South Asian Diaspora

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Religion, partition, identity and diaspora: a study

of Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man

Paromita Deb

To cite this article: Paromita Deb (2011) Religion, partition, identity and diaspora: a
study of Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man , South Asian Diaspora, 3:2, 215-230, DOI:
10.1080/19438192.2011.579459

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South Asian Diaspora
Vol. 3, No. 2, September 2011, 215 –230

Religion, partition, identity and diaspora:

a study of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man
Paromita Deb∗

Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

This paper intends to study the Partition history through the subaltern eyes of a
young girl narrator belonging to the Parsi diaspora in colonial Lahore, Pakistan,
in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel, Ice-Candy-Man. By suggesting a holistic approach
towards Partition, which is inclusive of analysis and integration, at multiple
levels, of official history books, excerpts from survivor accounts and critical
evaluation of partition novels like Sidhwa’s text, the study approaches the
enormity of the experience of Partition with immediacy and sensitivity. It
discusses how diasporas create dilemmas for the traditional nation-states and for
those caught between the battle-lines. The paper discusses how the text portrays
Partition’s role in not only destroying the sub-continent’s communal life, but
also in the reconstruction of multiple identities. By highlighting the plight of
abducted women, the novel can also be interpreted as a gendered narrative of
displacement and dispossession caused by the dismemberment of the sub-
continent.
Keywords: partition studies; gender narratives; Parsi diaspora; subaltern studies;
religion; history; identity

Introduction
The Partition of the Indian sub-continent is a defining moment in South Asian history.
This massive event significantly changed the map of the Indian subcontinent and its
repercussions are still being felt even after 60 years. It led to the birth of Pakistan in
1947 and later to that of Bangladesh in 1971. Undoubtedly, Partition is a subject as
harrowing as the Holocaust. Religion played the key role in these particular historical
disasters, and partition history invariably entails the horrors and stark drama of
numerous religious riots and massacres. Pakistan, comprising some of the territories
of erstwhile British India, prioritized the claim of separate nationhood by the
Muslims of the sub-continent. The Muslim homeland itself underwent ruptures as its
eastern half, catapulting on a linguistic and cultural nationalism, shunned all its
association with a solely religion-defined ‘national identity’. Nevertheless, post-
liberation, religion has appeared to define the nationhood of the Bangladeshi populace.
Altogether, between 1947 and 1971, about 14.5 million people crossed borders, more
than 7 million Muslims, and 7 million Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted in this largest
and most terrible exchange of population in Indian history.
Quite surprisingly, we do not find substantial writing about Partition of India in
1947. Few survivor accounts of Partition are available in English. This can be linked
∗
Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1943-8192 print/ISSN 1943-8184 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19438192.2011.579459
http://www.informaworld.com
216 P. Deb

to their refusal to speak loss, or, their inability to distance themselves from the brutality
and objectively speak or write their experience. There is very little literature in English,
especially fiction: Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Chaman Nahal’s
Aazadi (1975), more recently, by younger authors, like Mukul Kesavan’s Looking
Through Glass (1994), and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers
(2001), offer brilliant historical perspectives of partition.
However, there is a rich body of fictional work in the other popular sub-continental
languages, especially those used by the victims of Partition, Punjabi, like Hindi, Urdu
and Bengali. Masoom Reza Rahi’s Aadha Gaon offers a vivid and powerful portrayal
of a fragmented and wounded society in the context of the plight of migrants and
divided families. Krishna Sobti’s Hindi texts on Partition – Sikka Badal Gaya and
Jindaginama too represent the grim contemporary reality without siding with a
particular religion or community. Again, distinguished Urdu writer, Shorish Kashmiri
in Boo-i gul Naala-i dil Doodi-i Chirag-i Mehfil, challenges the monolithic world-vie
about Muslim communities and foregrounds the apparently marginal voices among
Muslims, particularly the Nationalist Muslims, during this cataclysmic event. Nasım
Hijazi’s historical novel Khak aur Khoon describes the sacrifices of Muslims of the
sub-continent during the crisis.The famous Punjabi writer, Amrita Pritam, in her poign-
ant Pinjar (The Skeleton) (1950), expresses her deep-felt anguish over massacres
during the partition of India, while depicting Puro as an epitome of violence against
women, loss of humanity and ultimate surrender to existential fate. Urvashi Butalia
in her book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998),
narrates the real-life story of how the marriage of a Sikh boy, Buta Singh, and a riot-
abandoned Muslim girl, Zainab, turns into tragedy as the latter is reclaimed by the
Pakistani authorities. Bengali Partition literature, especially fiction, is extensive, even
though Bengali literature in sharp contrast to the literature originating from Punjab,
took some time in registering the event and its aftermath. The first well-known novel
on 1947 Partition is Nayantara Sanyal’s Balmik in 1955. It was followed by a spat
of novels in the 1960s and 1970s such as Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga Opar
Ganga (1967), Prafulla Roy’s Keya Patar Nouko (1970), Sunil Ganguly’s Arjun
(1971) and Atin Banerjee’s Nilkontho Pakhir Khonje (1971).
As partition texts present an interface between literature and history, a broader
socio-political and historical framework is required to understand and appreciate
them. Sidhwa’s third novel, Ice-Candy-Man (1989), has carved its niche as the first
‘Partition’ story from the unique perspective of a Parsi child. A short synopsis of the
story is hereby placed to understand the immediate context of the paper. Here, we
see the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan through the innocent eyes of a girl-
child, Lenny, who is not Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, but a minority Parsi. On account of
being physically handicapped by polio, Lenny always accompanies her Hindu Ayah,
Shanta, the central character in the novel, who has access to all strata of society. The
latter is young and vivacious, and, has many admirers, the popsicle vendor ice-
candy-man, the cook Imam Din and the masseur, to name a few. Lenny visits her
Parsi godmother’s house each day after her tuition classes at Mrs Pen’s house. Commu-
nal riots between Muslims and Sikhs spread from towns to small villages as in Imam
Din’s home in Pir Pindo, amid which Lenny’s friend Ranna miraculously escapes as
a wounded and shocked lone survivor. Announcements on All India Radio about the
division of districts into India and Pakistan become popular. Eventually, a Muslim
mob stops outside Lenny’s house and enquire about its Hindu servants, especially
about the Hindu Ayah Shanta but the cook tells them about her fake departure.
South Asian Diaspora 217

