Bodies as Borderwork: From Cartographic Distance to Cosmopolitan Concern in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Abstract

The child protagonists Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man (1988) and the unnamed child in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) witness the immediate and longue duree losses and violence of Partition on the Indian subcontinent. In the face of distances constructed by national divisions and personal estrangements, the children attempt to breach that most reductive of borders—the corporeal—through restorative imagination and empathy rather than violence. This paper will locate the body as a border and identify key moments where the child narrators in Ice-Candy-Man and The Shadow Lines use imagination and empathy to overcome limited and imposed national identity interpellations through transnational cosmopolitan outreach.