that condition what they represent. In analyzing the reports of the “communal” crimes against women, Menon and Bhasin identify three specific features of the violence: “their brutality, their extreme sexual violence and their collective nature” (43). The collectivity of the violence suggests a cultural logic of precisely non-individuated, non-class differentiated vengeance visited upon women defined as the belongings of other men. However, in Sidhwa's narrative, the violence upon Ayah is singular, almost as if she were selected and separated especially from women of a higher class or other ethnicities. While this serves to individuate the victim, it also suggests that there is only one kind of over-determined lone victim, or, that certain others could only be agents of rescue. Instead, what would be the implications if Sidhwa's novel attended as much to the rapes of upper-class or Muslim women, or if it juxtaposed other narratives of differently situated women to explore the contrasts and imbrications of ethnic and class positioning? Perhaps it could then introduce a less self-exculpating and fatalist discourse and historical memory in order to re-think national and communal responsibilities. It might then also not provide its Muslim readers with the escape hatch of imagining the victim of political violence as after all only a servant and a Hindu.

As Lenny shadows Ayah's adventures earlier, by the end Ayah's violation becomes a shadow of Lenny's—but it remains an approximation from which the text retreats, for rape is always distanced by the uncrossable boundaries of multiple lines of difference. And thus, in a way, the text articulates another desire, a gladness at the difference that allows Ayah to be the attackable one, instead of Lenny or women from the circle of her family or friends, who must always be kept safe from the possibility of lower-class disrespect. As Lenny becomes the real subject, she casts both Ayah (reduced repeatedly to “eyes” and “diminished flesh” [272]) and her lover/betrayer into stereotyped roles: “When I think of Ayah I think she must get away from the monster who has killed her spirit and mutilated her ‘angel's’ voice” (276). Ayah becomes an inhabitant of Lahore's famed “Hira Mundi,” or “Diamond Market,” a euphemism for the same red light district dating back to Mughal times where Kipling's Lalun also resided. But unlike Lalun, Ayah becomes altogether the marginalized victim, not a border inhabitant with any agency. The ability to deploy one's in-between status is reserved for her savior, the storyteller and her family.

Moreover, the text also turns to the comfort of positioning lower-class men (of any ethnicity) as always and only sexually threatening figures—a potential rapist in every one. (Whereas ethnicity and class are used to separate those [women] yoked by gender, with gender and class difference there appears no need for ethnic differentiation.) Early in the narrative, it is made clear that men like Ice-Candy-Man could never be allowed within the precincts of bourgeois households. “Mother would have a fit! He's not the kind of fellow who's permitted inside, […] thuggish, […] shady, […] disreputable” (37). Of course, Ayah must meet him outside those clear boundaries, here briefly herself a boundary figure who travels between the inner sacrosanct domain of the respectable middle-class women and the outside world of “thuggish” men. Ironically, to delineate those lower-class men, Sidhwa resorts to the stigmatizations of nineteenth-century colonial discourse which produced the notion of “thuggee,” associated with bodily violence and theft. Not only is Ayah used as a figure of the lower-class and therefore rapable woman, but also, lower-class men are insistently and silently positioned as the collective sexual enemy, the implicit threat that cannot be permitted to materialize in any form other than towards Ayah.

The contrast between Kipling's representation of Lalun's borderhood as threateningly subversive (to colonial authority understood as selfhood) and Sidhwa's representation of Lenny's borderhood as empathetic but self-distancing (as a model for postcolonial selfhood) is telling: for us as critical readers, at the very least it disallows a priori political validation. Kipling's Lalun is unquestionably an orientalist, masculine projection and fabrication of feminine guile, and perhaps a mode of self-exculpation for lapses in colonial authority, but it reveals an uneasy acknowledgment of the potential of border work to which Sidhwa's Lenny and her narrative aspire. That her narrative becomes entangled in another problem is not to suggest that Kipling's account is unproblematic, but my concern is with the former, not the least because it is productive of different expectations.

As herself an advocate for women's rights in the increasingly tightening milieu of Pakistan, Sidhwa draws upon a certain variety of postcolonial nationalist feminism as a project for Cracking India.³⁷ First, writing in the context of a bedeviled postcolonial nation whose reactionary clergy have recently sought to oppose colonial heritage by imposing “Sharia” or so-called “Islamic” laws that legally seek to disenfranchise women, (particularly rural and lower-class urban women), Sidhwa attempts through her fiction to increase recognition of women's victimization by male rivalries and bids for political power.³⁸ She has said that her aim was to show that “women suffer the most from political upheavals,” that “victory is celebrated […] and vengeance is taken on a woman's body […] in [her] part of the world” (qtd. in Graeber 11). Second, in its very form of personal, autobiographical narration, the novel strives to substitute one dominant kind of historiography (masculinist, totalizing, exclusivist, (neo)colonial, impersonal, national) with an alternate one (partial, multiple, non-teleological, grounded in collective experience).