Out of innocence, Lenny discloses about her hiding to the title character. The angry
Muslims drag her out of Lenny’s house and later as Lenny discovers the opportunist
takes her to Hira Mandi while the latter is forced to prostitution. However, later the
godmother rescues Shanta, now renamed as Mumtaz, sending her to the recovered
women’s camp, and through Lenny’s mother’s negotiations is ultimately restored to
her family in Amritsar. Lenny learns to live with her new ayah, Hamida, who was
one of the abducted women victims of Partition and lived in the well-guarded
women’s ‘jail’, or camp beside Lenny’s house.
Here, I would like to provide a brief outline of the research methodology used in this
study as that would enhance one’s understanding of it. There are broadly four different
sources of Partition history: historical records, gender narratives, personal memoirs and
literature. The majority of historiographical English sources focus on the political causes
of Partition, like Muhammad Ali Chaudhuri’s The Emergence of Pakistan (1967) and
ideological differences between Congress and Muslim Nationalists, such as Maulana
Abul Kalam Azad’s India Wins Freedom (1988). Gender narratives such as Ritu
Menon and Kamala Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries (1998) and Urvashi Butalia’s
The Other Side of Silence (1998) are perfect examples of ‘history from below’, as they
give voice to previously marginalized groups, such as dalits, women and children.
Oral sources including personal memoirs, like Nonica Datta’s ‘Partition Memories’
(2001), deal with personal losses and family traumas. To enrich this study on Ice-
Candy-Man as a unique Partition text, I wish to use all of these available resources on
the topic. On one hand, history, dealing primarily with elite national politics and being
agenda-driven, cannot have the emotional touch of gender narratives, personal mem-
ories, or literature. On the other hand, personalized oral interviews, despite their plurality,
are also biased and sometimes factually inaccurate – and thus, they cannot substitute
archival research. As Talbot and Tatla explain, ‘While history is concerned with
causes, the memory of pain can result in a sense of events as irrational aberrations’
(2006, p. 13). My aim is not to diminish existing historical documentations stressing
the high politics of constitutional decision-making (Jalal 1985, Mahajan 2000). The sen-
sitivity and human aspect of Partition literature and interviews too are carefully not
ignored. I therefore suggest a holistic approach towards Partition, which is inclusive
of analysis and integration, at multiple levels, of all these genres of knowledge. Thus,
I have punctuated my study of the novel often with accounts of official history books
and also, with excerpts from survivor accounts – Sidhwa, the novelist herself, being
one of them. It is through such a wider approach that we can assimilate the enormity
of Lenny’s experience of the vivisection of the Indian subcontinent.
This study intends to juxtapose the story of forced migration of countless Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs, and the story of how a diaspora Parsi family copes with such an
event. The huge impact of such large-scale international migration challenges the
idea of the nation-state, calling into question whether nations can ever achieve sover-
eignty in a homeland only for people who belong to their imagined community or reli-
gion. The first part of this paper tries to explore how both the Parsi diaspora, first in
undivided India, and later in Lahore, Pakistan, exemplified by Lenny and her family,
survived the Hindu–Muslim–Sikh communal strife in the prelude to and the aftermath
of 1947 Partition. The migration of Parsis centuries ago is likewise centred on religion
and like those of contemporary Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs entailed loss of homes,
national territory and necessitated resettlement. The second part of this paper investi-
gates how this unique Partition narrative by a diasporan examines and critiques key
concepts such as history, representation and cartography. The third part studies
218 P. Deb

Lenny’s evaluation of identity in the novel as well as the trauma and dislocation of
women. In the fourth part, I intend to argue how the novel critiques common percep-
tions of religion as the central part of one’s identity and also the use of religion as a
sensitive ideological weapon in the hands of the powerful. Lenny exposes the
myopia in such an estimation of the significance of religion as she evaluates critically
that although religion should elevate one spiritually and away from material things, it
can at times bind us even more narrowly to our plot of land. In the Conclusion, I discuss
how diasporas and victims of Partition create dilemmas for the traditional nation-states
and for those caught between the battle-lines. Unlike many survivor accounts based on
personal loss and trauma, as well as history books that fuel the political debate by shift-
ing the blame on a particular community or a national leader, Ice-Candy-Man,
I propose, attempts for a reconciliation while downplaying the animosity and highlight-
ing the affirmation of humanity through rehabilitation and recovery.

1. Parsi diaspora and partition

To study the dynamics of the socio-political and religious change that the Partition
brought, it is necessary to examine the contemporary historical and political back-
ground of both the Indian sub-continent as well as the miniscule and liminal Parsi dia-
spora in India. The Parsi diaspora predates European civilization and is a direct result of
the tyranny of the new Islamic masters of Iran, in the first century CE. India forms a
vital part of the earliest Parsi diaspora, by virtue of over 1000 years of history,
during which the Zoroastrians of Iran, that is the Parsis, settled here. Quite uniquely,
Parsis are in diverse diasporas that often run concurrently: the pre-colonial Indian dia-
spora; the Partition diaspora – where the division of the sub-continent into India
and Pakistan in 1947 found the Parsis on both sides of the new border; and the post-
colonial/Western diaspora, in which the Parsis have left India or, Pakistan to live in
Britain, Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand (Bharucha 2000, pp. 55 –61).
Bapsi Sidhwa, who was born in Lahore in undivided India, writes out of a diaspora
that is not just double but triple. As a Parsi born in colonial India, she belongs to an
Indian diaspora. Again, as a young Parsi who lived in Pakistan, after 1947, she was in
a diaspora generated by the partitioning of India. Further, as someone who presently
spends much of her time in the USA, she is also, at least partly, in a Western diaspora.
Based on her real-life experiences, to some extent, her award-winning novel, Ice-
Candy-Man is concerned almost entirely with the anguish of this silent minority who
were apparently invisible to national Partition politics. In this diaspora, the Parsis had
to tread very carefully so as to avoid antagonizing either their Hindu or, Muslim hosts.
The revisioning and retelling of Partition history from a multiple marginalized
standpoint is what makes the novel so specific. In an interview with Julie Rajan,
Sidhwa confesses, ‘As a child in Pakistan – it was very like Lenny’s life . . . . Like
Lenny, I had polio as a child and spent a lot of time with the servants . . ., and wasn’t
sent to school. I didn’t have an extended family and this resulted in my being a little
isolated’ (www.monsoonmag.com/interviews/i3inter_sidhwa.html). Interestingly,
Lenny, her mouth-piece character in her novel, Ice-Candy-Man, too is triply
marginalized. Like her author, she too belongs to the minority Parsi community, initially
as an Indian and later as a Pakistani. There is physical separation from the second
homeland, India, as there was from the original homeland, Iran, in the history of Parsi
diaspora. Further, seen from a woman’s point of view, she gives a distinctly margina-
lized viewpoint in both the patriarchal pre- and post-colonial worlds. Finally, since
South Asian Diaspora 219

