Cracking India (Sidhwa)

Cracking India 
Bapsi Sidhwa, 2006
Milkweed Editions
296 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781571310484


Summary
Young Lenny is kept out of school because she suffers from polio, and so spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, visiting with the large group of admirers that Ayah draws. Thrilled with the attention that comes with her invalid status, Lenny manipulates the activities of courtship to better spoil herself.

It is in the company of these working class characters that Lenny learns about religious differences, comes to recognize religious intolerance, and provides a lense into the blossoming genocidal strife on the eve of Partition. As she matures, Lenny begins to identify the differences between the Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs engaging in political arguments all around her.

As a Parsee, Lenny is separate from these groups and their conflicts, though they play a tremendous role in her life. The Ice-Candy-Man, a popsicle vendor and the title character in the British edition, initially the most aggressive of Ayah’s suitors, transforms several times over the course of the novel, symbolically representing the subcontinent's own transformations.

Sidhwa humanizes the violence and strife caused by religious intolerance by putting the innocence of a child, an outside narrator due to both her age and her ethnicity, on the line, caught in the crossfire of political unrest. The story depicts the planting of the seeds of religious intolerance and political violence that remains to this day in India and Pakistan, and much of the rest of the Middle East.

Cracking India provides a timely reminder that contemporary American rhetoric of the “War on Terror” and post-9/11 politics echoes eerily that which is recorded in this novel. Sidhwa personalizes the history of political unrest in South Asia and the Middle East, an issue as pertinent today as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. (From the publisher.)