Third, the novel also implicitly addresses a recurrent question that has beleaguered postcolonial feminists: what modes “feminism” may adopt in specific postcolonial contexts, and how feminism may question or locate itself within a heavily gendered nationalism.³⁹ The novel exemplifies the restorative work performed by women of the Parsee community, border women who seek to heal the painful cracks in this partitioned Indian land-as-body. Deploying their ethnic border status, and, of course, their upper-class economic and social privilege, Lenny's mother and aunts construct a refuge for “fallen women” of all religious affiliations—peasant women or domestic servants raped or abducted in the aftermath of Partition—and try to restore them to their families or to find homes and work for those who, seen as shamed and “defiled,” cannot return.⁴⁰ Or, they smuggle petrol to help their Hindu and Sikh friends with cars cross “the Border” safely to India (254). It is such a Parsee collective that seeks and finally finds Lenny's Ayah—a collective force of matriarchal power embodied in Lenny's Godmother. “Over the years, Godmother has established a network of espionage with a reach of which even she is not aware. [… She] can move mountains from the paths of those she befriends, and erect mountainous barriers where she deems it necessary” (222-23). Godmother determinedly breaks many codes of decorum when she takes Lenny to visit Ayah in the red light district, and then extracts her from the hands of Ice-Candy-Man—by commanding a posse of armed men.

Thus the text suggests by analogy that its own postcolonial feminist work is that of both crossing boundaries and of occupying borders. It crosses the bounds of Pakistani fictive decorum and national discourse in settling both on a minority (Parsee) community and on women's and servant communities as sites for refracting and recasting history. As a Parsee Pakistani woman's writing contingent upon belonging/unbelonging it attempts to build a usefully skewed national identity and suggests new modes of creating trans-ethnic and trans-religious alliances. It thus upholds the power of border feminism (as emblematized by Parsee women) to redress the casualties of neo-colonial history.

Yet what is interesting about Sidhwa's version of postcolonial feminism is precisely the mix of contradictions that it evokes and the ambivalences it reveals. It also raises a problem for us as readers and teachers of such texts; namely, how an incautious prioritization of “otherness” may occlude the complex ways in which these writings too may participate in the questionable ideologies they seek to challenge. As a text that is now being taught not only in literature but also in history and women's studies courses in the Anglo-American academy, Cracking India is often appropriated as an authentic subaltern voice or as witness to trauma without recognition of its inadequacies. It might be more usefully taught if it could also be problematized for its discursive and political strategies, and historicized in relation to its goals and contexts versus ours. In building a nuanced reading, we might consider how (to use Raymond Williams's terms) promising but problematic “emergent” texts still bear the “residual” dominance of other systems (121-27). How are we critically to assess such fiction? How are we to account (in Rajan's apt phrase) for the “ways in which (feminist) resistances also enter into the processes by which structures of domination persist or renew themselves” (4-5)?

Critics such as Aijaz Ahmed have warned against the myopia of many celebrated third world writers to class difference and to their own socioeconomic privilege in representing a part as the whole (In Theory 73-94). While giving Sidhwa due credit for even broaching the taboo issue of rape, we must also recognize how her writing might be insufficient—how it will only allow the possibility of rape and prostitution when enacted upon “other” bodies. At best the possibility of sexual assault on “us” can only be hinted at—but then distanced and mediated through “their” bodies. How, in the act of drawing together “women,” are women divided into “us” and “them”? And how are men, both upper and lower class, rhetorically positioned by this feminist narrative?

While Sidhwa's narrative seeks to celebrate both border-crossing and border inhabitation, it is hampered by its own invisible boundaries, border troubles that seem to me concentrated in at least three areas. First, in locating the work of postcolonial feminism in terms of traditionally understood and clearly demarcated roles of healing and restoration, Sidhwa leaves intact and unquestioned the binarism that insists that men are agents of violence, politics, and history, while women are either victims, witnesses, or healers, bound within the limits of domesticity. The original title, Ice-Candy-Man, is more revealing, for its male eponymous hero, despite Lenny's central consciousness, remains the agent of violation, and perhaps, of the novel. (Cracking India ends not with Ayah or with Lenny but with Ice-Candy-Man, now romantically and guiltily devoted to his victim, sorry for his part in the madness, contriving pathetically to follow her across the border.) It is surely telling that in this long narrative, Ayah herself has no voice of agency or independence of purpose—her story is told by Lenny, as Lenny's story of her fall into knowledge.

In one scene, Sidhwa herself mourns the disappearance of “women” from the scene of postcolonial politics. When Lenny returns to her old playground, the Queen (Victoria's) garden, she finds a paradigmatic absence: “I cannot believe my eyes. The Queen is gone! The space between the marble canopy and the marble platform is empty. […] Bereft of her presence, the structure looks unwomaned. The garden scene has depressingly altered. Muslim families who added colour when scattered among the Hindus and Sikhs, now monopolize the garden, depriving it of colour. […] There are fewer women. More men” (249). The shift from British imperialism to Muslim nationalism cannot be regarded as altogether joyous when it seems also to have dictated a monopolistic takeover of the “playground” by men, and the elimination of “women,” either as ruling powers or as players in the field, irrespective of racial or class difference. Yet, despite this vital recognition, the imaginative boundaries of Sidhwa's postcolonial feminism cannot reconfigure this queen's garden beyond a trimming of its edges. Indeed, it remains surprisingly uncritical of the inequities and tensions already present in this hypothetically harmonious “garden.”