Lenny is also crippled by polio, she is triply dispossessed. The marginalized status of the
narrator enables her to have the privilege of detachment: she gives us the whole story of
Partition, instead of in fragments. The authorial voice, in this novel, therefore, is a
powerful voice of hindsight. Lenny is neither merely an Indian, nor a Pakistani, she is
much more versatile, like her character.
One of Colonel Bharucha’s pronouncements, which Lenny hears on an earlier visit
to his clinic, impresses itself powerfully on Lenny’s consciousness: ‘We must hunt with
the hounds and run with the hare’ (Sidhwa 1989, p. 26). This double position that the
Parsis felt they must occupy gives them a unique perspective. Their extreme vulner-
ability and lack of power paradoxically afforded them access to all the contending
groups. Intelligently, they projected their neutrality by underscoring their small
population size. The Parsis were astute enough to recognize their vulnerability and
simultaneously to grab advantage out of their nonaligned status. A full understanding
of Lenny’s version of the Partition of India and Pakistan therefore demands a similar
neutral subject position from us as readers for fair assessments.
Through the first-person account of an eight-year old girl, Lenny, in Sidhwa’s work,
we feel the unease and insecurity experienced by this ethnic and religious minority
group – the Parsis. Such quintessential diasporic discourses can be explained as,
‘the social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective’, in Homi
Bhabha’s terms (Bhabha 1994, p. 2). In spite of the detailing of racial and religious
characteristics, as the references to the Ahura Mazda and Tower of Death, Sidhwa’s
protagonist, as in contrast with most of her familiar characters of other communities,
is not a prisoner of her ethnicity or religion. Lenny, instead, tries to move beyond
these constructs to wider spaces free of the pressures exerted by the dominant groups
in colonial India. As diasporic Parsis, Lenny and her family, thereby, seem to be endea-
vouring to perfect the art of existing in a state of liminality, partaking of different
cultures, yet ultimately retaining for themselves the refuge of their formative ethno-
religious identity. On account of their diasporic status as well as by being part of the
smallest minority in pre- and post-Partition India, they adopt a ‘discreet and politically
naı̈ve profile’, (Sidhwa 1989, p. 26) in order to survive the religious antimonies in the
wake of the Partition of India in 1947.
The use of the Parsi child narrator, as the novelist herself explained to interviewer
David Montenegro, brought ‘objectivity’ to the narrative as her ‘participation in events
is not so involved’ (1990, pp. 513–533). Therefore, she continues, Lenny is ‘more free
to record them, not being an actor immediately involved’. However, despite being an
outsider in a predominantly Muslim, Hindu and Sikh society, she is protected and
loved by it. Moreover, she does not possess the prejudices that will later destroy the
community. Importantly, seen through her subaltern eyes, her critique of the formation
of the two nation-states does not have the tendency to generalize and push the blame on
the basis of the actions of few ‘nationalists’, Gandhi, Nehru or Jinnah. The novel does
prescribe ‘nation’ to a Parsi-specific rendition, as we see a humanized picture of both
Gandhi and Jinnah, though in glances. They are not seen as symbols or national
icons, rather as normal flesh and blood individuals with their own vulnerabilities.
The neutrality maintained by the Parsi diaspora during the partition is thereby subtly
reflected in Lenny’s understanding of partition politics. Thus, this text acquires con-
siderable significance as it foregrounds the marginal voice of a Parsi who rewrites
the histories of partition, communalism and nationalism challenging the partly mono-
lithic world-view of Hindu and Muslim communities. Or, in other words, here, the
subaltern voice of the narrator gives testimony to the oppressed ‘other’ – the abducted
220 P. Deb

Hindu Ayah, the relatively liberal Muslim masseur as well as Hamida living in the
refugee camp. Finally, it can be argued that perhaps owing to her diaspora status,
Sidhwa’s/Lenny’s story of partition of India and Pakistan emphasizes more of repair
of the trauma and coping up with life after partition in her particular locality,
Lahore, than rupture and loss incurred during the event. Thus, Lenny’s account of
Partition has a sense of detachment as well as a balanced view of dehumanizing
effects of communalism, without a trace of protestation, preaching and histrionics.

