Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa 141

Making up with Painful History.

The Partition of India in Bapsi
Sidhwas Work: Bapsi Sidhwa
interviewed by Isabella Bruschi
Isabella Bruschi interviewed Bapsi Sidhwa in Turin
on 14 May 2007.

Abstract
The interview engages Bapsi Sidhwa in a discussion on Partition, a
central issue in her novel Ice-Candy-Man, which also recurs in her other
works. The authors interest in the historical event, beside having auto-
biographical origins, demonstrates the tremendous impact it had on
ordinary peoples lives, the way it shaped their identities and the trauma
it caused, which is not yet healed in contemporary India and Pakistan.
According to Sidhwa, literature can dig into painful memory and try
to make sense of it more successfully than history can. Her adoption
(unprecedented in the context of Partition literature) of a marginal point
of view that of a Parsi girl who looks at reality with the immediacy and
absence of prejudice typical of childhood has enabled Sidhwa to tell
her story with greater impartiality and to treat the problematic question
of womens rape and abduction from a gendered perspective. The inter-
view also explores the relationship between Sidhwa and film director
Deepa Mehta, and between novel writing and filmmaking in connection
with both Ice-Candy-Man/Earth and Water.

Keywords
Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man, Partition, womens identities, Lenny,
Deepa Mehta

Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications http://jcl.sagepub.com

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 43(3): 141149. DOI: 10.1177/0021989408095243
142 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

IB: It is commonly known that Partition had a tremendous impact on

the lives of ordinary people. How did it affect them? What, in your
opinion, are the greatest changes Partition produced in peoples lives
and relationships, and are these changes still visible now?
BS: Partition affected each one of our lives, because it was the largest
migration known to man. Twelve million people crossed borders over
three months; they were physically uprooted and, because of the riots,
many people lost their relatives. Many Muslims stayed behind in India,
while half of their families went to Pakistan; in Sind, for example, a lot
of Hindus stayed in Pakistan and are still there, but others moved, so
the families got divided. This didnt affect only the Hindus and Muslims
and Sikhs, who were directly involved, even Parsi and Christian families
were divided. It was a time of transition and many Christians and Anglo-
Indians moved to England too. It affected every life, for example my
life. My mothers relatives were all in India and every year she would
take us to visit them. But it became more and more difficult to get visas.
Once you got your visa, you were only allowed to go to three cities. So
we would always choose Amritsar, Delhi and Bombay []. We had to
report our arrival and our departure at the police station in each city.
All these formalities contributed to disrupt families on both sides of the
Indian and Pakistani border. Another thing happened to me, as a con-
sequence of the bad feeling which was created at the time of Partition:
I was married in India first and at twenty-three I was divorced; although
I had an Indian citizenship, I was not able to take my son to Pakistan
with me. So he grew up without me. []
However, ordinary people are more willing than their governments
to re-establish peaceful relationships. The worst rioting and killing took
place in the Punjab, yet strangely enough people in the Punjab have
been readier to forget the atrocities and forgive each other. The Sikhs
were, for some reason, more violent than anybody. And yet, now when
the Sikhs come to Lahore to visit their temples during religious festivals
they are warmly welcomed. There are many Sikh shrines in Pakistan
and some 40,000 to 50,000 Sikhs get special pilgrimage visas to come to
Pakistan every year. People in shops give them free food because there
is nostalgia; they used to belong here and the people miss them. []
The anger and feelings of vengeance caused by the killing and rioting
have substantially lessened. Both sides are aware they were the victims
and the persecutors.
But the legacy of Partition is still there and can be seen in what is
going on now in India; feelings have become much worse in places like
Bombay and Gujarat, where there was little or no rioting at the time
of Partition. Muslims did not even move away from there, or very few
moved. But now there is this tremendous surge of anti-Muslim feeling
Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa 143

