3.

Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s

Cracking India: A Geocritical Study
of the Great Divide of the Indian
Subcontinent
Sobia Khan

Much has been written about the partition of British India into modern day
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Despite historical accounts and some fic-
tional imaginings of the Great Divide, initially a woman’s perspective was
largely absent in the discourse on Partition. Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel, Cracking
India, first released under the title, Ice-Candy Man, was the first novel writ-
ten by a female novelist who broke through the silences of women to tell
a semi-autobiographical tale of what happened when India was divided. As
such, Sidhwa’s novel published in 1988 is a pioneer in a tradition that has
produced multiple works of fiction on Partition by female writers such as
Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2002), Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in
the Mist (2010), and Shaheen Ashraf–Ahmed’s The Dust Beneath Her Feet
(2012), among other works of historical, cultural, and critical insights which
examine India’s Partition. The story is primarily of women and chronicles
the impact Partition had on the lives of Indian women. Let me be clear that
Sidhwa’s story is of “Indian” women and how they are broken, fractured,
and divided into religious and ethnic categories as a result of the geographical
divide. My work here adopts a geocritical lens to study transnational feminism
in Sidhwa’s work to tease out the complex journeys women undertake to sur-
vive the Great Divide. In many ways, Sidhwa’s novel is a lament for women
who suffered Partition and who remained silent for decades keeping their
stories of horror hidden from the national gaze.
My interest in Cracking India, like many other South Asian’s, stems from
a personal place. Like a million others, my family left their ancestral home in
56Sobia Khan

Dehradun and traveled from the foothills of the Himalayas to the plains of
Punjab and then to the port city of Karachi in Pakistan. Their train was the
first to escape murder and mayhem as it crossed the border from India into
Pakistan. The few stories we have heard of that time relate how neighbors
turned against neighbors because of religious difference, and how everyone
had to escape to save themselves. Far more stories, I know, remain untold.
No one speaks of the girls who disappeared, the men who lost their hands, or
the severed relationships among family members as a result of displacement.
Sidhwa’s novel then negotiates the unacknowledged boundaries of multiple
dimensions, such as boundaries of silence and speech, territorial boundaries
of the Great Divide which cracked Punjab into two nations, religious and eth-
nic boundaries that divided friends, and feminism which was lost and found in
the in-between spaces of class, gender, and religious difference.
As the title of the novel suggests, we find Sidhwa’s characters in the in-­
between spaces—in the “cracks” of British India’s Great Divide. These in-­
between spaces are fraught with anxiety, disillusionment, and despair, as we
see in the story of Sidhwa’s protagonists. After Partition, non-Muslims who
belonged to Lahore, Pakistan, became “outsiders” and found themselves nei-
ther here (unwanted in Pakistan) nor there (far from their family homes in
India). I label those that do not belong as transnationals. As such, Sidhwa’s
novel is a story that focuses on those outsiders who did not belong in the new
Pakistan and became trapped in in-between spaces on the literal and metaphor-
ical borders between India and Pakistan. Many theoretical frameworks, such
as Bhabha’s “in-betweeness” as outlined in Location of Culture, Hitchcock’s
“long space” explained in The Long Space,1 Anzaldúa’s articulation of “bor-
derlands” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,2 and Pratt’s idea of a
“contact zone” discussed in Imperial Eyes,3 among others, have emerged as a
way of understanding the new spaces occupied by transnational subjects. My
work here will rethink Sidhwa’s novel to directly address the crisis experienced
by transnational subjects trapped in an in-between space.
Geocritical studies as explained by Robert Tally in The Geocritical Legacies
of Edward W. Said “have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary
criticism by focusing attention in various ways, on the dynamic relations
among space, place, and literature” (ix). Tally clarifies that the term “space” is
not to be taken only in its literal sense. In the newly envisioned scholarship on
space and place, “spatial criticism examines literary representations not only
of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while
exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or
unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it” (x). I use
an expanded understanding of space as suggested by Tally to study Sidhwa’s
Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s Cracking India 57