2. Lenny’s understanding of history

Authoritative readings on the genesis and development of the idea of Partition and the
attendant problems of nationalism are generally biased, in terms of the historian’s
nationality. On one hand, many Indian official historical narratives of nationalism in
India squarely blamed the British for Partition – for instance, Ashok Mehta and
Achyut Patwardhan’s The Communal Triangle in India (1947), provide us a classic
Indian nationalist account of the event and attributes Muslim separatist demands to
Machiavellian British divide – and – rule policies. On the other hand, Pakistani histor-
ians concentrate on the central role of Jinnah and the importance of the ideology of
Pakistan, in their analysis of Partition. S.R. Khairi in Jinnah Reinterpreted (1995)
argues that Nehru, rather than Jinnah, destroyed the unity of India by his rejection of
1946 Cabinet Mission proposals. So, both contemporary Indian nationalism and
Muslim nationalism, and the tragic denouement, have been interpreted in India and
Pakistan in ways that have often failed to include the many diversities in Partition.
The treatment of themes – like human suffering, women, rape and abduction,
honour killings, children and refugee resettlement – is usually very slender in these
elementary history books.
Literature and oral sources highlighting local specificities and personal traumas are,
therefore, indispensable in the assessment of the human emotion of the 1947 massacre.
Sidhwa’s novel Ice-Candy-Man is an important part of this whole picture of Partition. It
sensitizes us to alternative discourses on the tragedy of 1947 within the overwhelming
presence of dominant intellectual debates on Partition’s impact on the individual and
collective psyche of the two nations.
In Ice-Candy-Man we get a glimpse of Sidhwa’s ability of addressing grim histori-
cal realities in an unbiased manner with both precision and affection. As Lenny’s world
is torn apart by the horror of the partitioning of India, she voices serious questions about
key diasporic concepts such as, ‘home’, ‘nationality’ and ‘exile’. She prudently states –
‘Playing British Gods under the ceiling fans of the Faletis Hotel . . . the Radcliff
Commission deals out Indian cities like a pack of cards. Lahore is dealt to Pakistan,
Amritsar to India. I am Pakistani. In a snap. Just like that’ (Sidhwa 1989, p. 140).
As Sidhwa similarly describes in Pakistani Bride: ‘Hysteria mounted when the
fertile, hot lands of the Punjab were suddenly ripped into two territories Hindu and
Muslim, India and Pakistan. Until the last moment no one was sure how the land
would be divided. Lahore, which everyone expected to go to India because so many
wealthy Hindus lived in it, went instead to Pakistan. Jullundur, a Sikh stronghold,
was allocated to India . . . .’ (2000, p. 4). As Lenny matures, she confronts a world
increasingly reduced into categories and labels. Thus, on a sociological level,
Sidhwa’s work is crucial to an understanding of the cultural complexities of the
ambiguities of nation – building, post-Independence Pakistani cultures and the dia-
spora they have occasioned.
South Asian Diaspora 221

The child’s fallibility and the fragmentary nature of her vision bring out a new
version of history. As she is not yet an adult therefore she cannot have the knowledge
about every detail in the birth of a nation. The novelist however seems to suggest very
subtly that so does national history – it too has its censorships and omissions. The
turmoil and the atrocities are captured in the memory of the young girl with great
tragic power and that is why she lingers on particular scenes for greater lengths of
time. Lenny recalls: ‘How long does Mozang Chowk burn . . . ? Mozang Chowk
burns for months . . . and months . . . . Despite its brick and mortar construction: . . .
the buildings could not have burned for months. Despite the residue of passion and
regret, and loss of those who have in panic fled – the fire could not have burned for
. . . months and months . . . .’ (Sidhwa 1989, p. 139). Lenny herself justifies immediately
– ‘But in my memory it is branded over an inordinate length of time: memory demands
poetic license’.
In terms of the historical accuracy of the book, facts are moved around. Gandhi’s
march, for example, is actually 15 years off, owing to poetic license and fiction
where one can manipulate events to arrive at the larger truth. The child’s memory
also gives us the license for such factual discrepancies. Lenny’s naivety and limited
resources of knowledge makes her account more powerful. Only the significant
details are harvested and revealed in an imaginative way. From this perspective,
such representation of history is more candid.
Above all, Lenny seems to be largely troubled by the pointless brutality in the socio-
political scenario during the Partition. Like the celebrated contemporary novel,
Midnight’s Children (Rushdie 1981), Ice-Candy-Man too, in a way, exposes the
fictionality and pain of all the metaphors implied in the national history of the Indian
sub-continent. One of the central metaphors in Rushdie’s novel – the ‘birth’ of a
nation – is associated with the accompanying pangs and screams. Similarly, in the
other text the cruelty of Partition is aptly represented by the grim trope of the pulling
apart of the legs of Lenny’s ‘life-like’ doll by herself (Sidhwa 1989, pp. 138–139).
Political acts like that of partitioning a country is likened to a child’s play where
histories are being made on the basis of whims of a select few.
The available historiography of Partition is invariably informed by political
ideology. G. Pandey in Remembering Partition argues that while official histories
view Partition merely as ‘constitutional political arrangement’, survivors’ memories
suggest that ‘it amounted to a sundering, a whole new beginning and thus, a radical
reconstitution of community and history’ (Pandey 2001, p. 7). Thus, one can discern
a battle between two forms of history in Sidhwa’s novel – the standard, authorized
and hyped one and the personal and passionate one. Each one challenges the truth of
the other. On her eighth birthday, Lenny and her cousin listen to the celebrations of
the birth of the new nation, Pakistan, on the radio, as Jinnah declares: ‘You are free.
You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques. . . . You
may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business
of the State . . . Pakistan Zindabad!’ (Sidhwa 1989, p. 144). The irony is clear. Such
inclusions while blandly imparting information, official facts and speeches, stand out
starkly amid the ethos of imaginative excess in the novel. Thus, the standard historical
extracts as in this instance form a kind of jarring interruption in the narrative.
Also, another facet that is commonly obscured in official historical records of the
1947 riots – the role of many outstanding private individuals, irrespective of their com-
munity or state, in refugee rehabilitation – is highlighted in Sidhwa’s work. The fact
that Hamida, initially sheltered in a refugee camp for ‘fallen’ women, gets employed
222 P. Deb

in the narrator’s household, is therefore significant. Furthermore, Lenny’s own mother