Hence this feminism actually remains quite Victorian (and colonial) in its understanding of gendered spheres, its essentialization of male violence, and its reassertion of class divisions. It sees lower-class men as an uncontainable, unanalyzable problem—as a collective rabid mob inherently prone to unreasoning violence—and the middle class as not in any way implicated in the problem. It remains oblivious to the socioeconomic circumstances and inequities that may in fact produce those tensions. Ice-Candy-Man's behavior is presented as unmotivated, inexplicable, and irrational. By contrast, Arundhati Roy's powerful account of child molestation in The God of Small Things, also artfully playing upon a child's perspective, does not excuse or explain away the motivations of the Lemon-Drink Orange-Drink Man, but it does offer a more complex understanding of the colonial histories and class resentments that structure his grotesque assault on an English-speaking affluent child.

Second, Sidhwa's continuous conflation of the political and the sexual produces another set of problems. That Lenny's awareness of the violent repercussions of political independence is equated with both her own arrival at sexual awareness and with Ayah's sexual violation suggests a troubling conceptualization of female sexual maturity as a fall into political knowledge and, furthermore, an equivalence between political victimization and sexual relations. Lenny's painful puberty, for instance, becomes a symbol for Pakistan's gory coming of age, and her understanding of rape is entirely coincident—and coterminous—with that of Pakistan's emergence as a new nation (252).⁴¹ Again, what wistfully nostalgic imagining of colonialism as protected chastity underlies this tropology? Why after all must political violence continue to be understood as sex, and vice-versa? What may be the unimagined consequences—for both—of liberating the two from each other? But this is not a boundary crossed by Sidhwa's writing. As it deplores the parochial forms of thinking that demand that political rivalries be enacted sexually on women's bodies, or that nations be imagined as rapable women, her narrative reifies these concepts and tropes in its own symbolic structure. Jenny Sharpe has shown how colonial rhetoric such as Mutiny narratives of rape cast native insurgency against colonial authority as a sexual threat to white women. Not only did this serve to justify repressive colonial counter-measures, but it also depoliticized subaltern revolt by representing it as sexual attraction to and violation of the colonizer's women. Analogously, in postcolonial discourse, if male/ethnic peasant or working-class protest is essentialized and seen consistently as exclusively sexual violence, then we also risk depoliticizing and dangerously misapprehending the complex forces that underlie such historical collective movements.

Finally, perhaps the most serious constraint to Sidhwa's border feminism is her narrative's invention of a national allegory of border crossing that also depends upon the reification of gender, ethnic, and class divisions.⁴² As national borders are drawn to define postcolonial nationhood, the Hindu Ayah becomes the embodiment of the border that is crossed by men of all sorts, the site of transgression itself. Where there was once no border, and traffic in either direction was unquestioned, in this postlapsarian universe of postcoloniality, that very same body has now become a forbidden and thus transgressible border. When the history of the violent generation of Pakistan is mapped with such relentless literalism upon Ayah's ravaged body, we need to ask: what psychic needs demand that this national history be thus metaphorized (and deflected?) through this particular prism? What psycho-narratival needs demand that Ayah's body be cast as an allegory for India/Pakistan, or for Hinduism as a victim of Muslim nationhood? If the birth or death of a country must be figured as female violation, how can we read this replay of the colonial and neo-colonial nationalist metaphor of land as female body, victimized this time not by white oppressors, but by decolonized men who run amok in the deranging liberty of independence? Does this not run the danger of nostalgically fabricating colonial harmony and reaffirming the colonial prognostication that decolonization could only prove disastrous?

One danger of gendered national allegories is that they work in a circular fashion: drawing on culturally available gender prescriptions (of both masculinity and femininity) upon which to construct nationhood, they then reinforce those norms. As the editors of the collection Nationalism and Sexualities assert, the colonial and neocolonial “trope of the nation-as-woman […] depends for its representational efficacy on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful, daughterly or maternal” (Parker et al 6). The “Mother India” trope has been used in Indian nationalist rhetoric also to interpellate men: to marshal civic-as-filial loyalty, and to cast secessionist (Pakistani) nationalism as matricidal betrayal. Examining the rhetoric of one newspaper, Butalia indicts the equation of “manhood and nationalism” and the imagined “purity of Mother India, the motherland which gave birth to the Hindu race,” offering a striking example: “One issue of the Organizer (August 14, 1947) [Pakistan's Independence Day] had a front page illustration of Mother India, the map of the country, with a woman lying on it, one limb cut off and severed with Nehru holding the bloody knife” (141). When Sidhwa re-uses this trope of India as ravaged body subject to (incestuous?) male violence, she ends up reaffirming this logic which, incidentally, also serves to idealize motherhood as a prescriptive norm of femininity for female citizens.

