Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa, as a trauma in Cracking India

Ice Candy Man

Bapsi Sidhwa

Discuss how the partition is seen as a trauma in Cracking India's "Ice Candy Man".

Answer: Bapsi Sidhwa’s most famous novel, Ice Candy Man represents partition as a painful experience for both national level and individual. Sidhwa made it clear that the mere idea of partition was theoretically created, not anything close to what it was in reality. Partition was seen as a thing that politicians could decide in a distant and quiet room without a mirror of the reality of political decision-making. The trauma of the partition was seen in his execution, something like that was revealed by Sidhwa. The notion of religious intolerance for fear of partition helped to increase its traumatic hold on the nation.

Siddha shows how women were the immediate recipients of this injury, either by enduring the loss and death of their husbands or by losing their own qualities through rape and sexual abuse. The way Sidhwa has seen the country being violated by partition; the lines have been marked without any consideration for individuals. She has seen the citizens of India and especially women being violated in the same way. At the national level this same thing happens to an individual, which manifests the trauma of partition on a real and stable level. It is here that Sidhwa sees partition as something that is irresistibly traumatic for India and its people.

Leaving a young girl, Lenny, at the center of the novel, Sidhwa both emphasized the personal influence of political decisions - often on the other side of the world - and emphasized the inadequate knowledge British policies imposed on her subjects. Although Lenny is confined by her physical disability, her strong female family and social networks and her innocence protect her at one stage; He exploits the effects of partition more emotionally than rationally.

Although the author himself says that Lenny was not himself, one would think that the narrator Leni himself was the author telling the whole story of that division. The author felt the trauma after the birth of a Persian child and growing up in Pakistan so he presented the trauma from a Pakistani perspective. He reproduces experiences and events in a way that makes the reader feel the same way, even though 21st century readers have not witnessed the events themselves. Partition readers feel through the actual narration of a fictional story that they were present to witness the event and the trauma during the partition. The novel can actually be considered as a real autobiography, the historical events are fictionalized and colored by the authors who have their own reflections, opinions, beliefs, feelings, emotions and fantasies. Overall it can be said that ‘Ice Candy-Man’ depicts the tragedy of the common man caused by the split with the actual color.

Ayah is carrying more weight than Leni, an adult, female worker (as well as a Hindu). Only those who are readily available become internally displaced persons whose home becomes a place of danger rather than security; although he was helped to leave, he suffered pain in exile.

However, Bapsi Sidhwa described the division of the Indian subcontinent as fundamentally painful for society as a whole, not just for those who have experienced it. Even beyond the end of British colonial rule, secession between individual countries forced millions to choose sides, many marginalized and endangered. Numerous individuals, especially Ice Candy Man, tried to strategize the situation for their own interests.

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