and Parsi godmother rescue many such abducted women in Lahore, Shanta being on of
them. So, the role of somewhat heroic private individuals in rehabilitation of the victims
of the Partition riots is again what distinguishes the private stories of Hamida or, the
Ayah from the generality of the Partition that exists publicly in history books.
Importantly, Lenny’s history from the ‘other’ perspective is also a discourse on
power by one who is powerless. The novel, thereby, gives us an alternate and subaltern
version of history as well as power, though both as intrinsically interlinked. In the
process, the narrative destabilizes the centrality and certainty of the official version.
Such sub-versions of power also critique the one officiating them. The novelist’s spot-
light is not on locating the ‘heroes’/‘villains’ of Partition. Sidhwa’s stress seems rather
on the specifically historical nature of problems encountered by a diaspora – the min-
ority Parsi diaspora, the Hindu religious diaspora in the Muslim state of Pakistan, as
well as the female diaspora constituting the raped victims of ravaged Hindu, Sikh
and Muslim families in the new states – in the process of acquiring new nationality
and citizenship.
Again, this formally sophisticated novel also uses narrative modes of fantasy, alle-
gory and fragmentation of time and space to depict the young Parsi narrator’s view of
the Partition holocaust. Lenny’s worst fear of her ‘house’ being ‘broken’ with the dis-
memberment of the country comes out to be true in a metaphorical level. It does break
her home, like many other homes, as she loses many of her Hindu, Muslim and Sikh
friends. The story gives an insightful portrayal of the ensuing traumatic deconstruction
of perceptions and ideas as Partition upon her little space.
Thus, Sidhwa’s novel points out the fallacy in viewing Partition as merely a singular
historical event of August 1947. She rather emphasizes how it was a part of a much
longer and painful historical process that changed common people’s perceptions of
friends, neighbours, beliefs and humanity at large. Moving away from the meta-
narratives of nationalism and communalism, Ice-Candy-Man gives voice to the dis-
placed ordinary people and their existential reality. What lends greater credibility to
the novel, then, is its ability to unfold certain critically important dimensions, like
the human suffering of the innocent, without using religion as the principle point of
reference.

3. Lenny’s evaluation of identity

Partition not only destroyed the sub-continent’s communal life, it also altered and
reconstructed identities. Sidhwa’s text becomes more indispensable in contemporary
research on Partition when read alongside significant studies on the plights and rehabi-
litation of raped and abducted women in 1947, like the narratives of Ritu Menon and
Kamala Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries (1998) and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other
Side of Silence (1998).
As the defining features of identity include community, religion and nationality, in
this section, I would like to deal with two particular aspects in Lenny’s understanding of
identity as a concept. First, her own diasporic status plays a major role in the shaping of
her own identity within contemporary socio-political scenario. Second, her awareness
of her feminine status illuminates her perception of the identities of the other female
characters surrounding her. The second point becomes vital when we note that
Lenny is mostly influenced by and looks up to the female matriarchal figures in her
life, as her references to godmother, her own mother, Shanta and later Hamida,
South Asian Diaspora 223

prove. More specifically, in this part of the paper, I intend to study how the narrator is
troubled by the apparent fixity of these defining features of identity.
The Parsi diaspora, as discussed earlier, had perfected the art of existing in a state of
liminality, partaking of different cultures, yet ultimately retaining their formative ethno-
religious identity. Lenny’s identity therefore has various traces: she befriends Sikhs like
Ranna, she adores Hindus like her Ayah and is also sympathetic towards Muslims like
the masseur. Yet, these varying facets about her inclinations towards people belonging
to rival religious communities do not make her identity dissonant. Rather, her com-
passion and understanding towards certain members of each religion becomes a
language itself communicating between three diverse religions and two separate
nations. Sidhwa, herself, too feels the same, as she reveals in her interview: ‘I would
describe myself as a Punjabi-Pakistani-Parsi woman, because all three societies influ-
enced me. I guess I actually have a whole medley of identities. And that’s wonderful
because this combination made me the writer I am’ (www.monsoonmag.com/
interviews/i3inter_sidhwa.html). In fact, the new title of the novel, Cracking India,
by which it was published later in the USA in 1991, refers to the image of India as a
riddle with so many cultures. It is particularly befitting as a title because the novel elu-
cidates that while the complex mix of religions and the interwoven fabric of family and
community life in India can be confounding to the uninitiated reader, to some like the
Parsi diasporan it is ubiquitous and humanizing.
In her presentation of multiple positions in the culture wars and religious conflicts
during Partition, Lenny suggests a continuum of perspective: we are acclimatized to
both extreme positions as well as intermediate points along the spectrum. We are
offered the extremist views of the butcher and the ice-candy-man side by side with
those with moderate ideas like Imam Din and the masseur. She vividly portrays the
rampant lootings, meaningless cycles of reprisals and revenge killings – the murder
of refugees and the trainloads of corpses as referred to by the ice-candy-man.
Sidhwa thus gives us a glance of both carefully planned attacks like the latter, as
well as individual acts of violence, like the killing of the masseur, which was seemingly
fuelled by personal jealousy on part of the title character.
The celebration of hybridity of Lenny’s identity can also be seen in the language of
the text. The syntax and diction of Sidhwa’s use of language in this novel is distinctive
in its incorporation of many Hindustani, Urdu and Sikh words in her vocabulary – like,
‘chachi’, ‘mian’ and ‘granthi’, respectively. She evokes the plurality of the Indian sub-
continent for which no single language seems adequate. The multi-lingual texture of
life in the sub-continent is woven into the narrator’s concern in the novel for the
other communities and is negotiated on various levels. Further, language can be seen
as a metaphor for the rich profusion of India’s diverse culture, which prior to Partition
formed an asset, while post-Partition turned into a problem. The Parsi diaspora,
however, smartly appropriates Hindu, Muslim as well as Sikh words in their vocabulary
throughout the novel owing to their particular character. While celebrating fluidity and
multiplicity in her use and representation of language, Lenny/Sidhwa thus resist such
artificial territorial divisions.
The diasporic position is best exploited by the Parsi godmother – whose name, as
she is referred to by Lenny, itself is symbolic. Having an influential and dignified per-
sonality, she is respected by Hindus and Muslims alike. She effectively mediates
between antagonistic communities and single-handedly rescues the Hindu Ayah from
the clutches of the malicious opportunist, the ice-candy-man, while verbally chastising
the latter. Again, it is she who informs Lenny about her strong Parsi heritage. Despite
224 P. Deb