and until recently there were pogroms to kill Muslims, especially in

Gujarat. Hindutva, the Hindu nationalism that rose in India with the
election of the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, stirred the worst feelings:
they would go around in huge chariots, in saffron clothes, with caste
marks on their foreheads shouting that every Muslim had to be killed.
Yet there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan. Also
the Kashmiri dispute is not settled; India and Pakistan have gone to war
three times over Kashmir. Every time there is an election the politicians
beat that Kashmir drum.
Because of what happened at Partition, Muslims seem to have become
disposable people and this seems to be true worldwide: you can kill them
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, anywhere it doesnt matter. Partition is
not over, it is going on and on; its problems stay and they affect each
of our lives.
IB: Literature, visual art and music are said to succeed where history
fails, that is they can express what is silenced, because it is officially un-
savoury or because it is too painful to voice. How far do you agree with
this statement?
BS: Hundred per cent. I mean, if you want to know about the
Russian war, you read Tolstoy, rather than Russian historians; he tells
much more. Historians are often guided by their own and their nations
prejudices. Fiction-writers can paint a fuller canvas and often intuitively
arrive at the larger truth. Now, I am Parsi, not Hindu, Muslim or Sikh
and I wrote from a Parsi childs perspective, because I felt it could bring
some sort of fairness on the issue of Partition which still raises strong
emotions involving religious communities. Historians often arrange
facts according to their own assumptions and aims. That said, I have
read accounts of the Partition by Indian Historians [e.g. Seervai] that
are meticulously researched and accurate.
IB: In your work the issue of Partition is recurrent: it is mentioned
at the beginning of The Bride, it is the central theme in the short story
Defend Yourself Against Me and in Ice-Candy-Man. Where does your
apparent need to write about Partition come from?
BS: Partition is still so immediate for us, especially since I live in
Lahore, and I lived in Lahore at that time. Partition has changed the
map of our world and it has been the most defining moment in India
and Pakistans history. It has changed our way of life, our politics, and
affected the education system. Partition is still very much on peoples
mind in the Punjab, which has been divided between India and Pakistan.
In South India people are not so aware of it, because they were not
affected. In a way it is nice; the younger generation there say: these
were your quarrels, these are not our quarrels. And that is wonderful
144 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

to hear, because it means they have lost the prejudice. But it is still real
in the Punjab, it is still very alive.
IB: The character of Ranna in Ice-Candy-Man seems to be the same
person as the man with the scar, who tells his experiences as a child
during Partition to the protagonist of Defend Yourself Against Me.
In what relationship do they stand to each other? Have they got to do
with your personal memories?
BS: They are both the same person. I met this gentleman in Houston.
I had gone to a party at a Hindu gentlemans; he was a writer too and he
had invited Muslims, Sikhs, everybody. His American wife pointed out
to me a man, a Muslim, who was wearing a wig because he had been
wounded during Partition, when he was very small; the Sikhs had at-
tacked his village, they had killed all his relatives and badly cut his scalp.
I asked him if he would share his story with me and he did. He told me
everything very frankly. The man with the scar and Rannas story in
Ice-Candy-Man are based on this gentlemans story, but what I describe
in my writings is much less horrifying than what he went through. It is
amazing how many times he escaped and every time he felt there was
somebody to help him and he was safe, he fainted. Each time people
left him for dead. After Ice-Candy-Man was published, he told my friend
that I should not have written that way. He left Houston. I think he was
angry because I had written about the women in his family being kid-
napped. That is something nobody talks about, nobody: it is such a
dishonour to admit that a woman in ones family was raped. Its only
after Ice-Candy-Man was written that people confided in me about it.
One did not realize that hundreds of thousands of women had been kid-
napped and brutalized. I knew because there was a recovered womens
camp next to my house, but it was so hush-hush, it was a subject no one
wanted to mention or admit to.
IB: Do you perceive your writings about Partition as belonging to
a group of novels and short stories focused on the same issue? And in
what relation does your work stand to the others?
BS: Rushdie and Khushwant Singh both said Ice-Candy-Man is the
best book about Partition, and I think it is. This is partly because I was
in the Punjab at that time and I grew up with stories of what happened,
hush-hush stories, which afterwards made sense to me when I was
writing my book. Writers who write about the Partition but did not live
through it, respond differently: their response is not so immediate, it
has more of an agenda. Khushwant Singhs Train to Pakistan was an
almost immediate reaction to the events of Partition; he is a Sikh, but
he wrote out of compassion for all communities. Shauna Singh Baldwin
has written her What the Body Remembers from the Sikh perspective
too. I found Manju Kapurs Difficult Daughters very moving. An Indian
Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa 145

