Feminism and the female body in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels: The Pakistani bride and Cracking India

Feminism and the female body in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels: The Pakistani bride and Cracking India

Bapsi Sidhwa who is an award winning Pakistani Novelist is also known for her social activism has come to fore in the current decade with an earnest concern for women's issues, especially of Indian subcontinent. She makes an attempt to capture and turn our attention towards the female suffering against patriarchy and centuries old customs and conventions. Though her fictional canvas ranges from issues of traditional concerns to contemporary challenges, her course examine many controversial and dialectical issues from pre-independent India to the great partition of 1947 and its repercussion. Many of her Novels have been adapted to screen versions which have turned out to be marvelous success and a milestone in the genre of serious cinema. The novel and film "water" (2006) is the representative of her clinical impartiality and biased social concern. One is stimulated to appreciate the density of gendered power relations that Sidhwa portrays and comes to realize how she breaks free from the supremacy of patriarchal partition narratives and provides a distinctive female counter-narrative. Her major novels like 'The crow eaters, 1980, The Pakistani Bride', 1983, 'Ice candy man' 1988, 'Cracking India' 1991, courageously take up women's issues, the problem of colonization, and the bitterly divided predicament of partition and reconsider and re-examine the socio-cultural society that shaped the fortune of the Indian subcontinent. Sidhwa truly represents the unrepresented half of humanity at large with openness and careful stance.

This thesis will to do close readings of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels: The Pakistani Bride and Cracking India. It brings to light the ways in which the image of the female body is used in the two novels and in what ways this image represents the novels’ feminist message. The close readings reveal many similarities between the novels’ treatment of the female body, but also interesting developments that take place in Sidhwa’s feminism from The Pakistani Bride of the 1970s to Cracking India of the 1980s.

The Pakistani Bride focuses on female suffering and the powerlessness experienced by women within the patriarchal society depicted. The suffering is linked closely to the female body and the control over it by male society. The female central character of the novel rebel against patriarchy, but in spite of this male control takes over in the end. The novel does not change the society in which it is set, but it does show the reader a reality which must be told. The novel provides us awareness about the subjugation and atrocities on women. This male dominated society always tries to manipulate the laws and rules to overpower and subjugate women. New unjust laws are being developed to silence the rebel. This novel along with representing the female plight also records the trauma of partition. Though the story speaks about Pakistani society or the Indian subcontinent yet the issues discussed are entirely universal. Since ages women have been tortured, killed and subjugated. Although the book reflects the society of 1940s but the issues discussed here still seem contemporary.

Cracking India is a more hopeful novel than The Pakistani Bride. The novel focuses on the cracks in the patriarchal system: that can be used for self realization or for the common good. The women of the novel all perform their own acts of rebellion to patriarchy and, even though some of them are punished for their liberty, the novel still lets these women speak and be heard at the end of the story. This novel opens for a future in which women will be able to look at the world through their own eyes and assemble their own awareness and authority. It offers a counter history to the dominant national history of Partition, one which functions as “re-constitutive and salutary in the revision of national history and identity” (Hai 410). Rather than depicting women as totally maltreated, Sidhwa provides a more nuanced depiction of the variety of ways women influenced the events of Partition.

The feminism of The Pakistani Bride and Cracking India is a feminism which aims to break the silence concerning the subjugation of women in Pakistan. Since the novels set out to inform and shock the reader into action, the feminism has a focus on the description of the different ways on which female bodies are oppressed in the patriarchal society of the novels. Because the female body is something that is supposed to be hidden and not talked about, showing violence and injustice through the female body makes the message twice as powerful. The novels’ focus on injustice and violence aim to infuriate the reader into taking action.

As a whole the thesis brings to light the violence and injustice done on women and the eyes of women looking at the world are introduced as stimulation to women of patriarchal societies to question traditions, to gain their own understanding of the world and to declare their intellectual power.

Bibliography

·         Sidhwa, Bapsi, The Crow-Eaters, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.

·         Sidhwa, Bapsi, The Pakistani Bride, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.

·         Sidhwa, Bapsi, Cracking India, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 1991.

·         Sidhwa, Bapsi, An Amerian Brat, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1994.

·         Sidhwa, Bapsi and Singh, Preeti, ‘My Place in the World’, interview from 1998.

·         Abrioux, Cynthia, ‘A Study of the Stepfather and the Stranger in the Pakistani Novel The Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa’ in Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1990 autumn, pp. 68-72.

·         Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, ‘Bapsi Sidhwa: Women in History’, in Ross, Robert L. (Ed.), International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, Chicago, Illinois and London: St James Press, 1991, pp. 271-81.

·         Allen, Diane S., ‘Reading the Body Politic in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels: The Crow Eaters, Ice-Candy Man and An American Brat’ in South Asian Review, December 1994, pp. 69-80.

·         Baym, Nina, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978.

·         Bharat, Meenakshi, ‘Gender and Beyond: The Girl Child in the English

·         Novel from the Indian Subcontinent in the Past Decade’ in World Literature Written in English, vol. 37 1&2 (1998), pp. 177-189.

·         Bharucha, Nilufer E., ‘From Behind a Fine Veil: A Feminist Reading of Three Parsi Novels’ in Indian Literature: Sahitya Akademi’s Bi-monthly Journal, no. 175: Sept.-Oct. 1996, vol. XXXIX, no. 5, pp. 132-141

·         Hai, Ambreen, ‘Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India’ in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, summer 2000, pp. 379-426.

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