iconic novel depicting the trauma of Partition. My study here examines the
dynamics of the space, place, and the text to reveal the anxieties ridden in
trauma literature such as Cracking India.
Much scholarship precedes my intervention on Cracking India and it is
worthwhile to recognize the layered readings made possible by Sidhwa’s text.
Ambreen Hai, in “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism
and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” cautions against a simplistic
understanding of border crossing on gendered bodies and raises concerns
against overlooking “other lines of difference” in favor of focusing on cross-
ings and of inhabiting borders. Her critical stance on Cracking India is that
it is a non-canonical, Anglophone work from a Pakistani female writer of fic-
tion. Hai goes on to write, “As a Pakistani woman with Muslim parents who
also migrated from India in 1947, I find Cracking India both compelling and
importantly interventionist, but at the same time I also cannot read it without
certain qualms, without pausing over its contradictions and ambivalences”
(386). For my purposes in this essay, I would further add to Hai’s comments
that Sidhwa’s work is doubly marked by marginalization not only as that of
a non-canonical Anglophone woman writer’s fiction, but also as a text that
exclusively deals with marginalized characters on the periphery of society and
who remain on the borders of the Partition by not partaking actively in the
Great Divide. The protagonists in the novel never “act,” but are seen “react-
ing” to the political upheaval around them. I see the double marginalization
of the text, author, and characters as a worthy place to examine inter and
intra relations of space, place, and the literary text. Unlike Hai, it is precisely
in the realm of “contradictions and ambivalences” I find Sidhwa’s work most
compelling. It is in this space we find Sidhwa’s characters trapped between the
cracks of a breaking nation.
My reading of Cracking India shows how Sidhwa negotiated issues of
feminist identity suppression and transformation in a realm of contradic-
tions through the story of Shanta. Referred primarily as Ayah in the novel,
I will refer to her as Shanta, thereby giving her character agency by recog-
nizing her individual identity separate from other relationships in the novel.
Shanta’s character encourages a re-reading of the Great Divide of the Indian
Subcontinent in ways that resistance, globalization, and re-mapping collide
into our contemporary understanding of marginalized South Asian women
and thus, provides what Kamran Rastegar calls a “counterhistory,” which
challenges political narratives of Partition by including marginalized experi-
ences. Rastegar writes, “as contemporary literary and historiological inquiry
problematizes the notion of ‘objective’ histories, ‘fictional’ representation has
begun to be accepted as fulfilling a specific role in the larger question of what
58Sobia Khan

history is and can be” (26). Cracking India was one of the first few texts
written by a woman to fill this gap in historicizing the Partition. It is from
the position of a geocritical transnational feminist scholar that I re-examine
Sidhwa’s Cracking India as a text that blazed a trail for other female fiction
writers, social scientists, and critical analysts to follow. In studying Cracking
India we begin to fully understand the complexities of Shanta’s story as a
marginalized, gendered, silenced, and fractured subjectivity during Partition
of British India in 1947 as representative of a specific experience allowing
the inclusion of multiplicity of experiences that had been overlooked until
Sidhwa’s text.

Trangressive Borders, Cracking Nation

In Cracking India, Sidhwa captures the tragedy of a partitioning nation
through the perspective of a young Parsi girl, Lenny, who is witness to the
multi-religious love and warfare, the victimization of Shanta as the direct
consequence of Partition, and the creation of new nations. Through her
narrative, Sidhwa traverses literal and metaphorical transnational boundaries
marking the contemporary landscape of South Asia. Her feminist text ques-
tions the role of religion, female sexuality, and innocence, and she questions
loyalties to nationalist dogma in comparison to loyalty based on love. The
Hindu woman, Shanta, called Ayah by the child narrator, loses her place in
her society when her loyalties to a new Muslim state, Pakistan, are put into
question. She is subjugated and defeated sexually, emotionally, and spiritually
when she no longer has the security of her old home state—India, or the
security of her pseudo family of contrabands who were united despite their
ethnic, lingual, and religious differences.
The first time we meet Shanta and her suitors it is as if Sidhwa creates a
country that revolves around Shanta. Queen’s Garden, the park in Lahore,
India, where Shanta lounges with Lenny is Shanta’s utopia, her self-created
sanctuary where she is the queen. Shanta experiences a sense of freedom in
the park where her suitors gather around her seeking her attention. Despite
the sense of imagined freedom, Sidhwa is astute to remind the readers that
neither the park nor any of its occupants are truly free. A statue of Queen
Victoria looms over them. Lenny, the narrator of the novel tells us, “Queen
Victoria, cast in gun metal, is majestic, massive, overpowering, ugly. Her
statue imposes the English Raj in the park” (Sidhwa 28). The statue serves
as a reminder to the visitors about the British rule over India. Colonial by
design, the park and every sense of false freedom permeates Shanta’s encoun-
ter with her admirers, leading us to question if Shanta’s utopia is real or
Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s Cracking India 59