television series based on Bhisham Sahnis novel, Tamas, is quite fair,

but it has a Hindu slant. In that respect I feel that my book has more
objectivity.
IB: Many women novelists have written about Partition. I am thinking,
for example, of Attia Hosains Sunlight on a Broken Column, Anita
Desais Clear Light of Day, Manju Kapurs Difficult Daughters, and of
those works written in different Indian languages. All of them have a
young woman as a protagonist, some a first-person narrator too, like your
Ice-Candy-Man. Do you think a female or feminist view about Partition
exists and, if so, what would it consist of?
BS: Sunlight on a Broken Column is semi-autobiographical; I would
not say it is only feminist, because Attia Hosain was an upper-middle-
class lady writing about the upper-middle class, so the book did not
deal so much with ordinary people and in spite of the protagonists
love affair, which breaks with her familys tradition and status, it had a
limited point of view. Also Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, the author of The Heart
Divided, was from a prominent family; her father and uncle were very
involved in the Partition problems, in the politics of the time. She was
a young woman in that period, very conscious of what was happening
and she wrote again from a privileged perspective but she gave an
interesting insight into the politics of the time from the point of view of
Partition in Pakistan.
IB: Does the difficulty of giving voice to the pain thousands of men
and particularly women experienced in the period of Partition have
anything to do with your choice of a child narrator in Ice-Candy-Man?
In other words, was this literary strategy enabling in writing this story?
Do you think your child-narrator allowed you to speak, in a sense,
more frankly?
BS: Yes, children can see through things very directly, and their im-
pressions are often closer to the truth. Lenny has a shifting perspective
she is a child of seven or eight, yet her voice is sometimes that of an
adolescent or even of an adult, so all these complex aspects of her
character come into play. Of course choosing a girl-child narrator was
crucial. When I started this novel I thought of an omniscient voice,
an adults voice and suddenly, when I wrote the first paragraph, I dis-
covered Lennys was the voice I wanted to use, and in the present tense.
When I was writing the novel, I was able to inhabit the persona of this
little girl, and I found my vision cleared; it became very direct. A child
is allowed to be bewildered and not always accurate. Children have not
learnt to look at reality through the lenses of prejudice yet; they have
not learnt to hate people and hate communities; they are taught that as
they grow up. Children are still innocent, so this is where their special
vision comes from. This child, Lenny, doesnt even know the names of the
146 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

people who are Ayahs friends. She knows Ice-candy-man as Ice-candy-

man, she doesnt know his name; she doesnt know Ayahs name. In a
way children are selfish, they just know people by the means by which
they serve them: Masseur is Masseur because he massages her leg. Later
on when she realizes that differences exist, then she realizes that they
have not only names, they also have religions.
IB: Identity, in terms of gender, community/religion, citizenship/
nationality, seems to me a central theme in Ice-Candy-Man. To what
extent does Partition affect the characters identity and contribute to
Lennys building up of her own identity?
BS: Identities were very fluid, then they became fixed. Of course
anything as dramatic as the Partition experience affects our consciousness,
our reaction to people. I dont think anyone can be truly dispassionate
your experiences colour your vision and give you certain biases, you
grow up with prejudices. As for my sense of identity, Partition didnt
make me feel more of a Parsi, but it made me feel more sympathetic
to people of other religions, because I had seen them suffer so much.
I saw how devastated peoples lives were on account of Partition and
the compassion I felt defined my character, and of course, I suppose, all
these incidents impressed themselves on me helped to create the iden-
tity of the characters in Ice-Candy-Man.
IB: In gender-oriented studies of Partition, such as Ritu Menons
and Kamla Bashins Borders and Boundaries or Urvashi Butalias The
Other Side of Silence, mass rape and abduction during Partition and the
post-Partition disputes between India and Pakistan about the retrieval
of their missing women have been interpreted as a consequence of the
patriarchal discourse implied in the nationalist project, which had
elected the inviolate female body as the symbol of national purity. Do
Lennys ayahs, Shanta and Hamida, represent such a connection between
womens sexuality and nation-building?
BS: To a large extent they do. I think Urvashi and Ritu have created,
through their research and gifts as writers, invaluable works. As I said
before, people had just got so hush-hush about the topic of women being
kidnapped. It was not till Ice-Candy-Man came out that people realized
how many women had been kidnapped and people wanted to find out
what had happened. Both writers researched the lives of the Hindu
women who were kidnapped; unfortunately nobody did research on
the Pakistani side; its a very shameful thing.
Anyway, I dont think there is a deliberate connection on this point
in my book, but it imbeds itself naturally in the narrative. I knew that so
many women had been kidnapped and yet very little was written about
it, so I wanted to do it. And I wanted to write about sexuality too: the
little girls Lennys sexuality, Ayahs sexuality. This has been a theme
Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa 147

