Silence and Mediation: Narrative Form in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India

Abstract

This essay considers the role of narrative silence in postcolonial literature, particularly the literary techniques of Bapsi Sidhwa in Cracking India. Engaging with historiographical debates on how we represent marginalized groups, this article argues that Sidhwa’s careful narrative structure impels readers to engage with subaltern figures to better understand the violence women experienced during the Partition. While some scholars have criticized Sidhwa, suggesting she (a Parsi woman) appropriates the suffering of Hindu women during the Partition, I suggest that Sidhwa uses multiple narrators and timeframes to raise a historical consciousness about gaps in historical records, allowing readers to identify with Hindu women while at the same time recognizing “loss as loss” within the first instance – to borrow a phrase from Jill Didur. In other words, this article builds on narratologists such as Paul Ricoeur to demonstrate that Sidhwa destabilizes overarching historical narratives that claim to stand-in for those who cannot speak for themselves. Communicating the ways literature may supplement the historical record of the Partition, Sidhwa’s Cracking India encourages a dynamic and heterogeneous method for better representing the past.

Keywords:

• Partition literature
• Bapsi Sidhwa
• Cracking India
• subaltern
• historiography

Notes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Das’s Critical Events (1996). “In the process, it is not so much that new anthropological objects are created as that old concepts, being asked to inhabit unfamiliar spaces, acquire a new kind of life” (1). In particular, Chapter Three of Das’s work centers on the sexual and reproductive violence to which women were subjected during Partition – a topic often omitted from other major works on the binational event up until that point.

2 Sidhwa’s novel was originally published as Ice Candy Man in 1988 in the UK. It was published in the US as Cracking India in 1991, and was released in India in 1992. Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film Earth (or Earth 1947) is also based on Sidhwa’s novel.

3 “Emplotment” is deliberately used here to refer to the actual assembly of events into a narrative. It has a temporal quality, implying movement and flow, which is sometimes lost when using the word “plot” (as some may simply read this as a story’s content).

4 This list of historians and anthropologists is largely taken from Basu’s research. Historicizing Cracking India in this way is particularly useful when attempting to place the work in discourses on subaltern studies and historiography, fields which have certainly changed over the past 20–30 years. In fact, Hai’s essay is largely a pedagogical critique that examines the ways the novel is taught, drawing attention to some of the pitfalls teachers might make if they do not consider the context of the writing.

5 Singh aptly demonstrates the ways Parsees are often described as the “bum-lickers of the British” (Singh 2008, 30), including the ways they are sometimes Anglicized because of their marginal status.

6 Singh takes issue with the Anglicization of Parsee communities in particular, essentially arguing that some critics have overlooked Lenny’s marginal position because she is hybrid, neither Hindu nor Muslim (nor Sikh). Partition was an event that affected more than just these dominant groups, one reason there may be issues with Basu’s comparisons between Lenny and her mother to Victorian women and sexuality (Basu 2007, 14). The central narrator should not necessarily be read as a British or Anglicized voice, as this elides cultural context and engages with a history of Parsee marginalization.

7 See Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions: “the liminal subject does not stand with respect to others in the limen as in a hierarchy” (Lugones 2003, 61). Lugones builds on the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner to assert that “the limen is understood as a social state; it contains both the multiplicity of the self and the possibility of structural critique” (Lugones 2003, 61).

8 Technically, Spivak uses the infinitive darstellen.

9 See Bahri (1999, 232).

10 Here, Ricoeur borrows from Western thinkers such as Augustine and Heidegger. Augustine, working in the Christian tradition, identifies an eternal (“cosmological”) aspect of time, while Heidegger’s work examines Being-within-Time(ness) (“phenomenological”). For Ricoeur, narrative has the ability to effectively meld and represent the human experience of time, which is often located at the intersection of both cosmological and phenomenological time.

11 This quote suggests there is a clear definition of what is and what is not an adult voice or an “adult consciousness” – a concept that is itself largely arbitrary. While aspects of Sidhwa’s life may lead certain readers to assume to text is an autobiography, this overlooks the very nature of fiction. Even the term roman à clef does not seem to fully capture several of the metafictive moments in the text.

12 The text is actually referred to as “a novel” on the cover and the title page by the US publisher, Milkweed. For the purposes of this essay, it is important to read Cracking India as a novel rather than an autobiography, precisely when it comes to issues of representation. The play with time, intertextuality, and even the accuracy of the text can be interpreted in drastically different ways depending on whether or not the book is read as fictional, as a simulacrum of the historical record rather than part of the record itself.

13 Naturally, Wilson is specifically referring to the work of Homi Bhabha. For the purposes and scope of this paper, however, I do not address his writing when referring to hybridity, though it is certainly relevant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Williams

Sebastian Williams is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University who researches twentieth-century literature and culture. He has published primarily on disability in popular culture and topics in the medical humanities, with a special focus on ethics, though he also has an interest in twentieth-century postcolonial fiction. Sebastian is also an editorial assistant for Shofar, a peer-reviewed journal in Jewish studies, and he teaches introductory literature and composition courses at Purdue.