imagined. From the very beginning of the novel, tension between space and
place underpin the text’s narrative illustrating the ambiguous boundaries of
the Indian subcontinent viz a viz Queen’s Garden.
In addition to the imposing British Raj in Queen’s Garden, Shanta’s per-
sonal boundaries are encroached upon as well. The reader is privy to these
transgressions through Lenny’s observations of Shanta’s encounter with her
admirers. Lenny tells of her time in the park with Shanta,
I lie sprawled on the grass, my head in Ayah’s lap. The Faletti’s Hotel cook,
the Government House gardener, and an elegant, compactly muscled head-and-
body masseur sit with us. Ice-candy-man is selling his popsicles to the other
groups lounging on the grass. My mouth waters. I have confidence in Ayah’s
chocolate chemistry … lank and loping the ice-candy-man cometh. (28)

Sidhwa goes on to write about how all Shanta’s admirers flock to her and flirt
with her, each in his own way. In recounting how each man flirts, Sidhwa
exposes how it is Shanta’s personal physical boundary each aims to cross.
Lenny observes that the gardener and Shanta only talk to each other, “noth-
ing much happens except talk” (29). Shanta allows the masseur more privi-
leges than to any other man. She lets Masseur massage her under her sari and
Lenny detects Shanta’s response to the masseur’s tactile attention. In com-
parison, Ice-candy-man’s sneaking toes are sharply pushed away each time
they over step Shanta’s boundaries. However, sometimes Ice-candy-man’s
stories are so engrossing that Shanta and Lenny “are taken unawares” (29)
of his traveling toes. If the story is really good and his toes are polite, then
Lenny tells us that Shanta tolerates them. It is as if Ice-candy-man pays for
his transgressions by divulging juicy gossip. This seemingly idyllic scene of
flirtation, mild transgressions, and a burgeoning romance between Masseur
and Shanta is the background against which Lenny comes of age in a nation
held delicately together despite British rule. It is also the world of Shanta in
which she is somewhat in control. Despite the British rule, Shanta, Lenny,
and all those surrounding them constructed a life that they could live with.
Through scenes such as the one in Queen’s Garden, Sidhwa portrays life in
India during British Raj, a life that is at the threshold of change. Tensions
and contradictions permeate the literal space of the park and the lives of its
visitors. Lenny is at the threshold of maturity, Shanta close to choosing her
true lover, Masseur at winning Shanta’s hand, Ice-candy-man at the brink of
rejection, and India at the edge of war.
A few pages later, Sidhwa’s story takes a sharp turn on the brink of inde-
pendence from British rule and at the time of Partition of India. Shanta and
her world are destroyed as is her sense of self. It is as if the cost of winning
60Sobia Khan