in all my works; it started with The Bride. I was not self-conscious about
my writing. I grew up as a lonely child, so I dwelt in my own thoughts.
I wrote truthfully, without inhibitions, so when I started to write about
children I included their sexuality. I know how strong teenagers sexual
feelings can be. So even in Lennys case and in Ayahs case, I described
female sexuality because I feel men tend to describe it very differently,
more exploitatively; there is more of a sexual fantasy when they de-
scribe womens sexuality. So this is something I have depicted in all my
books, without being conscious of it really. But at the back of my mind,
I think, Ive always had the feeling that womens sexuality has been
glossed over and not portrayed accurately. Even our fathers, brothers,
mothers hate to admit their childrens especially their daughters,
sisters sexuality. So I wanted to bring this out into the open: little
girls not only little boys also have sexual feelings. So there is where
Lenny and Ayah and all come in. Ayah is surely a very sensual, sexual
person. Her attraction was also a way of showing how closely the Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs lived together before Partition; her sexuality was the
glue no matter what religion they belonged to that held her group
of friends together. []
IB: When Lenny witnesses the brutal killings in the streets of Lahore,
she reacts with crimson fury and she tears her doll apart; how would
you explain such a violent reaction?
BS: When you see violence on that scale, you are going to be affected,
especially if you are a child. Lenny saw dead bodies, Lenny saw fires,
Lenny saw mourning, Lenny heard the story of Ice-candy-mans sisters
breasts coming back in a gunny-sack on a train from India. As a child
I saw many of these things. A mob did come into our house, because
they thought we were a Hindu household; my mother came out with her
hands on both of our heads, which I made into the scene where Ayah
is kidnapped. Part of that scene was based on reality, even though now
I tend to forget what was real and what is fantasy! Anyway all those
images of violence, the sense of helplessness and fear you have when
somebody comes to attack you and you dont know what to do, create
unexpected reactions. Lenny tears the dolls legs apart, because she saw
a man being torn apart by two jeeps and she wants to discover what
it really means. She is curious and horrified and she wants to under-
stand how it happened.
IB: Now, as for your relationship with film-maker Deepa Mehta
and cinema. Your Ice-Candy-Man was made into her film Earth and
her film Water was made into a novel by you. What has working with
Ms Mehta meant to you and, more specifically, what has the two-way
passage from your words to her images and from her images to your
words involved?
148 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

