A Feministic Approach to Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man

Pages:45-49
Ashok Kumar (Department of English, M.M. P.G. College, Fatehabad, Haryana)

Ice Candy Man is a feminist novel exhibiting brutal experiences of women during the partition of India and its aftermath. The novel was published in 1988. The novel was published in U.S.A. and India under the title Cracking India in 1991 and 1992 respectively. Filmmaker Deepa Mehta made a movie based on this novel, named Earth 1947 in 1998. The story of the novel ranges from the partition of one Indian subcontinent into two different nations- India and Pakistan, on 15 August, 1947. Along with the presentation of bifurcation of India and Pakistan, Sidhwa presents the predicament of aggrieved situations of women in which they have to encounter with severe physical troubles as well as mental trauma. Belles Letter remarks that “Sidhwa is a feminist and a realist. One sees in her women characters the strength of passion, the tenderness of love, and the courage of one’s conviction” (qtd. in Ice-Candy-Man). It would not be wrong to interpret the novel from the feminist point of view after a thorough reading of the novel. The novel touches upon the pressing problems relating to women. The story of the novel is narrated by the child narrator named Lenny, an eight year old Parsi girl. Sidhwa employs the child as narrator for the narration of the novel because she wants to present everything without any partiality. With the help of the child narrator, Sidhwa shows the changing socio-political reality of India just before the partition of India into two independent nations.