Another problem, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, is that “when the woman's body is used only as a metaphor for a nation (or anything else) feminists correctly object to the effacement of the materiality of that body” (In Other Worlds 257). The problem is not with allegory in itself; but with the implications of the particular allegory used. For one thing, the allegory of Ayah as national body is not sustained throughout the novel, nor is it supported by a corresponding political vision (as in Midnight's Children or Shame) or empathy for the Hindu nation. More importantly, however, Sidhwa's allegory of Ayah replicates without questioning another aspect of the symbolic violence it deplores. Menon and Bhasin describe and analyze this as follows:

The range of sexual violence […]—stripping; parading naked; mutilating, and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping of course; killing foetuses—is shocking not only for its savagery, but for what it tells us about women as objects in male constructions of their own honour. […] Tattooing and branding the body with “Pakistan, Zindabad!” or “Hindustan, Zindabad!” [or symbols like the crescent moon or trident] not only mark the woman for life, they never allow her (or her family and community) the possibility of forgetting her humiliation. [… T]hey became the respective countries, indelibly imprinted by the Other.

(43-44)

The logic of such symbolic (and material) violence reduces women to the sites of reproduction upon which each side could target its desire both to vanquish and to eradicate the other. It positions women as objects of possession and vehicles of communication between men. And then it also allegorizes the nation as such a terrain. For Menon and Bhasin, “the trope-of-nation as woman further secures male-male arrangements and an all male history” (109). Sidhwa's well-intentioned replication of that symbolism seeks emotively to arouse moral indignation about violence against women, but in replaying the trope it then consolidates—instead of questioning—the gender assumptions of that symbolism.

Moreover, I would argue that such a selective national allegory has yet another function: it allows for what Huma Ibrahim has called “evasion” in partition literature. It reveals a narratival inability to recuperate a national and ethnic past too violent, shameful, and traumatic to be told except through the distancing of a child's censored vision, and the displacement of national history to a female body rendered multiply other. In turn, the Ayah's body becomes an allegorical figure (and indeed reduced to only a figure) for a nation that is brutalized and ravaged, in a narrative that seems unable to (re)cast that history in an alternate discourse.

Mohanty has made a powerful case against certain kinds of “reductivist Western feminist” constructions of “third world women” as a monolithic object of study. Importantly, she adds, this may equally pertain to middle- or upper-class African or Asian feminist scholars who study rural or working-class women. Such orientalist and neo-colonialist moves, she argues, ultimately build a self-enabling self-construction (as subject) at the expense of a conveniently constructed otherness (“Under” 51-80). By analogy, I suggest, Sidhwa's narrative unfortunately perpetrates across lines of class and national/ethnic difference what Mohanty reprehends in some feminist work across political lines. Just as the lower-class Hindu Ayah became a surrogate for the obsessive exploration of sexuality for an upper-class child so, as a figure, she also becomes the impassable boundary—the limit—for this narrative's self-positioning as border work. The triumphalism of the narrator's (and narrative's) position, which, after the rape, identifies with Godmother and not Ayah, may be a good example: “The long and diverse reach of Godmother's tentacular arm is clearly evident. She set an entire conglomerate in motion immediately after our visit and single-handedly engendered the social and moral climate of retribution and justice required to rehabilitate our fallen Ayah” (285; emphasis added).

Lenny's (and the text's) ambivalent borderwork stops short of crossing into Ayah's dangerous terrain: indeed, it presents itself as successful border-crosser only by requiring the figure of Ayah to become its marginal site, an icon of absolute other as victim, against which irrecoverable otherness Lenny's subalternity can define itself. It is an example of what Spivak has described as the “token subaltern” (who is taken to be a “spokesperson for subalternity”), but it is even more than that because it positions itself as the paradigm of the subaltern by capitalizing upon the subaltern for whom it purports to speak (“Subaltern” 292).⁴³ Sidhwa's narrative constructs upper-class Pakistani womanhood and its power to cross borderlines parasitically upon the status of Ayah as a scapegoat for its own anxieties and guilt. It fabricates a solidarity of gender that in fact quite simply relies upon class and ethnic difference to tell the story of the otherwise unspeakable, the—otherwise—unthinkable.

The young Lenny's participant observer's complicity in betraying Ayah quite literally then is no minor detail in her story. Tricked by Ice-Candy-Man, she gives away Ayah's hiding place to the waiting crowd of men, for her guilt mirrors the text's repressed complicity in the traitorous use it makes of Ayah. While Lenny's complicity is acknowledged within the story at the level of plot, that complicity is not acknowledged by the text as a mirror of its own strategies at the levels of narrative strategies or representation. In order to construct itself as a narrative of the relief-giving powers of border-inhabitation, this narrative seems to need to push figures like Ayah beyond its own borders. Quite literally, there is no recuperation for Ayah within the bounds of Sidhwa's text—or her Pakistan; the only solution to the ruptures in and of this narrative is to convey Ayah across the border into India—to a hypothesized other space, to a supposed safety beyond. In a grotesque parody of Anzaldua's words, Ayah indeed becomes a “crossroads,” but hers is not a narrative of survival: it is a casualty of the self-positioning as feminist of Sidhwa's narrator/narrative, that seeks to cross borders without considering the other border lines it draws. It may be well to recall then Diana Fuss's caution in another context: the “delimiting of boundaries […] becomes a problem when the central category of difference under consideration blinds itself to other modes of difference and implicitly delegitimates them” (116).