BS: Deepa Mehta came across my book, Cracking India [US title
of Ice-Candy-Man], and decided: this is the film I want to make, this
is Earth! She didnt know where I lived, but she discovered we had a
common friend in London, who gave her my phone number. She called
me, told me she wanted to make my book into a film and asked for my
permission to do so. She had just made Fire, so she promised she would
send it to me to see; she was very keen that I should say yes. She talked
non-stop, selling the idea to me. As she talked, I realized that she is also
Punjabi, from the Indian side, and that she had understood the nuances
of my book perfectly; she had understood the significance of Lenny as
a Parsi child and she felt this child brought a fair point of view to the
story. At the end of our chat I said she could make the book into a film.
I remember she was worried that somebody else might make another
offer to me, but I reassured her. So she started to work on the screenplay
and, whenever she finished a section, she would send it to me we would
fax each other in those days; I would suggest alterations, but very soon
I backed off. I realized her cinematic vision was more important for
the film than my writers vision. I am glad about it, because in this way
she was free to make the film as she did. I knew that Ice-Candy-Man
was the most difficult of my books to make into a film; I expected that
people would want to make The Bride into a film, because it is more
cinematic. I was surprised that she wanted to make this film. [] I had
different ideas about how to render Lennys thoughts in the film; I
imagined them as a voice-over heard on a close-up of Ice-candy-mans
toes for example, darting up Ayahs saris, whatever. But Deepa said
she was uncomfortable with voice-overs. She would hold the camera at
an angle that would represent Lennys vision. [] Deepa phoned me
early one morning to let me know she had finished her last film Water.
I knew she was shooting the film in Sri Lanka because of troubles
with the Indian authorities: Bapsi, I want you to novelize it, she said,
adding that she would send me the rough edit of the film. She also said
she wanted the novel in time for the release of the film in three months.
Impossible! I didnt think I could do that: it takes me three years to write
a novel! She persuaded me to give it a try. I am very fond of her and I
respect her as a person and as an activist, so I decided to try. I found
the child Chuyia was really so similar to Lenny that I could get hold of
her character and through her I was able to make Water into a novel.
I worked both with Deepas film and her script. The script of course
was like a skeleton. It was amazingly the opposite of what happened
with Earth. As Deepa made Ice-Candy-Man into a script for Earth, it
dwindled and became less, less, less; it became like a skeleton. I thought
my book had been reduced to nothing! Then I realized that this is what
happens; to make a book into a film you must reduce it to its very bones
Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa 149

and the camera will fill out all that you have written. In the case of
Water I did not simply describe the scenery and action and extend the
script. Both Deepa and I wanted a novel, not an extended script. The film
cannot explain the religious laws that govern the widows lives or why
widows are treated so harshly. It cannot give each widows background
or describe her past. I created a village-life for Chuyia with her parents
and siblings in a prologue before the films action starts. I described
her marriage and the quarrels between her parents that preceded her
marriage. And later I not only added to the scenes and extended dia-
logues but I also created new scenes for Chuyia and Madhumati and
the eunuch Gulabi. I explain the culture of the eunuchs and their place
in Indian society. As for Shakuntala, the woman who in the end saves
Chuyia, I felt there was something lacking in her character, so I added
a lot more there. I fiddled a bit with the ending; I thought it was a little
strange that Shakuntala should hand the child over to a man, especially
in the context of those days. So I created a new character, a woman
character, who very subtly befriends the child and Shakuntala; when
the train leaves this woman is on it and she nods at Shakuntala so you
feel there is a woman who is also going to take care of the child. It is a
heart-achingly beautiful film, but a novel requires a different approach
to realize its own potential.
IB: Do you feel the film Earth is an accurate reflection of your book
Ice-Candy-Man?
BS: Yes, it caught the essence of the book. Of course its different. It
has to be different, otherwise it might have been an endless sequence of
episodes in a TV serial; the book is so much longer! It is different only in
the sense that she concentrated more on the romantic part of the novel
and also she threw out most of the Parsi characters, a lot of the humour.
But how much can you put into a film?
IB: Last question: most of your books are set in India and Pakistan.
Especially in Lahore; however An American Brat is partly set in the USA
and the short story Defend Yourself Against Me takes place entirely
there; you have also explored the contact between the two worlds the
East and the West in The Bride, through the relationship between
Zaitoon and the American woman. Do you feel both these worlds
are yours?
BS: Yes, of course a writer has to possess her world to write about it.
When my physical location changed and I moved to America, the land-
scape of my writing also changed and I could incorporate America into
my writing. Of course Lahore is always there, but when it came to The
Crow Eaters I incorporated a lot of Bombay and India into it. So I am
ready to be wherever it is necessary, in whichever city.