Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114712 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Customer Reviews

This author's relative obscurity is inexplicable.
Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India will expand and alter your view of India, Pakistan, and the British Raj. Using a child-narrator, a literary device over-employed and often unsuccessful, this author has found the perfect vehicle for conveying the heart-breaking story of the Partition of India in l947, without being coy and without descending into bathos.

Lenny, as the child of a Parsee family, roams freely through the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee society of her household and neighborhood in Lahore. Because she is lame and receiving private schooling, she is at home when momentous events and important conversations occur, and because she is very young and has no ethnic biases, she observes the disintegration of her society with the puzzlement of an outsider.

An active, loving person, Lenny makes us see the personal and emotional costs of the founding of Pakistan, especially to women and children. Whether your interest is historical, literary, or feminist, Cracking India will illuminate the dangers and tragedies of creating artificial geographical boundaries. Mary Whipple

One of the finest works of partition fiction
Published as Ice Candy Man and Cracking India (and made into a movie called Earth) the book tells the story of the partition. Initially I was put of by the fact that we had a child narrator, but Lenny's insights and interpretations of the events around her can be almost hilarious and work very well in what is otherwise an almost violent read. Much has been made of the pro-Pakistani slant to the book, it's a bias that's hard to deny but it is an almost impossible to task to find literature on the partition, both from fact or fiction that is truly objective. Sidwa presents a view point and it is a view point shared by many and therefore should be read for that reason alone. As a work of literature this is almost with equal and is the finest piece of partition fiction I have read to date. It's not a tale of politicians, but of people and how they react to the events unfolding. Central to the story are the many men of all religions courting Lenny's Ayah, we meet the Ice Candy Man, the masseur, the butcher all vie for her affections. The book, though it takes a few chapters to get going soon becomes impossible to put down, the mixture of humour and violence can leave one laughing one minute and almost reduced to tears the next. A must read.

A world torn apart as seen by a child.
Ms. Sidhwa does a wonderful job of presenting the tensions that exist to this day on the indian subcontinent. I do however feel that she doesn't aptly portray the lives of poor or middle class indians. Probably because the minute percentage that make up the ruling and wealthy classes on the subcontinent are out of touch with the reality that exists in their own country. The only poor people they know are their servants (often unpaid child labor from their tenant farmer's families) and its not like they bother to sit down to tea and ask about their day.

While I saw a previous review that accused Ms. Sidhwa of being racist and inaccurate, I have to disagree. During the time of the partition there were murderers on ALL sides. Muslims slaughtered Hindus...Hindus slaughtered Muslims. While each side bickered about who attacked first, thousands continued to be murdered. I feel Ms. Sidwha presents the both sides impartially.

If only the murders of 1947 could be isolated incidents, but they are not. There is an aftermath that follows such brutal acts. Take for example Nusreen, a woman from a middle class muslim punjabi family. In 1947 she, her two sisters, two brothers, parents and cousins were forced to flee their village because hindu raiders had come to kill all muslims. They didn't have time to pack belongings or take their savings. While migrating to Pakistan her brothers were murdered, leaving the family with nothing for dowries, no means to provide such, and only an old feeble father. As a result she and her sisters were forced into marriages far beneath where they would have been arranged. While Nusreen and her sisters were beautiful young women, respectable and mannered, they were married to brothers who were considered the village bullies. It was the only match that could be obtained without dowries. While that may be a tragedy, and her life was difficult, her influence affected all of her children in positive ways. Her husband may have been a lowly dude wallah but her sons grew up to be doctors, engineers, lawyers. Nusreen, a poor village woman in the punjab and also my mother-in-law, is a woman for whom I have the greatest respect and love.

I hold Ms. Sidwha in the highest esteem for portraying accurately the events on the subcontinent and the cultural differences between the various religious sects but I feel she, like all people from her class have no real understanding of the other 95% who inhabit the subcontinent.

There were far greater tragedies that occurred in 1947 than a rich girl losing her Ayah.