It is in this sense that the ayah's rape becomes an alibi—a misleading distraction from, and a clue for—the text's own guilt at the self-promoting use of the very figure whose victimization at the hands of male violence it decries. The production of an alibi (as proof of innocence) presupposes accusation in a context of suspicion. Yet often the strongest alibi is the best cover-up, a declaration of innocence precisely as an act of self-exculpation. I use the term “alibi” as such an act of covering up—as a form of substitution and a deflection of responsibility. By producing an excess of outrage over the rape of the Ayah, the psychic mechanism of this text deflects attention from the strategies by which it in fact is also exploitative. Like the most unexpected culprits in detective stories, who as narrators serve as implicit guarantors of innocence, the feminist impulse of Cracking India presumes its own innocence as it looks about for others to blame. But the very act of seeking elsewhere and focusing attention on one kind of outrage becomes the alibi that obstructs the discovery of its own collusion, its own private satisfaction at being exempt.

If all representation brings with it the politics of violation, it may well be asked, what, if any, is the solution? In the postmodern era, we have learned that there is no unburdened or unmediated representation, but that there are degrees of difference. The intrusiveness of representation may be mitigated by a foregrounding of the problems of that representation, and by an insistence on a responsible and self-aware self-positioning. Anthropologists following James Clifford have come to recognize that if one must be a participant observer, one could at least examine the forms of one's participation and effects on what one “observes.” As Spivak concludes: “finding the subaltern is not so hard, but actually entering into a responsibility structure with the subaltern with responses flowing both ways: learning to learn without this quick-fix frenzy of doing good with an implicit assumption of cultural supremacy which is legitimized by unexamined romanticism, that's the hard part” (“Subaltern” 293). Aware of living in and writing about an ethnically and “class-structured society,” Sidhwa manifests still a certain oblivion to her own position within it. In an interview with Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock she has announced that she is “on the borderline of a few cultures [… and] that […] gives [her] a certain objectivity” (214), while Rushdie, by not living in Pakistan, has “Britishized biases” (216-17). The border feminism of Cracking India seems equally unselfconscious of its own positionality and desires as it demarcates the violation of Ayah as exclusively the province of a rabid lower class maleness. It fails to acknowledge its own complicated fascination for and repudiation of that figure—the very figure that it seeks to ally itself with but needs to differentiate from. As such, this contradictory text reveals both its good intentions and its myopias, its aspirations and its insufficiencies: as a border worker, it depends upon the use of a figure that finally becomes its own site of limitation and occasions its greatest troubles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An early version of this essay was delivered as a conference paper at the MLA in Toronto, 1997. I would like to thank my audience there and the friends and colleagues who have offered comments at various stages of the manuscript: Margery Sabin, Helen Elam, Randy Craig, Michael Gorra, Josna Rege, Sadia Abbas, Kevin Rozario, and the anonymous readers of MFS without whose insightful and incisive questions this would have been a much lesser piece.

Notes

1. For an analogous reading of this tale, see also Rushdie's essay “Kipling” in Imaginary Homelands.

2. A glance at the titles of some recent notable examples across a range of fields is illuminating: Mae Henderson, ed., Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies; Homi Bhabha, ed., “Front/Lines/Border/Posts,” Special Issue of Critical Inquiry; Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds., Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies; John C. Welchman, ed., Rethinking Borders; Henry Giroux, Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies; Hector Calderon and José David Saldivar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology; Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text; Martine Reid, ed. Boundaries: Writing and Drawing. Yale French Studies; Maggie Humm, Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers; Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture; Margaret Higonnet, Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature; and a somewhat earlier piece, Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines.”

3. Given that “feminism,” in the contexts of both the Anglo-American academy and the “third world,” is itself a contested term, I draw upon Chandra Mohanty's useful definition of an “imagined community,” where despite differences there is a non-essentialist commitment to “the way we think about race, class and gender—the political links we choose to make among and between struggles” (“Cartographies” 4). I also use the term “third world” as Mohanty does (while cognizant of its problems) to designate not a unitary group but a “political constituency” (7). Its historic connotations as politically “non-aligned” to first or second worlds also ties in well with the sense of a third or alternative space that marks the border zone.

4. This is to be distinguished, she insists, from the often essentialist appropriation of the middle voice as a feminine voice in some French feminist approaches. See also Maggie Humm on the various strategies of border crossing by women writers.

5. For two recent examples of excellent analyses that work against this tendency, see Grewal and Caplan, and Ghosh and Bose.

6. Jussawalla's introduction reads: “Crossing borders both literal and metaphoric has become the condition of postmodernity and of postcoloniality” (vi). Papers (such as Gravely-Novello in the same issue) that find border-crossing “dangerous” do so on the grounds that the border-crossing is either fatal, or does not change the subject's marginality because it fails to produce a home in the new space entered. For an astute critique of Bharati Mukherjee's Indian-American immigrant fiction, and her uncritical celebration of the Indian immigrant's “crossing” into the refuge of American as modern space, see Koshy.

7. However, even JanMohamed, in delineating the “specular border intellectual,” notes the “pleasure of border-crossing and transgression” (114; emphasis added).