being part of a tiny minority, she faces contemporary religious conflict with wisdom
and practicality.
The question of belonging, integral to expatriate living and expatriate writing,
acquires an additional urgency in case of women characters and women writers. In
case of female migrants the issue of self-definition can hardly be dissociated from
that of gender. As C. Vijayasree argues, ‘Women are born into an expatriate state,
and they are “expatriated in patria”; hence their writing in exile is necessarily different
from that of their male writers’ (Vijayasree 2000, p. 124). She adds, a woman is always
an outsider and the effects of elsewhereness, which is termed ‘alibi’ as in Latin, is felt
most painfully in her own native setting. Her point about the perpetual sense of else-
whereness being articulated in the works of Indian writers of the West can easily be
appropriated in the case of Sidhwa. The author is candid about the internalized exile
that she had born within in her interviews, as referred earlier. Thus, we find a perfect
externalization of this feeling in Lenny’s narrative in Ice-Candy-Man, as she contrasts
her physical exile with the universal psychological exile. Again, it is this feeling that
enables the narrator to connect with the post-Partition exile of her two ayahs,
Hamida and the Shanta. Their plights in this novel epitomize the terrible consequences
of the gendering of the nation and the emphasis on manhood involving protection of the
nation and its women.
The female approximation of displacement and its literary representation in women
diaspora writing displays few identifiable patterns, as has been pointed out by Vijayas-
ree (2000, pp. 124–126). Carrying on with her argument, one can add that Sidhwa fits
in the line of female diaspora writers as Bharati Mukherjee and Kamala Markandaya, as
she focuses on the essential estrangement of women in a man-made world while
voicing the angst of alienation. Besides, all of them are strongly preoccupied with
female body and sexuality. Sidhwa maps Lenny’s female sexuality from a woman’s
point of view. This aspect of female sexual awakening seems particularly subversive
when considered in the context of the author’s as well as the narrator’s constrictive and
rigid patriarchal background. Like Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989), Ice-Candy-Man
breaks the silence of woman’s physical reality. As Lenny’s references to ‘my burgeoning
breasts’ and ‘the projected girth and wiggle of my future bottom’ suggests, the novel
depicts her slow awaking to sexuality and physicality (Sidhwa 1989, p. 220). Thus, the
female protagonist’s body can be read as a text, while the narrative brilliantly fuses the
physical and semantic aspects of her growing up experience.
Further, Lenny sees her sexual awakening in the patriarchal Lahore society as one
which is burdened by ambivalences and contradictions. As she encounters veiled
Muslim women in the park segregated from the Hindus and Christians, like the
readers of this text, she also participates in the retreat into traditional taboos that
monitor the revealing of the female body. Woman should fulfill the individual male
psychic need for scopic/sexual gratification and yet guarded by censors in national
culture. She further explores the contradictions in woman’s position as spectacle in con-
temporary Lahore: the drugging of the child-bride Papoo, the segregation and torture of
the ‘kidnapped women’ in the jailhouse for women, and most of all, the treacherous use
of the Ayah as a prostitute in Hira Mandi. In each case, the body of the woman becomes
a focus for the symbolisms of cultural and religious reaction. We are reminded of the
fact that our gender perceptions are deeply embedded in the dynamics of social change.
The identity of the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women characters in the novel changes
as their bodies are reconstructed as sites of difference. The use of the female body, in
voyeuristic terms, as a prized territory, meant to be conquered and controlled by enemy
South Asian Diaspora 225

camps, is quite common in any warfare. The narrative of Kartar Kaur suggests the
poignancy of the issue of using women as political scapegoats in ‘honour’ killings
(2006, p. 129). In this novel, this can be alluded to the ‘poor fate-smitten women’
like Hamida (Sidhwa 1989, p. 212). Further, the central character, Shanta, becomes a
classic symbol of India itself – a possession to be fought for, and ultimately ravaged
by Hindu and Muslim men alike (Innes 2007, p. 57). As Klaus Theweleit has said,
‘woman is an infinite untrodden territory of desire which at every stage of historical
deterritorialization, men in search of material for utopias have inundated with their
desires’ (1987, p. 294). He further adds that it is the lure of a freer existence that
marks this territory of desire and is most often indulged in by men in search of
power rather than those already dominant (Theweleit 1987, p. 294).
As women are treated as collective scapegoats, it is particularly apt that Lenny
stages her mock-Partition/act of dismemberment on the body of a ‘doll’/female.
Throughout the text, the body and morality of woman and national events cannot be
separated. Talk of the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is invariably qualified
by gossip about his scandalous relationship with Lady Mountbatten. Jinnah’s personal-
ity is also tarnished by references to his unhappy marriage with a beautiful young Parsi
girl. Such gossip about these national characters constitutes a major popular discourse.
Importantly, woman’s shame is the cornerstone of Islamic fundamentalism. The
status of woman as a sign constantly subordinated to male dictated contexts is
demonstrated in the transformation of the Ayah’s dress code once she becomes the
wife of the ice-candy-man in newly formed Pakistan. Lenny’s story of the fate of
Ayah after her abduction by a gang of Muslim fanatics exposes the male-oriented rhetoric
of the nation. As the ice-candy-man defends himself when godmother confronts
him: ‘I saved her . . . . They would’ve . . . killed her . . . I married her!’ (Sidhwa 1989,
p. 249), he justifies the national desire that women are the electorate to be wooed by
those in power. In the unpartitioned, comparatively secular world of Lahore, the
Ayah’s exuberance was irrepressible. In post-Partition, fundamentalist Lahore/Pakistan,
she is captive to the Pakistani nationalist rhetoric and its view of women. From being an
abducted Hindu, the Ayah is converted to a Muslim prostitute, to be later recovered and
sent back as a Hindu refugee, her identity is in a continual state of construction and
reconstruction. From this standpoint, the story of 1947, therefore, can be interpreted as
a gendered narrative of displacement and dispossession.