independence from the British is the breaking up of the mighty country, its
way of living, and its people. Sidhwa foreshadows the plight of the country
and its occupants in the seemingly tranquil activities of Lahoris. Replicating
the political anxieties over India’s impending partition and the fierce ani-
mosity between Hindu and Muslim leaders, Sidhwa shows Masseur and Ice-
candy-man’s rivalry in winning Shanta over. They try to outdo each other
in entertaining and impressing Shanta. When Masseur shares his invention
of an oil that can grow hair and how he is raking in money with its sale,
Ice-candy-man declares that he has developed a fertility-pill. Simultaneously,
Sidhwa also recounts how Nehru tried to win Lord Mountbatten over while
Jinnah stood firm on his ideas of how India should be partitioned. Sidhwa
uses Lenny’s innocent narrative point-of-view to show the absurdity of how
each stakeholder in Indian politics was trying to get his way. Lenny says:
There is much disturbing talk. India is going to be broken. Can one break a
country? And what happens if they break it where our house is? Or crack it fur-
ther up on Warris Road? How will I ever get to Godmother’s then? … This side
for Hindustan and this side for Pakistan. If they want two countries, that’s what
they’ll have to do—crack India with a long, long canal. Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru,
Iqbal, Tara Singh, Mountbatten are names I hear. And I become aware of reli-
gious differences. (101)

While Lenny may be voicing the notion of how to “break” a country, she also
discovers that people around her are now redefined by other symbols than
what she was used to. Her relationship to those around her was not based on
differences, but on what was common between them. Her circle of servants
existed because they all had Shanta in common. The realization of differ-
ences and of alliances between people alarms Lenny. She says, “It is sudden.
One day everybody is themselves—and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer
my all-encompassing Ayah—she is also a token. A Hindu” (101). Similarly,
Lenny sees others around her “turning into religious zealots” (101) acting
with a born-again religiosity, observing their particular religion with renewed
fervor around the time of Partition. With the changing political climate,
Lenny observes that the dynamics of people were also changing. In Queen’s
Garden, Muslims sat with Muslims, Hindus had their own enclave, and Sikh
boys played among themselves. She notes that only her Ayah’s group had not
changed. Around Shanta, she felt that there was still heterogeneity. Lenny’s
optimisim and sense of hope is crucial to illustrate the geopolitical divide that
existed all around Lenny and in her Ayah’s circle too, but at this point in the
novel, she is oblivious to it.
Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s Cracking India 61

Madhuparna Mitra, in “Contextualizing Ayah’s Abduction: Patterns of

Violence Against Women in Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” discusses how tell-
ing the story through Lenny’s point-of-view is an advantage to the story
Sidhwa is recounting. She writes, “Lenny herself is a child of privilege, born
into an upper-middle class Parsi family is thus a ‘doubly’ neutral narrator, by
virtue of her age and ethno-religious affiliation” (25). Sidhwa purposefully
positions Lenny as a distant observer of the horrors of the Great Divide of
India, thereby allowing the reader to feel safe within Lenny’s world and guilty
because of her Parsi community’s immunity to the horrors of Partition. The
narrator’s position is problematic precisely because it is on the borders of
Indian society enjoying the security afforded to them because of their reli-
gious disassociation. I view Lenny and the Parsi community’s distance from
Partition as “thirdly” distant because of the social and class status. Lenny
remains in the safety of her family’s home while the working class servants
she spends time with are victimized because of their ethno-religious-class dif-
ference. Sidhwa infuses the text with multiple and layered distance between
the characters as they each experience the break of the Indian subcontinent.
Lenny and Shanta’s sojourns to Queen’s Garden halt in the throes of a
breaking India. Shanta’s group of admirers stop meeting at Queen’s Garden.
Instead, they visit Shanta at Lenny’s house in groups of two or three, or
alone. “There is dissension in the ranks of Ayah’s admirers,” Lenny notes
(157). Religious differences and a sense of proprietary ownership of land
and people drive Shanta’s group against each other. Ice-candy-man’s jealousy
of Masseur becomes palpable as does the hatred between different religious
groups. Ice-candy-man succumbs to partisanship and becomes a Muslim
goonda against his Hindu neighbors. His remark, “They thought they’d drive
us out of Bhatti! We’ve shown them!” (147) is very telling of how his hatred
for Hindus escalated after Partition. It is important to discuss the progression
of hate between Shanta’s group of admirers in the wake of India’s Partition as
the events that follow show the consequences of “cracking” a country.