8. Edward Said reminds us of the “perilous territory of not-belonging […] of refugees and displaced persons” (“Mind” 51). Even Homi Bhabha acknowledges the difficult work involved in constructing hybridity, which requires continuing negotiations with shifting boundaries, and the construction of the “unhomely,” the defamiliarizing, unsettling, and shifting border spaces created by such artists as Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer (Location 9). Aijaz Ahmad, however, writes more scathingly: “History does not consist of perpetual migration. […] Most migrants tend to be poor and experience displacement not as cultural plenitude but as torment” (“Politics” 289).

9. For an illuminating discussion of this category see Merewether.

10. This would suggest not a biological or racial category, but a location that would include, for example, third world scholars in the Anglo-American academy.

11. Ahmad's essay on Rushdie's Shame is an important exception (In Theory).

12. It would be well to recall Sara Suleri's timely warning against the dangerous “iconicity” often granted in the western academy to the combination of “postcolonial” and “woman” (“Woman” 758).

13. In the jubilant celebrations of India's fiftieth anniversary of independence, such publications as the special issue of The New Yorker (June 23 & 30, 1997) on Indian-English writers did not include even one article by a Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan writer (thus uncritically conflating British and modern India).

14. This does not include of course the work of Pakistani women journalists or scholars, or of the women writing in Urdu or other Pakistani languages. Notably, one would add Sara Suleri, who is better known for her critical work and for her memoir, Meatless Days. As Sidhwa herself has documented, “we don't have a strong publishing industry in Pakistan, and it's almost non-existent where English fiction is concerned” (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 215-16). Sidhwa and Suleri are also the only two Pakistani writers to be included by Rushdie and West in their recent anthology on Indian English writers in celebration of fifty years of independence. (Though it is interesting that the extract chosen from Sidhwa's Cracking India is the only segment not narrated by the female child-narrator—it concerns the horrific testimony of the rape and massacre of his family by a village boy. Yet it remains a rather ironically telling choice considering that the novel is emphatically concerned with focusing on the neglected experiences of women!) Some new British-Pakistani women writers beginning to publish now include Mona Alvi, who has two collections of poetry and a memoir on her life in and between Pakistan and Britain, and Rukhsana Ahmad, who has just published her novel The Hope Chest. Oxford University Press in Pakistan has also just published a new anthology edited by Muneeza Shamsie that includes earlier, lesser-known writers as well as more recent ones.

15. For a brief contextualization of Sidhwa's work within Parsee tradition, and an account of the Parsees' historic migration from Persia to India, see Jussawalla, “Navjote.” This increasingly fragmented diasporic community is now mainly located in Bombay, Karachi, and Lahore, and in various metropolitan centers in Britain and North America. See also Sidhwa's somewhat self-ironic comic version of the community's originary tale of migration from Persia and assimilation into India, as the parable of a “teaspoon of sugar” (the minority) that would melt into and “sweeten […] a glass of milk” (the majority) (Cracking 47-49).

16. Sidhwa has described the initial difficulties of writing as a Pakistani woman expected to prioritize her children and coffee parties (Dhawan and Kapadia 27-34). Yet she still has had the benefits of belonging to a middle-class and a Parsee community unusual for its commitment to equal education and social activism.

17. Pakistan was founded upon a perhaps contradictory secular ideal—although demanding a separate country for Muslims, the original founders imagined a secular legal and constitutional system, civic equality, and religious liberty for all. Pakistan's flag symbolizes this original ideal: a large green space with star and crescent for Muslims, coexisting with a smaller white space for non-Muslims. It was only later that Pakistan was declared an “Islamic” state, and discriminatory practices towards non-Muslim “minorities” instituted.

18. The Bride is more uneven but similar to Cracking India in that it also attempts to address the debilitating effects of Partition on a female child and is marred by its unselfconscious attempts to represent a lower-class and ethnically alien figure. It is perhaps yet more problematic for its orientalizing representations of what it terms “tribal” culture. I say this not because I subscribe to any notions of “authenticity,” or to ethnic belonging as endowing some “rights” of representation (for example, the territorialism that insists that only a member can write about a group), but rather because it presumes to represent to western readers a remote ethnic group via a primitivist and denigratory discourse based solely upon an authority of cultural proximity. Thus the tribals are atavistic and brutal, all their women are oppressed, and escape lies in the dichotomized civilizing urban space. While such condemnation may arise from a laudable desire to change gender politics, the novel still re-inscribes colonial rhetoric and constructs a bourgeois nationalist discourse that prescribes a norm for those who do not fit.

19. Sidhwa wrote this novel while she held the prestigious Bunting Fellowship at Harvard (1987). Since then, she has taught at Columbia University, the University of Houston, and Mount Holyoke College. Attention to Sidhwa's work is beginning to grow, though with the exception of the collection by Dhawan and Kapadia, there is little published criticism of her work. For two of her more accessible published interviews, see Montenegro, and Jussawalla and Dasenbrock.

20. See Wolpert 346 and 348 and Menon and Bhasin 35. For a detailed historical account, see also Butalia.

21. In English, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) remains the most important precursor. See also Menon and Bhasin (recently published oral narratives), Bhalla, and Cowasjee and Duggal (selected stories in translation). For recent scholarship, see also the second special issue (forthcoming) of the new postcolonial journal, Interventions (Menon).

