Bapsi Sidhwa Research Articles

Deconstruction of Patriarchal Structures and Post-Colonial Themes in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Short Story, ‘A Gentlemanly War‘

Deconstruction of Patriarchal Structures and Post-Colonial Themes in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Short Story, ‘A Gentlemanly War‘

Hybrid’s Hunt for Home: A Postcolonial Study of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Fiction

The present study aims at exploring the elements of hybridity and assimilation in the fictional expedition of Bapsi Sidhwa. The work in question adheres to the theoretical construct of Postcolonial theory by utilizing Bhabha’s concept of Hybridity which suggests that the colonizers and the colonized, through their interaction, mutually construct their subjectivities and this interaction destabilizes the hierarchy of superior and inferior cultures. The research is primarily qualitative in nature and the selected texts namely, An American Brat (1993) and The Crow Eaters (1980) are subjected to close reading for explicating the instances where the characters’ social practices and personal experiences display hybrid cultural forms, patterns and parameters. The novels actually depict a clash and an unbalanced conflict between different cultures. Though the characters yearn for saving their own cultures yet at the same time they are forced to sacrifice their traditions. . The current research shines light on the implications of multiculturalism and highlights an increasing interaction between different nations. The study contends that identity is a process, constantly being redesigned and refashioned. In the light of the findings, it can be concluded that identity is fluid, never complete, always in process owing to transnational and transcultural flows in the globalized world of today. The current study can be helpful in understanding the dynamics of identity and the challenges to the cultural purity in the world of diaspora.

Analysis of Linguistic Choices in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat

The present study contributes to the growing literature on Pakistani novels in English by exploring transitivity choices in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat from Halliday’s (2004) systemic functional grammar (SFG) perspective. Data of the study consisted of 1158 clauses that were selected from the novel. The following techniques were used to analyse data: comprehending the selected text of the novel, splitting the text into clauses, identifying processes, participants and circumstance types and drawing the conclusion based on the analysed text. The findings of the study revealed that all types of processes were found in the novel. Among 1158 clauses, the material clauses were computed most frequent with the frequency of (566), making a proportion of (48.87%). The second most frequent projection was of the mental clauses with the frequency of (392) making a proportion of (33.85%). The concentration of verbal processes in the text was (123), having a proportion of (10.62%). In comparison, the lowest projection was found in behavioural processes (50), making a proportion of (4.31%), followed by relational processes (17) making a proportion of (1.46%) and existential processes (10) making a proportion of (0.86%). The study results showed that Sidhwa was interested in the description of physical actions and feelings of different characters. For this purpose, she used material and mental processes more than any other process in An American Brat. The current study proved that systemic functional linguistic theory is a helpful tool for analysing any literary or non-literary text. It has implications for further research in stylistic and narratological studies through the transitivity system of analysis.

Celebrating Indigenous Culture and Identity in Ice Candy Man: A Postcolonial Critique

To justify colonialism and perpetuate colonial rule the colonizers appropriated their political, cultural, academic, literary, and linguistic supremacy which left a tinge of mimicry and hybridity among natives. The colonizers, being in the center, employed colonial discourse, Eurocentric historic construct, western education system, English language, missionary, and creative literature to portray the periphery, the colonized, as uncivilized, accultured, incompetent, uncouth, and diabolical evils. To rebut this, the postcolonial writers rejected colonialist ideology and cultural supremacy by asserting native culture, identity, language, and societal values. They actually disassociated themselves from cultural imperialism and celebrated their indigenous culture. The undertaken study analyses the portrayal of celebration of the indigenous culture and identity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man (1988-89) from the vantage point of postcolonial theory. It has been found that Sidhwa celebrates indigenous culture, identity, tradition, language, and localization in the novel. To this effect, she employs code-mixing to add indigenous semantics, delineates characters from the locality, asserts her Pakistaniness, and objectifies Pakistani leadership and narrative in the novel and thus she continues to live as a postcolonial writer.

Negotiating Conflict: Regional and National Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English

Pakistan has frequently been viewed as a stronghold of Islamic radicals, often overlooking the fact that various trends of both dormant and obvious conflicts exist between the politics of religion and region. Whereas the former is mainly controlled by the state, the latter is generally influenced by language and ethnicity. The state’s monolithic notion of national identity, from the country’s birth in 1947 to the present, has overshadowed the regional identities mainly the Pashtuns, Baluchis, and Sindhis, and disregarded the minority credos such as Shias, Parsis, Ahmadis, Hindus, and Christians. The present article aims to explore how contemporary Pakistani fiction in English spotlights images of a fragmented national self, underlining plights of the aforementioned marginal groups and exhibiting strong resistance to hidebound national identity. Reviewing contemporary Pakistani fiction in English with a particular focus on the fiction of Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Bina Shah, and Jamil Ahmad, this paper aims to bring critical attention of the scholars to the socio-cultural and political valuation of the regional identities.