Sacrificial Spaces, Mutilated Bodies

Lahore was burning. Sikhs from Lahore were fleeing the city leaving their
native homelands. Hindus were leaving, and Muslims escaping from Hindu
dominant areas were butchered on the trains they traveled. In the midst of
it all Pakistan was born. As Lenny states, “I am Pakistani. In a snap. Just like
that” (150). Ice-candy man’s hatred for others grew as a result of all the
atrocities he saw levied against Muslims. He tells the small group of friends
around Shanta, “I lose my senses when I think of the mutilated bodies on that
62Sobia Khan

train from Gurdaspur … that night I went mad, I tell you! I lobbed grenades
through the windows of the Hindus and Sikhs I’d known all my life! I hated
their guts … I want to kill someone for each of the breasts they cut off the
Muslim women … The penises!” (166). Ice-candy-man’s angry rhetoric and
actions depict the self-destructive behavior committed in the name of na-
tion and religion. Unashamed he tells Shanta, a Hindu, and others gathered
around her of the atrocities he committed. Ice-candy-man’s characterization
is indicative of the larger canvas of hate exhibited by people of different re-
ligions. The nonsensical and baseless atrocities indict the perpetrators. What
is more incredulous is that these crimes are committed after India’s indepen-
dence from Britain, which should have been an occasion for celebration but
gets misdirected into fearmongering and hatred.
The human body becomes the space for rendering the rupture India
suffers as a result of Partition. Sidhwa references nameless bodies which are
mutilated on both sides of the new border from the Muslims migrating into
Pakistan on trains to villages obliterated because they were the wrong religion
and on the wrong side of the border. Women suffered doubly, first used and
transgressed against because of their gender and then murdered, or if they
were left alive they were left homeless in an alien place. Sidhwa doesn’t shy
away from chronicling these human ruptures. Lenny being an upper-middle
class child is not privy to all the horrors, but she is witness to the debasement
Shanta and other non-Muslim servants endure at the hands of their so-called
Muslim friends. Through the cook’s grandson, Ranna’s story, Sidhwa tells of
women in villages who are raped and abused by conquering men and of the
murder of the men in their village. In telling Ranna’s story, Sidhwa remains
true to the semi-autobiographical lens through which we are told the story
of Partition. Lenny, loosely based on Sidhwa herself, would not have been in
a Muslim village nor would she have suffered like them. Sidhwa would have
heard such stories second hand just like Lenny does in Cracking India. The
neutrality and distance discussed earlier in the essay in reference to Lenny
and the Parsi community is exactly the privilege Sidhwa herself would have
enjoyed. As poignant and important Ranna’s story is to the story of Partition,
it is not Lenny’s story to tell and Sidhwa is perceptive to this distinction. She
plays out the dynamics of space, place, and the text when she abstains from
co-opting Ranna’s story as her own.
However, Lenny is witness to another mutilation of the human body
in the case of Hari, the gardener, a devout Hindu. “Hari has had his bodhi
shaved. He has become a Muslim. He has also had his penis circumcised”
(172). In an attempt to avoid persecution and to fit in with the new Muslim
state of Pakistan, Hari becomes Himat Khan, and discards his dhoti for a
Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s Cracking India 63

