Cracking India: A Novel - Softcover

Bapsi Sidhwa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915943565 ISBN 13: 9780915943562

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1991

Synopsis

Follows the experiences of eight-year-old Lenny, the daughter of an affluent Parsee family, during India's breakup

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Pakistani Sidhwa's third novel (The Bride, 1983; The Crown Eaters, 1982)--written from the point of view of a young girl who's surrounded by the personal and political violence that accompanied the partitioning of India in 1947--manages to do justice to the complexity of racial, ethnic, and religious violence in the era and to evoke the passage from an affluent childhood to the ambiguities of experience. ``India is going to be broken....And what happens if they break it where our house is?'' asks narrator Lenny, the daughter (who turns eight in 1947) of an affluent Parsi family in Lahore. And in fact her household does break apart when her young nanny, or Ayah, is kidnapped. Before that event takes center stage, the novel glorifies in the ``beautifully endowed'' world, which, as evoked by Sidhwa's luminous present-tense prose, is laminated with the magic of childish wonder: moving between her own house and that of her dynamic Godmother (``It is her nature to know things''), who lives ``with her docile old husband and slavesister,'' Lenny dramatizes the textures of multicultural Indian life, with its summer trips to the Himalayan foothills, dinner parties, visits from the ice-candy man, and, increasingly, hints of ``Hindu-Muslim trouble.'' While Lenny ``learns to tell tales'' by ``offering lengthier and lengthier chatter'' to fill dinner-time silences, she also becomes ``aware of religious differences.'' Sikhs start keeping to themselves, whereas before ``everybody is themselves.'' Violence escalates, India is divided, fires appear ``all over Lahore,'' and Ayah is kidnapped. She's finally found in the red-light district, then rescued through Godmother's influence, but it's clear that- -along with India and Lenny--she will never be the same. Richly layered, both realistic and magically evocative as well as topical: a novel that brings to triumphant life an India that ``has less to do with fate than with the will of men.'' -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review:

"One man's religion is another man's poison." The child narrator of Cracking India learns this lesson as she experiences the Partition of India in 1947. Comic, violent, turbulent, and full of life, this novel functions vividly on both domestic and historical levels, illuminating the uprooting of seven million Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs in "the largest and most terrible exchange of population known to history." In particular, Cracking India explores the effect of Partition on the subcontinent's greatest underclass: women. Events are refracted through the eyes of five year-old Lenny, the indulged daughter of a Parsee family whose tumultuous extended household includes an array of neighbors, servants, and relatives, and Lenny's beloved Ayah. For Lenny, the domestic manifestation of Partition is sudden and menacing: "one day everybody is themselves -- and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols." Witnessing the inexorable cracking apart of her world, with its affection, humor, and balance superseded by bigotry and violence, Lenny comes to a painful understanding of "human needs, frailties, cruelties and joys." In focusing on the domestic drama engendered by a national cataclysm, and by rendering it in the uninformed but clear-sighted voice of a young girl, Bapsi Sidhwa fully evokes the personal costs of an historical event. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Prudence Hockley

About this edition

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0915943565
• ISBN 13: 9780915943562
• Binding: Paperback