Cracked Identities
In Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Cracking India, the reader encounters a richly textured, multicultural society suddenly in flux. Within three months, seven million Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs find themselves uprooted in “the largest and most terrible exchange of population known to history.” But the 1947 partition made Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs each other's enemies, overnight. Subsequently, “one man's religion became another man's poison,” and religious affiliations and national identity emerge as crucial points of conflict in the novel.
Memories of partition surface in all three of Sidhwa's novels, but are nowhere as penetrating and poignantly recalled as in Cracking India. The narrator, Lenny, a polio-stricken Parsee, finds that she has become a “Pakistani in a snap. Just like that.” Lenny has seen the aspirations, trauma, and travail of the Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh men, women, and children with whom she grew up. She has had many teachers—her extended family: mother, father, aunt, Godmother; and cousin Adi; her servants; and her neighbors. When Lenny's world suddenly cracks, friends become enemies as the new nationalism, mingled with a vicious fanaticism, takes its toll on well-established human relationships. Lenny's episodic narrative of the local gossip, bizarre and brutal killings of friends, the kidnapping and rape of Shanta Ayah (her beloved nanny), the cruel betrayal by Shanta's admirer Ice-candy man, and the murder of Shanta's lover, Masseur, challenge the reader to sort out the contradictions and confusion that now permeate the eight-year-old child's fractured world.
When Masseur's body is found in a gunnysack, Ayah is haunted by his memory; she stops receiving visitors, trusts no one, and ignores the amorous advances of Ice-candy man. Lenny is shocked and shaken when an angry Muslim mob of looters enter her home. She recognizes Ice-candy man in this crowd of fanatics. He promises not to harm Ayah, but then betrays Lenny's trust by kidnapping Ayah.
While Lenny and her family remain in Pakistan, high-caste Brahmins move across the border to live in peaceful Indian communities. On the other hand, in order to survive the Muslim onslaught, Lenny's servant friends, the Untouchable sweeper Moti and his daughter Papoo, choose to remain in Pakistan because low-caste Hindus would not be better off in India. However, Moti does become a Christian and Hari the gardener converts to Islam. Even kidnapped Ayah Shanta has to take on a new Muslim name.
Against this background of social stigmas emanating from caste, creed, and cultural differences, the novel depicts a minority community's struggle for existence and its efforts to maintain its identity. Lenny and family are Parsees—the smallest minority in Pakistan. Although Lenny's family is proud of its Parsee heritage and Zoroastrian traditions, they learn to accommodate themselves to new norms in order to survive. Parsees tell each other, “We have to be extra wary or we'll be nowhere. … We must tread carefully … we must hunt with the hounds and run with the hare.” Thus, despite the seeming incongruity, Parsees observe the Jashans prayer ceremony to celebrate the British victory at the end of World War II. Lenny folds her hands in prayer and recites the 101 names of God in the ancient Avastan language of the Parsees when she anguishes over the secret missions of her mother and aunt; Mother prepares on Fridays to invoke the help of “great Trouble Eaters, the angels Mushkail Assan and Behram Yazd” as she smuggles rationed petrol to enable Sikh and Hindu friends to run away. Lenny's extended family is proud of its Parsee heritage, and Sidhwa designs family dialogues to enlighten the reader about the Zoroastrian faith and its rituals.
Sidhwa is a feminist and a realist. One sees in her women characters the strength of passion, the tenderness of love, and the courage of one's convictions. They struggle to overcome the hurts of time and escape the grip of a fate in whose hands they are often mere puppets—“polio stricken” Lenny, “widowed” Electric Aunt, “childless” Godmother, “fallen” Ayah, and “child bride” Papoo. But cracked identities and broken hearts are not condemned. Sidhwa's women overcome great odds, and they are not “bad” because they have been raped, widowed, abandoned, handicapped, or sterile.
Although Sidhwa's description of the partition experience is intensely emotional, the novel is not without flaws. Lenny is less than convincing when she mouths adult perceptions, especially about British politics. Some readers may find that Sidhwa tends occasionally to pander to Western tastes, or reinforces communal stereotypes and biases while seeking to inject relief via farcical scenes replete with sexual imagery, bathroom humor, and profanity. Nevertheless, Sidhwa's novel provides a fascinating cross-cultural vignette of how broken lives triumph when the past is forgiven, even if fate cannot be undone.
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