shalwar. Later when Masseur’s body is discovered by Hari and Lenny, Lenny
notes, “Faces bob around us now. Some concerned, some curious. But they
look at Masseur as if he is not a person. He isn’t. He has been reduced to
a body. A thing” (186). Through these and other incidents in the novel,
Sidhwa clearly shows the enactment of violence over land enacted on the
human body, most specifically the private parts of the human body. The par-
allel of a “broken” land with the broken and desecrated human body reflects
the manifestation of a cracked nation. The inhuman and cruel actions of men
on either side of the conflict like those of Ice-candy-man set up events to
follow in the novel. After Partition, Ice-candy-man was not the same man we
met at the beginning of the novel who recited couplets to Shanta and tried to
win her over with his stories and wandering toes.
For me as a Muslim reader and critic, the novel is at its most destructive
when Muslims are shown as barbaric people after the birth of Pakistan with
its new Muslim identity. It is here, in the self-criticism of my ancestors’ ac-
tions that I find Sidhwa’s novel most poignant. Sidhwa portrays the vigilante
mobs that searched for all Hindus in Lahore. A mob descends on Lenny’s
house asking for Hindus to be turned over to them. Hari is left untouched
because he became a Muslim as is Moti, the sweeper because he converted to
Christianity. But the relentless mob asks for Shanta who is a Hindu. All the
servants and Lenny’s mother protect Shanta and do not divulge her hiding
place. Ice-candy-man, who is still in love with Shanta and has followed Shanta
around every day, emerges from the crowd and tricks Lenny into revealing
Shanta’s hiding place with a promise to protect her Ayah. Immediately, the
crowd marches into the house and drags Shanta out with her clothes tearing
at the seams and men pushing and shoving her. Shanta is kidnapped and taken
away “staring at us as if she [Shanta] wanted to leave behind her wide-open
and terrified eyes” (195). Ice-candy-man, the very man who professed love
for Shanta, betrays her. Lenny, who was wholly dependent on Shanta, betrays
her. Sidhwa locates Shanta in between the cracks of society, nations, and loy-
alties, and this space betrays Shanta in every way.

Fallen Women
In the post-Partition Lahore, Lenny’s world transforms into an unknown
space. Located near Lenny’s house is a shelter for “fallen women” called the
Recovered Women’s Camp. Lenny’s new ayah is one of the women who
was first housed at the shelter. At night, Lenny hears the women wail. At
first, she thinks they are in some danger, but eventually learns that women
like her new ayah, Hamida, have been abandoned by their families. Lenny’s
64Sobia Khan

Godmother explains, “Hamida was kidnapped by the Sikhs. She was taken
away to Amritsar. Once that happens, sometimes, the husband—or his fam-
ily—won’t take her back” (227). When Lenny expresses her frustration saying
that it wasn’t the women’s fault that they were kidnapped, Godmother re-
plies, “Some folk feel that way—they can’t stand their women being touched
by other men” (227). These lines also reveal what may have been Ice-candy-
man’s thinking. He felt betrayed by Shanta and Masseur’s love. Sidhwa is
impartial (again, the neutrality she enjoys as a Parsi) in detailing the atrocities
committed by all sides during Partition. Sikhs killed Muslims, Muslims killed
Hindus, everyone was after the other. In the story of Ranna, we learn that his
entire Muslim village was butchered to death by the Sikhs. But the women
had it worse. They were tortured and raped, and then killed. The cook’s
grandson, Ranna, hears the women screaming in his village mosque: “From
the direction of the mosque come the intolerable shrieks and wails of women.
It seems to him [Ranna] that a woman is sobbing just outside their court-
yard: great anguished sobs—and at intervals she screams: ‘You’ll kill me! Hai
Allah … Ya’ll will kill me!” (213). In his semi-conscious state, the grandson
also imagines he sees his eleven-year-old sister run “stark naked into their
courtyard: her long hair disheveled, her boyish body bruised, her lips cut and
swollen and a bloody scab where her front teeth were missing” (213). Sidhwa
does not show the rape and the horrors the women of the village suffer at
the hands of men directly, but we can hear them. We hear their screams and
their wails. The women are neither killed nor left alive. They find themselves
in an in-between space of anguish. The women’s shelter, Recovered Women’s
Camp, in Lahore itself is a space between two nations, between a life lived
and a future lost, a space that harbors women who do not belong anywhere.
Similarly, in the case of Shanta, Sidhwa shows the trauma she undergoes for
being a Hindu woman at the hands of Muslim men. She is the main protag-
onist of the novel, the story revolves around her and all the people that occu-
pied her life. Like Lenny, the reader becomes a witness to Shanta’s suffering at
the hands of men she trusted. The reader cares for Shanta. As she suffers, the
reader suffers too. Shanta becomes a “fallen woman” like many other women
during the Great Divide of India. We see her fall from the status of a queen
and goddess to a mere body that is used and transgressed against for being
a Hindu. Ice-candy-man sets Shanta up in Hira Mandi, the red light district
of Lahore. Lenny is told this by her cousin who tries to show her physically
what actually happens to women in Hira Mandi. Even though Lenny is still
a young girl, she knows “Ayah is in trouble. I [Lenny] think of Ayah twisting
Ice-candy-man’s intrusive toes and keeping the butcher and wrestler at arm’s
length. And of those strangers’ hands hoisting her chocolate body into the
Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s Cracking India 65