22. Urvashi Butalia describes the Boundary Commission, chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a new arrival from England, who was given only five weeks to demarcate the boundaries without further research or familiarity with the histories or issues (63-66).

23. See Menon and Bhasin 65-130 and Butalia 134-38 and 187-220.

24. Sidhwa suffered from polio as a child and could not attend school until she was fourteen (Graeber). She also witnessed much of the carnage of Partition—fires, riots, bodies spilling out of gunnysacks—that she describes via Lenny (Montenegro 518)

25. The translation of “Ayah” as “nanny” is of course inadequate, since it does not imply the cultural equivalence of authority, discipline, or privilege associated with a British or American nanny. An ayah is very much a servant and a drudge—poor, illiterate, homeless, with no rights or recourse to any higher court of appeal, and vulnerable to all forms of abuse, sexual or otherwise. In reality she would sleep on the floor in the children's room, attend to all their needs, be clothed in cast-offs, and have little time of her own. The ayah's contrast with such a picture in Sidhwa's novel only highlights the degree to which she is romanticized and exoticized in her narrative.

26. She is named on a telling occasion: when she draws her upper-class mistress's attention to a physically abused servant child in the family compound (20-21)—that is, when she herself functions as a mediating agent of rescue for another victim.

27. There is a male Hindu gardener, who converts to Islam and is circumcised (172).

28. Interestingly, Deepa Mehta's 1999 film Earth, based upon the novel, omits this dimension of the novel—suggesting that the politics of the film resist the self-aggrandizement of this middle-class womanhood.

29. By contrast, we may compare the Indian Parsee writer Rohinton Mistry's fiction, particularly A Fine Balance (1996), which takes a very different tactic: it interweaves stories of Parsees of different class backgrounds with those of “Chamaars”—an untouchable caste—insistently to refocus attention on the reintegration of all as citizens of that nation. This may in each case be related to different national cultural discourses and imperatives: Pakistan's ethno-phobic religio-political conservatism versus India's secularism and much stronger leftist political traditions. My thanks to Sadia Abbas for suggesting this difference.

30. Later, Lenny's doctor belligerently declares that polio was introduced to India by the British—as if the ailment that assails Lenny's childhood were colonialism itself (25).

31. This officiousness can be read as analogous to colonial attempts at “rescue” that infantilized “native” women, such as in the controversial abolishment of sati in 1832.

32. By contrast, in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the position of victim is seen as much more complex, complicit, and self-disabling. When Saladin Chamcha metamorphoses into a devilish horned satyr, emblematic of an immigrant's internalized self-image upon encounter with British racism, his friend remarks: “Ideologically, I refuse to accept the position of victim. Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes” (253).

33. Mehta's film makes the stunning choice of ending at this point—making this the climactic conclusion of Lenny's story—emphasizing the absence that will permanently mark her life, and refusing to tell the subsequent tale of the Parsi women's efforts to recover her.

34. The rape of upper-class or high-caste women is by no means unknown in South Asian literature, particularly in contemporary women's writing—witness Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain (1977), which concludes with the brutal rape and murder of lla Das by the villager whose young daughter's arranged marriage to a rich dotard she is trying to prevent. Even there, however, the raped woman is an old, shrunken, comic figure, who is not allowed to survive to tell her story—and is thus differentiated from the central, dignified female character. However, that text at least is more self-knowing in its incorporation of the possible punishments of heroic intervention.

35. Paradoxically, in a South Asian context, an abducted woman is automatically dishonored: the burden is not on her to prove rape, but if anything, to disprove it, since she is automatically assumed to have lost her chastity.

36. My thanks to Josna Rege and Sadia Abbas for raising these tricky problems, and for forcing me to think them through to clarify my argument.

37. Interestingly, on a number of occasions Sidhwa has denied affiliation with feminist causes. She did not join the Pakistani group Women's Action Forum because of their attention-drawing methods of protest: “They burn their veils or shout on the road,” she explained (Montenegro 40-41). She has also said that she prefers to have her gender “buried” and “gender does not come into [her writing] in a very big way” (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 221). However, she has also claimed that many of her novels, in particular The Bride and Cracking India, are concerned with protesting women's oppression, and she has herself been read as feminist on many counts (Dhawan and Kapadia 176-86).

38. For recent discussions of the Sharia in Pakistan and the discriminatory effects particularly on lower-class women, see Suleri (“Woman”) and Jahangir and Jilani.

39. See, for instance, Peterson, or McClintock.

40. It should be noted, of course, that not all Parsees are middle class, though Sidhwa's narrative only describes affluent families.

41. Like Saleem Sinai's midnight birth in Rushdie's Midnight Children, Lenny's birthday and sexual awakening coincides with Pakistan's birth (140-44).

42. It would be well to invoke Ahmad's critique of Fredric Jameson's statement that all “third world” texts are to be read as “national allegories” (“Jameson's”). Clearly, while all third world texts are not to be read as such, many third world texts, as I think Ahmad would agree, particularly those made available in the “first world,” published and popularized by western publishing circuits (possibly as a materialization of their own desire for certain kinds of third world texts), often present themselves precisely as national allegories. Of these Sidhwa's is evidently one, as suggested by the recent republication and retitling of her novel in the U.S.

