Dark Portrayal of Gender: A Post-colonial Feminist Reflection of Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-candy Man

Abstract

The portrayals of women by fiction writers of Indian sub-continent can be seen in the context of postcolonial feminism. Sidhwa’s novels may be a part of postcolonial fiction, which is fiction produced mostly in the former British colonies. As Bill Ashcroft suggests in The Empire Writes Back, the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the colonizers. About the role of postcolonial literature with respect to feminism, Ashcroft writes, “Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writings and through other arts such as paintings sculpture, music, and dance that today realities experienced by the colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential.” Indian sub-continent fiction is the continuation and extension of the fiction produced under the colonial rulers in undivided India. As such it has inherited all the pros and cons of the fiction in India before the end of colonial rule in Indo-Pak. Feminism has been one part of this larger body of literature. Sidhwa has portrayed the lives of Pakistani women in dark shades under the imposing role of religious, social, and economic parameters. These roles presented in The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-Candy Man are partly traditional and partly modern – the realities women face.