cart” (253). The idea of other men touching Shanta sickens Lenny. Godmother
and Lenny meet Ice-candy-man and they confront him with what they have
heard. He took Shanta to Lahore’s brothels where she was raped and abused
for four months until Ice-candy-man decides to save Shanta by marrying her.
In his defense, Ice-candy-man tells them, “I saved her. They would have killed
her … I married her!” (260). Godmother does not let him off the hook and
asks him, “Why don’t you speak? Can’t you bring yourself to say you played
the drums when she danced? Counted money while drunks, peddlers, sahibs,
and cutthroats used her like sewer? … Did you marry her, then. When you re-
alized that Lenny’s mother had arranged to have her sent to Amritsar?” (262).
Ice-candy-man has no response. He transfers his revenge of Shanta’s preference
for Masseur and his hatred for all Hindus who killed Muslims during Partition
onto Shanta’s body and soul. He punishes her for crimes she did not commit.
Her female body is assaulted until he feels justice has been done. And then he
marries her. Sidhwa is astute is her portrayal of how nationalist and religious
dogma blind Ice-candy-man and others like him who turned on their neighbors
during Partition. With Shanta, Sidhwa shows a glimpse of how all ethical and
moral boundaries are trespassed in favor of imagined loyalties. We find Shanta,
a Hindu woman in a Muslim country, further marginalized as a “dancing girl”
living on the outskirts of society in the red light district. She lives, but is not
alive; these are the contradictions Sidhwa confronts her readers with.
What further deepens the wound inflicted by religious and political
criminals is the treatment the so called “fallen women” receive by their own
communities. Sidhwa confronts communities who abandon their daughters,
sisters, and wives when they fall between the cracks. In many cases, they are
shunned and disowned. Lenny is perceptive to this kind of abandonment, an-
other cruel punishment that women endure. Lenny tells Godmother, “I want
to tell her [Shanta] I am her friend. I don’t want her to think she’s bad just
because she’s been kidnapped” (266). Lenny and Godmother locate the ad-
dress of Ice-candy-man’s house in Hira Mandi and go visit. They find Shanta
as a decorated, “rouged and lipsticked bride” (272) in Ice-candy-man’s home.
He has renamed Shanta, Mumtaz. Not only is Shanta assaulted physically, she
is forced to take on a new identity, one that pleases Ice-candy-man. She loses
her dignity and her identity because of him. When Lenny meets Shanta, it is
not the same Ayah Lenny spent afternoons with in Queen’s Garden:
Ayah’s face, with its demurely lowered lids and tinsel dust, blooms like a dusky
rose in Godmother’s hands. The rouge and glitter highlight the sweet contours
of her features. She looks achingly lovely: as when she gazed at Masseur and in-
wardly glowed. But the illusion is dispelled the moment she opens her eyes—not
timorously like a bride, but frenziedly, starkly. (273).
66Sobia Khan