4. Lenny’s critique of religion

Notably, eminent contemporary historian Mushirul Hasan in India’s Partition (1993)
unravelled the ethical failure the Partition played out. Earlier historians – like Ian
Talbot in Punjab and the Raj, 1849–1947 (1988) and David Gilmartin in Empire
and Islam (1998) while drawing attention to factional alignments and wartime contin-
gencies in the making of Pakistan – apparently ignored the human consequences of
Partition. The role of religion in the cataclysmic event is more often critiqued in oral
narratives of survivor accounts and Partition literature.
In Ice-Candy-Man it is through the eyes of the young Parsi that we comprehend how
the Indian freedom struggle took the guise of a religious crusade resulting in the birth of
a theological Muslim state, Pakistan. The creating of such national margins actually
marginalized countless innocent lives whose hopes and homes were erased because
of an act of political will of the powerful. The lives of Hindus and Sikhs in Lahore/
Pakistan after Partition, therefore, posed an awful dilemma.
226 P. Deb

According to the author, though there are many interesting layers and insightful
interdependent issues in this novel, the main theme is identity: ‘I was just attempting
to write the story of what religious hatred and violence can do to people and how
close evil is to the nature of man’ (www.monsoonmag.com/interviews/i3inter_
sidhwa.html). Sidhwa draws our attention to the debate regarding how far can the
term ‘diaspora’ be used and extended to describe ‘religious’ migration arising out of
specific geo-political crisis.
Lenny is thrown into a psychological battle as she desperately tries to grasp an
understanding of the rapidly changing world around her. The identities of ordinary
people are increasingly fragmented and fractured. As Sidhwa alarmingly recounts in
her novel, Pakistani Bride (2000, p. 16):

Mola Singh stands quite still. The men look away despite the dark. Their indignation
flares into rage. ‘God give our arms strength,’ one of them shouts, and in a sudden move-
ment, knives glimmer. Their cry, ‘Bole so Nihal, Sat Sri Akal’, swells into the ferocious
chant: ‘Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!’ The old Sikh sinks to his knees.

Just prior to Partition, as her familiar characters turn into token religious nomenclatures,
Ayah as a Hindu, Imam Din and the popsicle vendor as Muslim, Hari and Moti the
untouchables, and godmother and her nuclear family, Parsis, the narrator naively
puts up the most vital question – ‘What is God?’ (Sidhwa 1989, p. 94).
With Partition, the discourse of secular rationalism and intimacy that reared Lenny
finally becomes discredited and consigned to the flames. As the Hindu–Muslim con-
flict gathers momentum, Lenny confesses that her ‘perception of people changed’
(Sidhwa 1989, p. 94). Gradually, with the brutal killing of the innocent masseur and
the abduction of her Ayah, she understands that her world has been broken and she
will have to work with the fragments she is left with. Thus, she strives to envision
and articulate new allegiances that can carry her forward, contending realities and
forms of knowledge. Lenny’s relationship with Hamida, as her new Ayah, post-
Partition, makes her more self-conscious and understanding. She continues her task
of envisioning and re-visioning individuals and communities in such times of crisis.
She narrates the story of Partition victims in multiple voices – thus, we see Hamida
from the perspective of the Muslim cook Himat Ali, her Parsi mother who has given
her work and the Sikh guard of the women’s ‘jail’. Thus, Ice-Candy-Man critiques gen-
eralized versions of Partition history by giving us not one but a series of perspectives,
through the various characters in Lenny’s world, which counter one another. As readers
we interrogate each character’s version of Partition – Ranna’s story, Hamida’s story,
for instance – and the contexts which influenced them.
The power of allegiance to any religious ideology to mask human cruelties is
explicated by the ice-candy-man’s role in the novel. The effects of historical disaster
are perhaps brought in most meaningful and human terms in the abuse of the Hindu
Ayah in the hands of the title character, the ice-candy-man. This complex and
layered character reads Urdu newspapers, the Urdu Digest, and even English dailies
like Civil and Military Gazette. He informs the Ayah and her group of friends about
national and world news. Occasionally, he drops a few insightful remarks like: ‘If
we want India back we must take pride in our customs, our clothes, our languages
. . .’ (Sidhwa 1989, pp. 28–29) Significantly, he falls short of mentioning the word ‘reli-
gion’ here. As the other characters in the text dwindle into religious symbols, the
Muslim vendor succumbs to religious fanaticism and intolerance. His parentage too
South Asian Diaspora 227

is important in this context – his father is a puppeteer, while his mother a prostitute. His
paternity or, more accurately, his family lineage is in dispute and so is his ability to tell
about his wife. It is interesting to note here that while India is often figured as the
motherland, Pakistan, on the contrary, is neither mother nor fatherland, but was
inspired by the poet Iqbal’s vision of Muslim brotherhood. This metaphor is partly
literalized as he abducts and forcibly shames and ruins Ayah’s dignity and justifies
himself by citing amorous romantic poets such as Faiz, Mir and Ghalib. His defending
argument when confronted by the godmother that otherwise the Muslim zealots ‘would
have killed her’ is a grotesque approximation of Jinnah’s famous historical words on
religious tolerance on the day of the birth of Pakistan. Lenny thus hints at the human
fallacies of the national figure heads and demystifies them – Gandhi in the case of
India and Jinnah in the case of Pakistan.
The narrator/author thereby also critique the relationship between lie, fiction and
history. The most disturbing aspect of the novel is the ice-candy-man’s lie about
taking good care of the Ayah while he turned her into a prostitute – that troubles
Lenny throughout her life. The lie – which is actually synonymous to the betrayal of
the trust of others – jars the sanctity of many preconceived ideas and notions about
humans and their behaviour in the young psyche of the child. Partition is interestingly
placed around the middle of the story of the girl’s awakening to life and history. So, in
a way Partition seems to asunder her world of dreams, fantasies and fables while sud-
denly jolting her out into a rude, nightmarish and grim reality. Notably, in his essay,
‘In God We Trust’ Rushdie had opined that Pakistan had been ‘insufficiently imagined’
(1991, p. 387). Thus, in other words, the lie of the title character takes away, at least
partly, the all-important meaning from not only Lenny’s and the Ayah’s life, but also
the conception and idealization of Pakistan in the eyes of the readers.
The novel therefore points out the fact that liberal freedom is a perilous balance
between the need for freedom from tyranny and the need for a centre that can withstand
the threat of disintegration. Lenny’s narrative of the birth of Pakistan shows us how
liberal freedom is under threat from forces of anarchy, in the guise of religious
rioters and overzealous mobs. As a subaltern, the narrator/author hints toward a
much needed subtle balance between freedom and tyranny. The invention of diaspora
politics, as Monika Fludernik (2003) rightly argues, takes a step in the direction of
preserving the celebratory tenets of hybridity, and of couching hybridity in the language
of identity politics rather than that of individual self-fulfillment (Introduction, xxiv).
The text thus can be seen as a plea for liberal values for human rights and civil and
religious freedoms.

