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.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1938
• Raised—Lahore, Pakistan
• Education—Kinnaird College
• Awards—Bunting Fellowship; Sitara-i-Imtiaz; Lila Wallace-Reader's
   Digest Writer's Award; Premio Mondello
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas, USA


Born in Karachi, Pakistan and raised in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa has been lauded as “Pakistan’s finest English-language novelist.” Sidhwa is the author of four novels: The Bride, Crow Eaters, An American Brat, and Cracking India (Ice-Candy-Man), which was a New York Times Notable Book, nominated by the American Library Association as Notable Book, and won the Literature Prize in Germany in 1991, and was made into the award-winning film Earth by Indian director Deepa Mehta in 1999.

Sidhwa was the recipient the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest honor in the arts in 1991, and was inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame in 2000. She has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and the Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe, among other honors.

Her novels have been published abroad in India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, Greece, and Italy. She has taught at several universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Though she currently resides with her husband in Houston, Texas, Sidhwa travels often to Pakistan, seeking the inspiration of Lahore and working as an activist for women’s and minority rights. (From the publisher.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Cracking India is a novel in which heartbreak coexists with slapstick, where awful jokes about forefathers and foreskins give way to lines of glowing beauty ("The moonlight settles like a layer of ashes over Lahore"). The author’s capacity for bringing an assortment of characters vividly to life is enviable.
New York Times Book Review


[Sidhwa] has told a sweet and amusing tale filled with the worst atrocities imaginable; she has concocted a girlishly romantic love story which is driven by the most militant feminism; above all, she has turned her gaze upon the domestic comedy of a Pakistani family in the 1940s and somehow managed to evoke the great political upheavals of the age.
Washington Post Book World


With understated prose and a seemingly simple narrative, Sidhwa’s novel conveys the human suffering of Partition far more effectively than a dozen history books.... Cracking India illustrates the power of good fiction: a historical tragedy comes alive, yielding insight into both the past and the subcontinent’s turbulent present.
USA Today


The spirited daughter of an affluent Parsee family narrates the story of the cracking of India, as she witnesses Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Parsees, and Sikhs fight for their land and their lives.
London Review of Books


Sidhwa's novel Cracking India is on of the finest responses made to the horror of the division of the subcontinent.
Salman Rushdie - The New Yorker


Sidhwa tempers Lenny’s hyper-awareness by capturing the whole range of her fears and joys as her innocence becomes another casualty of the violence among Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. On page 30, Lenny says about her cousin’s upcoming tonsillectomy: "I visualize a red, scalloped scar running from ear to ear. It is a premonition." What do you think she means by this?

2. On page 125, Lenny says, "Now I know surely. One man’s religion is another man’s poison." Do you believe this? Given the violence that breaks out and the fact that India is “cracked” along religious lines, can you understand why Lenny feels this way?

3. Chapter 21 takes the reader back into Lenny’s family world, characterized by humor, joy, and a "regular life." Why do you think the author shows us Lenny’s family here?

4. How does Lenny use her handicap? How does she feel about it? Find examples of her taking delight in her handicapped status.

5.Throughout section two, Lenny steals and hides bottles. Finally her godmother discovers the theft on page 93. Are some people bet ter at lying than others? Is Ice-candy-man a good liar? Is Ayah?

6. Lenny has finally betrayed her ayah. What scenes in the earlier sections of the book led up to this betrayal? How were we prepared for Lenny’s inability to lie? After the betrayal, what does she do?
(Questions issued by publisher).

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