43. In this interview, discussing the ways in which her essay “The Subaltern Cannot Speak” has been misapprehended, Spivak explains that the “subaltern who cannot speak” refers to the one who cannot be heard even when she does speak (“Subaltern” 292).

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

———. “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3-25.

———. “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality.” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Padmini Mongia. New York: Edward Arnold, 1996. 276-93.

Alvi, Mona. The Country at My Shoulder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

———. A Bowl of Warm Air. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

Best, Sue. “Response” to Beatriz Colomina: “Battle Lines.” Welchman 65-71.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

———, ed. “Front/Lines/Border/Posts.” Spec. issue of Critical Inquiry 23:4 (1997): 431-720.

Bhalla, Alok, ed. Stories about the Partition of India. New Delhi: Indus, 1994.

Brennan, Tim. “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities.” Race and Class 31.1 (1989): 1-19.

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1998.

Calderon, Hector, and José David Saldivar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

———. “Where Have all the Natives Gone?” Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 1-26.

Cowasjee, Saros, and K. S. Duggal, eds. Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition of India. New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors, 1995.

Dhawan, R. K., and Novy Kapadia, eds. The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. “Living On: Border Lines.” Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller. New York: Seabury Press, 1979.

Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Ghosh, Bishnupriya, and Brinda Bose, eds. Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women's Literature and Film. New York: Garland, 1997.

Giroux, Henry. Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Graeber, Laurel. New York Times Book Review Oct. 1991: 11.

Gravely-Novello, Lori. “Dangerous Crossings in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man (Cracking India) and An American Brat.” South Asian Review 18.15 (1994): 81-93.

Greenblatt, Stephen, and Giles Gunn, eds. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: MLA, 1992.

Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Caplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

Heidegger, Martin. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Trans. Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Henderson, Mae, ed. Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Hicks, Emily. Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Higonnet, Margaret. Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.

Humm, Maggie. Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers. New York: Manchester UP/St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Interventionist Agendas: Postcolonial Challenges to Literary History.” Keynote Address, Seventh Annual British Postcolonial and Commonwealth Studies Conference. University of South Georgia. Statesboro, Georgia. 8 May 1998.

Ibrahim, Huma. “The Troubled Past: Literature of Severing and the Viewer/Viewed Dialectic.” Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996.

Jahangir, Asma, and Hina Jilani. The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction? Lahore: Rhotas Books, 1990.

JanMohamed, Abdul. “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness as Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual.” Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Ed. Michael Sprinker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 96-120.

Jussawalla, Feroza. “Navjote Ceremonies: The Location of Bapsi Sidhwa's Culture.” Dhawan and Kapadia 80-87.

———, ed. Crossing Borders/Finding Homes. Spec. issue of South Asian Review: A Publication of the South Asian Literary Association 18.15 (1994): 1-104.

———, and Reed Way Dasenbrock, eds. Interviews with Writers of the Post Colonial World. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992.

Kipling, Rudyard. “On the City Wall.” 1888. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Ed. Louis Cornell. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Koshy, Susan. “Under Other Skies”: Writing Gender, Nation and Diaspora. Unpublished dissertation, UCLA, 1992. 33-93.

McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Menon, Ritu, ed. The Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent. Spec. issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1.2 (1999): 156-330.

———, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998.

Merewether, Charles. “Zones of Marked Instability: Women and the Space of Emergence.” Welchman 101-25.

Minh-ha, Trinh. “An Acoustic Journey.” Welchman 1-17.

———. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.” Mohanty et al 1-47.

———. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Mohanty et al 51-80.

———, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Montenegro, David. “Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa.” Massachusetts Review 31 (Winter 1990): 513-33.

Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Peterson, Kirsten Holst. “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge, 1995. 251-53.

Poovey, Mary. “Feminism and Deconstruction.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (1988): 51-65.

Rajan, Sunder Rajeswari. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Reid, Martine, ed. Boundaries: Writing and Drawing. Spec. issue of Yale French Studies 84. 1-3 (1994): 1-261.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. New York: Penguin, 1991.

———. The Satanic Verses. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Rushdie, Salman, and Elizabeth West, eds. Mirrorwork: The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-1997. London: Vintage, 1997.

Said, Edward. “Mind in Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile.” Harper's 269 (1984): 49-55.

———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Sedgwick, Eve K. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Shamsie, Muneeza. A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English. Karachi: Oxford UP, 1997.

Sharpe, Jenny. “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency.” Genders 10 (1991): 25-46.

Sidhwa, Bapsi. An American Brat. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1993.

———. The Bride. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.

———. Cracking India. Minneapolis: Milkweed/Heinemann, 1989.

———. The Crow Eaters. 1978. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.

———. Ice-Candy-Man. London: Penguin, 1988.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313.

———. “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. 241-68.

———. “Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors.” The Spivak Reader. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean. New York: Routledge, 1996. 287-308.

Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989.

———. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.

———. “Woman Skin Deep.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 756-69.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 1969. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Welchman, John C., ed. Rethinking Borders. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.