Lenny penetrates the layers of camouflage to see the real Shanta and this
Shanta is not happy. She tells Lenny and Godmother, “‘I want to go to
my family.’ Her voice is harsh, gruff: as if someone has mutilated her vocal
cords” (273). These are the first words Shanta utters to her guests, the
only words that mattered to her. Shanta tells Godmother that she cannot
forget what happened, that she’s not alive. She wants to leave Ice-candy-
man. Godmother asks her what if her family doesn’t accept her? Shanta
replies, “Whether they want me or not, I will go” (274). Shanta is resolute
in her decision to get far away from Ice-candy-man and return to Amritsar,
India where the rest of her family lives. She tells them that Ice-candy-man
is no longer cruel to her, “but I [Shanta] cannot forget what happened”
(273). Shanta’s desire to escape to her family in India is indicative of the
role place occupies in her mind. Lahore had been her space when she was
with Masseur, her friends, in a sanctuary of her making. But her life and her
space are ruptured both physically and metaphorically by India’s Partition.
Abandoned by all, she seeks refuge in kith and kin. Eventually, in the story,
Godmother manages to get Shanta to the Recovered Women’s House until
she is sent to Amritsar.
Sidhwa in recounting the story of the Indian Subcontinent and its peo-
ple fractured by the largest ethno-religious and political upheaval in recent
history, reveals the fate of women who are similarly marginalized, demar-
cated, and conquered. Her novel highlights the trangressive, ambiguous,
and contradictory nature of war. As Rani Neutill explains, “The project of
State building is invariably a gendered and sexualized phenomenon. The
overwhelming number of women raped during the Partition of India is an
example of the manner in which the creation of the modern nation state
occurs in tandem with the sexual violation of bodies and the organization of
desires” (74). Sidhwa’s transnational concerns depict the horrors of division
along gender, ethnic, religious, and ethical lines. Prior to the Great Divide
and the creation of borders everyone lived in harmony, respecting each oth-
er’s religion and culture. Sidhwa indicts the Indian people for the atrocities
committed during Partition. It wasn’t the British who betrayed Indian peo-
ple, but their own national and religious dogma. Trapped on the borders
of society, the marginalized population, and specifically women like Shanta,
suffer immeasurably for belonging to the wrong religion, gender, nation,
and social class. In my analysis of the novel Cracking India, Sidhwa’s trans-
national feminist and geocritical concerns highlight the dynamics of space,
place, and the importance of historicizing the Partition anew. Her work
speaks for the silenced stories and produces a new historical narrative of
India’s Great Divide.
Transnational Feminism in Sidhwa’s Cracking India 67

Notes
1. In his recently published The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form,
Peter Hitchcock brings the theoretical frames of transnationalism and postcolonialism
together to understand what role world literature plays in the construction of glo-
balization. He coins the term “long space” to understand and negotiate the distance
between transnationalism and postcolonialism in a novel. He writes that “the long in
[his] title refers to future persistence, a mode of engagement more extensive than the
exigencies of the present and a level of commitment constant with the task of facing
the enduring facility for exploitation in global integration” (4). His coinage of the
term “long space” and the critical engagement that takes place here reveals, once
again the difficulties and negotiations required to articulate transnational concerns.
2. Another prominent theorist who has furthered the idea of in-between spaces for
those subjects neither here nor there is Gloria Anzaldúa. In Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza, she focuses specifically on the US-Mexico border area, which she
claims is an unnatural divide. She confronts the history of Texas as understood by
white America, and inserts Chicano history as a force to reckon with. She calls this
borderland area a “third country” and the “closed country” (3). While rewriting
Anglo-American history, she simultaneously reworks the Chicano nationalist agenda.
Residing in between borders and histories, Anzaldúa and other transnational subjects
forsake their individual transnational identities for one at the edge. The third space is
fraught with questions of identity and a sense of belonging to neither place.
3. Mary Louise Pratt’s essay “Arts of the Contact Zone,” published in Imperial Eyes,
discusses her coinage of the term “contact zone” to account for how people of differ-
ent cultures, geographies, histories, and languages interact with each other, and this
forms the genesis of my work. Pratt defines these moments of contact as the “social
this spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in
highly asymmetrical relations of dominations and subordination, such as colonialism
and slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (7).

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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Hai, Ambreen. “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.2 (2000): 379–426. Print.
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Hyder, Qurratulain. Fireflies in the Mist. New York: New Directions, 2010. Print.
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68Sobia Khan

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Criticism in the Contact Zone.” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
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