Conclusion
Quite evidently, a study of Ice-Candy-Man as an integral part of Partition discourses
raises more questions than it manages to answer. The text sensitizes us to the need
to reexamine the partition debate afresh, transcending populist notions, particular
ideologies, misconceptions and national stereotypes. Without being investigative
about the causes of this strategic political event, Sidhwa makes us feel its immediacy
in the lives of the victims.
The alternative agenda of this Parsi diaspora narrative is to expose the ways in
which Partition redefined religious, socio-cultural and territorial boundaries. The poli-
tics of nationalism and Partition reduced people of all the warring communities to
tokens rather than complex human beings. Rather than a mere sub-text, religion
228 P. Deb

forms a text in itself in this novel. Partition violence defied the basic moral values of
Hinduism, Islam as well as Sikh faith. The helplessness of Lenny’s mother and
Imam Din in counter-foiling the abduction of the Hindu Ayah by the treacherous
title character accompanied by a mob of Muslim fanatics proves how societal forces
went beyond the control of an individual or a family.
Moreover, we learn how Partition also becomes a parameter to study the dynamics
of social change and gender perception. Sidhwa sees Partition as a male narrative by
highlighting the indiscriminate violence on women sufferers and survivors. Impor-
tantly, as a woman’s narrative, the embodying of the perspective of the ‘Other’ and
voicing the experience of an entire female community of homeless victims of Partition
form powerful allegories. The sympathetic portrayal raped and abducted women char-
acters, like Shanta, Hamida and Noni Chachi, complicates our notions about home,
patriarchy, state, community, human rights and history. Lenny’s accumulation of
female sexual awakening helps her articulate formerly suppressed voices with greater
sensitivity. As the official and popular narratives imagining nation lead to the engender-
ing of nation as male through their representation of the female body, Sidhwa’s/
Lenny’s story seen through the subaltern eyes seems to challenge such representations
of nation and the female body by exposing the inadequacies and terrible consequences
involved in national patriarchal agencies protecting ‘their’ women.
Partition, in other words, did not solve the problem about Muslim identity or, a
secular Hindu national identity – rather, it presented more acute dilemmas of identity.
In this text, we learn with Lenny that religious identities are not eternally fixed rather, in
Stuart Hall’s words, are subject to the ‘continuous play of history, culture and power’
(2003, p. 234). Our identities are the names we give to the different ways we are posi-
tioned by and within the narratives of the past. To, some extent then, cultural identity is
a social performance, not unlike Judith Butler’s ideas about performing gender. Both
gender and identity are continuous, social constructions (Butler 1999, pp. 176–180).
The role of state, society, gender and community in reshaping one’s post-Partition iden-
tity as explored in this text therefore turns out to be complex.
Like the novelist herself, the narrator does not have a single identity or a single
awareness, but a composite of identities and affiliations. Lenny’s being engaged in a
constant ritual of accommodation and assimilation does not allow her to be at home
with any one religion. Her intellectual engagement and disengagement creates a
sense of perspective that is both incisive and analytical. In the absence of a real geo-
graphical motherland, she creates a ‘home’ on a metaphorical level. This enables her
to assert the sameness between the Hindu Ayah and the Muslim masseur, the untouch-
able Papoo with herself – more than their religious differences she is keen to explore
the possible factors that connect them. Lenny critiques the extreme religious frenzy of
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs around her during the crisis of Partition. As an archetypal
diasporan, she displays and believes in moderation rather than extremism of religious
fanatics. At times her outlook towards religion seems to be far more mature than that of
her Hindu and Muslim hosts. She finds no reason in celebrating and externalizing reli-
gious differences in the wake of Partition as she continues to ‘see through their hearts
and minds’, though ‘their exteriors superimpose a new set of distracting impressions’
(Sidhwa 1989, p. 94). She questions the utility of one’s blindly following religious tra-
ditions as, Hari’s displaying his ‘bodhi’: ‘Just because his grandfathers shaved their
heads and grew stupid tails is no reason why Hari should’ (Sidhwa 1989, p. 95). If reli-
gion is centred on our concept of God, she puts up the most imposing question in the
novel – ‘What is God?’ Characteristically, she never tries to solve this riddle, nor does
South Asian Diaspora 229

she deliberate on the answer of this intriguing question, rather she leaves it for us as
readers to speculate. The process of searching for an adaptive strategy on the part of
a diasporan becomes the attempt to distinguish what is essential in the religion and
what is not.
Above all, Ice-Candy-Man suggests the density of the concepts of nationality and
diasporas. Post-partition, Lenny’s hybrid realization of her own diasporic status, and
her awareness of being between cultures, makes her understand the fact that our
religious identity as a ‘production’, which is always in process rather than being an
established fact. Her story narrates her act of individuating, which later leads her to
know who she is and what she believes. Dislocation from a familiar world can also
lead to connections with newer/‘other’ ones. Further, she points out both the possibi-
lities and malaise of independence. Partition resulted in geographical, cultural, religious
and above all, psychological dislocations. Like the Parsi diasporans, post-colonial
Indians and Pakistanis too must embody their impulse to reinvent themselves and to
create their own morality, as otherwise independence can become purposelessness.
While assimilating the enormity of the experience from a study of this text and few
oral sources of Partition memories, the most interesting point that emerges is that the
Partition violence was not merely a communal conflict, rather it was fuelled by the
human desire to ethnically cleanse minority populations. This is exactly what
Sidhwa critiques and denounces in her novel. Thus, this assessment of Ice-Candy-
Man, along with the parallel texts of standard history texts and personal survivor inter-
views, advocates the necessity of interpreting and re-interpreting the event and memory
of vivisection of the country in 1947.

Notes on contributor
Dr Paromita Deb received her PhD in English literature from Calcutta University in 2008. She
served as a Guest Lecturer of English in the Post Graduate Correspondence School, Gauhati
University. She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences, Kolkata for pursuing research on short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Her research areas
include body studies, early modern literature, Shakespeare, Indian diaspora, Indian writing in
English and American literature. She has published papers on these areas in various journals.

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