Bapsi Sidhwa as an South Asian Novelist

Introduction
Asian American literature can generally be descried as post-colonial in nature.
The impact of over a hundred years of political and cultural occupation of the
Indian sub-continent by British is often clearly visible. Contemporary writings from
the South Asian Diaspora are best known through the talents of Ved Mehta,
Meena Alexander, V.S Naipual, Sara Suleri, Bapsi Sidhwa, Vikram Seth and Bharati
Mukherjee.
Writings of Asian-American writers from the subcontinent are concerned
 Partition
 Post Colonialism
 Recollection of homeland and migration
 Cultural differences
 Personal and communal identity
 Feminism
The characteristics which Bapsi Sidhwa owns as an Asian-American novelist are
as follows:
Partition
Partition has been a popular subject for many Pakistani and Indian writers.
Before Bapsi Sidhwa Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai in Urdu, Amerita
Pritam in Punjabi, Khushwant Singh, Manohar Malgonkar, Chaman Nahal, Attia
Hussain and Mehr Nigar Masroor in English wrote fiction on the theme of
Partition. Partition figures in all of Sidhwa’s novels, set in the Indian sub-
continent. It forms the tail of The Crow Eaters, the head of The Pakistani Bride and
the main body of Cracking India.
Partition I which seven million Muslims and five million Hindus were uprooted
is the theme of Sidhwa’s famous novel Cracking India. The novel records the
neutral observations of Lenny of the world around her and how a political event
overshadows her world, causing disintegration and fragmentation. The story
traces the communal discord that occurred at the time of independence. It
highlights that external events can unleash animalistic characteristics in humans,
so much so, that they are blinded by prejudice and selfishness and use religion to
justify their beastly actions.
Cultural Differences
In her works, Sidhwa highlights the problems of the multicultural societies and
her stories bring to the reader knowledge the cultural disparities and distinctions
which hamper merger of one into another culture Sidhwa’s novels investigate the
intricacies of life in Pakistan and India and diaspora of the Pakistani people
following the partition of the former British colonies in the region in 1947.
In all her novels, she has taken up the issue of the cultural differences and the
problem arising out of it. An American Brat represents the youngsters, especially
the expatriate one, striving hard to strike a balance between tradition and
modernity, past and present dependence and freedom and so forth. While flying
and falling alternately, they are trying to soar to the state of being self-contained
from where there is no falling. The most important trait taken up in An American
Brat is the cultural shock that an International student from the third world faces
and experiences in the US. The novel commences with a shy soft spoken shalwar
kameez clad girl whose mother thinks she is too conservative. At the end of the
book we are left with the portrait of a self-confident, and an independent girl who
has no hangs ups about her individualism.
In spite of his sojourn in cities far away from his mountain village for a pretty
long time, Qasim in The Pakistani Bride feels nostalgic for his native world of
wilderness. In order to re-establish the lost link with his homeland, he marries
Zaitoon to one of his kinsmen in the mountains.
Post Colonialism
The novel has been the aesthetic object of choice for majority of postcolonial
scholars. The representational power of the novel, its ability to give voice to a
people in assertion of their identity and their history, is of primary importance to
postcolonial writers and scholars. In the postcolonial context, there are at least
three authors who have incorporated Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity into
their works from sub-continent, and thus are able to communicate the
postcolonial condition to the rest of the world. Bapsi Sidhwa is one of them.
 Bapsi Sidhwa articulates this same thing in her novel, Cracking India. She
approaches this same idea of Indian society pulling itself apart in its quest for a
shared, postcolonial, national identity by focusing on one small neighborhood in
the Punjab district. The inhabitants of this small, relatively insular community
hardly notice the difference between one another until India achieves its
independence, and is partitioned into Pakistan and India. As the novel progresses,
this happy community is slowly torn apart by violent instances of racism and
religious fanaticism.
Essentially, the message being communicated by this novel is that in forging an
identity, either on an individual basis, or as a nation, the stronger one feels about
belonging to one group, the more separated they become from another.
Feminism
Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels are also appreciated in feminist context. The novel
Cracking India creates a double feminist lens for bloody history of 1947- the
partition of British India into modern India and Pakistan. It offers both a self-
narrated account of the growing consciousness of a little girl, a member of a
minority ethno-religious community, and a focus on the experiences of the scores
of women who were raped, abducted, or mutilated in the ensuing violence.
The novel The Pakistani Bride highlights the plight of women in a patriarchal
society. But Sidhwa’s view of life is optimistic. She loves life in spite of all its
ugliness, brutality and horror. In the original story on which The Pakistani Bride is
based, the girl is murdered but Sidhwa makes Zaitoon survive. She seems to give a
message to women that life must be preserved at all costs since one can fight
oppression only when one is alive.
In spite of the feminist themes in her works, Sidhwa does not see herself as a
writer for women. Of course her protagonists are mainly women and they are
invariably win against men in their struggle for survival and honor. Jerbanoo
outlives her tormentor, Faredoon Junglewalla. Zaitoon manages to save her life
despite the looming threat. Ayah is liberated from the Hira Mandi and sent back
to her family in Amritsar. Feroza in spite of enormous pressures of her back home
family to return to Lahore and her failure in her first love decides to settle in
America. Sidhwa’s women are strong willed, assertive and courageous. They
resolve their crises in their own way.
Post Modernism
The characteristics which designate Pakistani English literature as post- modern
are a shift from village centrism to the city centrism and East-West encounter
which is branded as hybridity in relationship by the critics. Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel
An American Brat can be particularly mentioned in this regard as having post-
modern characteristics. There are characters and situations in the novel from two
different cultures – Pakistani and American. We can further categorize the
Pakistani characters as belonging to Parsi and Muslim communities. Edward Said
has inspired the novelists to write more and more about cultural encounter
between the East and the West. The themes of love, marriage and its failure are
some of the most prominent themes of the post-modern novels. We can see
Sidhwa’s novels dealing with themes most frequently. Lack of faith and declining
moral standards are also predominant subjects in post-modern novels. An
American Brat does correspond with these subjects. The protagonist Feroza is
shocked to see American ways in the beginning but adopts on much of it. But she
faces a conflict on many issues and repents on her smoking and late night
meeting with David. The rights of women have also been a prominent subject in
post-modern novels. Sidhwa deals with the subject in almost all her novels
successfully.
Conclusion
Bapsi Sidhwa has been called Pakistan’s leading English-language novelist. Her
novels not only depict what is present in society but give a deep insight to the
situations, people, problems and their consequences. She has adopted Asian-
American traits so well in her novels that one cannot deny their value and
importance. It is obvious that these traits are the basis on which most of her
novels stand. So it will be unjustified if we don’t mention Sidhwa in the list of
Asian-American writers.