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Revisiting Partition
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20318 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
2,621 Words |
| Author
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Robert Ross
Robert Ross is a freelance writer and critic who has
published widely on postcolonial literature. |
CRACKING INDIA
Bapsi Sidhwa
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991
289 pp., $18.95
That Pakistan was once part of India has almost been forgotten by most of the world. Even the horror at the death and destruction that accompanied India's partition in 1947 has faded amid other bloodletting since. But Bapsi Sidhwa's third novel, Cracking India, imparts immediacy to that event and to its aftermath. Sidhwa, Pakistan's major writer in English, has produced no commonplace historical work merely chronicling the political and social upheavals attendant upon India's independence from Great Britain.
Yet, for those unfamiliar with the era, the novel is grounded firmly in history and unsparing in bloody detail, providing sufficient background on what has become known as "Partition." Of course, the noble ideal behind this act was the creation of a separate nation for the Hindus (India), and another for the Muslims (Pakistan). The enterprise entailed the forced movement of millions of peoples. What a few politicians envisioned would be a massive but peaceful migration to religious homelands soon turned into vast slaughter. While no one knows the exact numbers, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of peoples on both sides were killed. Even the living were not spared suffering; many millions of refugees were created. All suffered from the anguish of dislocation, many from lost fortunes and lands, countless women from rape, a host from disease and hunger.
Here is material for any number of novels, and several fictional accounts, mainly by Indian writers in English, have appeared over the years. But none have succeeded in quite the same way as Cracking India.
Told in the present tense through the voice of a young girl named Lenny--eight or so years old at the book's beginning--the history becomes secondary, the human struggle foremost. The narrator, who is recovering from polio, announces at the outset: "My world is compressed." Sidhwa works this self-imposed limitation to her advantage by placing the privileged and spoiled Lenny in an adult world, which she apprehends and reports on in a naïve way. The events leading to India's partition and the concomitant violence unfold in increments through overheard adult conversations, wide-eyed observations of what is taking place in that compressed world, and a frequent misinterpretation of her elder's' actions. In fact, the title, Cracking India is drawn from
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