Beyond Humanity: Revisiting the Ethics of Body Politics and Violence Against Women in Partition Literature

The literary, historical, political and cultural stories of the partition which have been created by writers demonstrate that women, regardless of their cultural and religious backgrounds, were the worst affected by the recently recognized India-Pakistan border in 1947. The time period saw numerous forms of violence against women, regardless of any feeling of community. It has been a negative tradition to target all pious things for abusing, and revenging. Women have been regarded as a soft corner for all human beings. The bodies of women have been recognised as a notable tool for abusing and misbehaving. kidnapping stripping, making naked, rapping, deforming, cutting of breasts, engraving with religious symbols, and finally killing of women on the name of creed were witnessed in a great number which was the consequence of partition. The research work intends to give a complete analysis of the values and symbols of women's breasts by drawing on the ideas of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on power politics. Many literary, cultural, historical, religious, and political texts have used the period as their backdrop. The rhetoric of mother India was framed out of chaos and violence particularly against women and generally against the mass. As a result, it is considered as a movement having wounded breasts as a metaphor for border crossing and as a terrible testament to the history of Partition, endangering the stability of the country. The world witnessed the worst partition in the history of the world. The paper attempts to examine the Partition massacre by focusing on and comprehending female corpses with scratched breasts as abject who break the bounds of normative society and show its flaws in light of Julia Kristen's abjection theory. The values, ethical considerations, political ploys, and communal sensibility presented in this piece may be seen as a terrible repudiation of a brutal decolonization process and as an occultist for feminist resistance. The misery and sadness of maimed women's bodies are used as an illustration of the dialectic between history and the body by authors like Bapsi Sidhwa, Bhishm Sahani, and Khushwant Singh. There is the development of breaches of women's rights.

Female Corporeality and the Sublimation of Pain: A Study of The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa

This study explores in detail the crisis of female corporeality and how the self sublimates the resultant pain into psychological empowerment. Pakistani women have long been viewed as having no space for themselves. They could not master their choices or muster up courage to fight for the fulfillment of their desires. Similarly, the female characters in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Pakistani Bride (1990) appear to be oppressed and marginalized entities, dependent on men for their socio-economic needs. Yet, this research argues that their corporeal pain transforms into a psycho-emotional haven providing them a space of their own to think and make their own decisions. This specific strand has been a neglected area of research in the Sub-continental context. The research design used in this study is qualitative while the textual analysis is used as a method to analyze the data. The research pursues feminist literary standpoint theory posited by bell hooks (2004) in the postcolonial feminist context, while the Foucauldian (1979) concept of “Panopticism” (p. 195) and “Docile Body” (p. 135) are threaded to highlight the concept of complete physical and mental surveillance of the autonomous body/person in order to investigate the shift of gender/power roles from male hegemony to female empowerment.

Analysis of the Urduization Trend in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels

The study investigated the trend of Urduization in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels; “The Crow Eaters” (1978) and “Water” (2006), with a focus on the use of Urduized nouns in the two novels. Urduization is the process of adding words from Urdu into the English language (Ali & Ijaz, 2009). Pakistani literature in English began to make its presence felt both nationally and internationally in the 1970s. A significant feature of this literature was the language used by the Pakistani writers. The unrestrained use of local words and expressions, reflected a new confidence in the use of the English language by the Pakistani writers. Pakistani English (PE) as a non-native variety displayed the unique characteristics and features of cultural influence of the society. The borrowing of words from Urdu and the regional languages and incorporating them into structures and expressions signified the independent development of PE. A mixed method approach was employed and data was collected from a corpus of Urduized nouns, developed following the research pathway of Ahmed and Ali (2014), by creating contextualized categories of the nouns used in the two novels. Documentary evidence in the form of author interviews also formed part of the analysis. Findings showed that the extent of urduization remained the same with the author’s use of urduized words in both her novels very nearly following similar trends. Most words were added to provide contextual clarity and create interest, demonstrating a consistency in her writing style over three decades. Keywords: Urduization; Pakistani English; Cultural influence; Contextualized categories; Writing Style DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/79-01 Publication date: May 31 st 2021

From Innocence to Resilience: An Analysis of Transcultural Trauma in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat

From Innocence to Resilience: An Analysis of Transcultural Trauma in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat

Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century

Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century

Analysis of the Urduization Trend in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels

Analysis of the Urduization Trend in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels

A Critical Discourse Analysis of 'An American Brat' by Bapsi Sidhwa

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the novel written by an eminent 21st-century female writer Bapsi Sidhwa. The text was analyzed critically in the backdrop of the checklist developed by the researcher. The findings reveal that a significantly tough language has been used for the depiction of men and women. Roles and responsibilities given to them have been found to be assigned on the basis of gender discrimination. Therefore, it is contended that colonialism still prevails in the form of social, economic and educational disparities in the third world countries as compared to the developed and privileged countries. Similarly, power structures have been found functional in every sphere of life and are decided by the institutions which hold the utmost power. Racism has also been revealed in the text. Ethnicity, race, color, culture and language have been found superiority over all the other ethnicities, cultures, races and languages.

A Psychological Exegesis of Displacement in Bapsi Sidhwa's Novel The Bride: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

This reports the psychological perspective of displacement in the English Pakistani novel The Bride (also published as The Pakistani Bride), written by a Pakistani American novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. This is a sociolinguistic study with the employment of Close Reading (CR) and Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study involves social, psychological and semantic aspects with the aim to present the psychological impact of displacement on the personal and social life of the characters. Close-Reading provides the analysis of the novel and the author. Systematic Functional Linguistics provides context and semantics as tools to analyze the historical and conceptual background of the novel. The findings of the study present mixed results, supporting the supposition that displacement affects the psychological state of the characters and disturbs their individual functionality. It partially proves that their social functionality is equally affected. It may be because people are more careful in playing their social roles.

An Intersectional Feminist Reading of Bapsi Sidhwa's Water

Intersectionality has been recognized and widely taken by interdisciplinary fields that include Cultural studies, American studies, and Media studies to demonstrate a range of social issues. It focuses on the experiences of people in a different social and political context. The intersectional framework confronts significant social division axes that include race, class, gender, and disability that function together and influence each other. These social axes operate the power structures of a particular society that can cause inequality and discrimination. In literary studies, women's representation is no more confined to European and American academic writings. Within the feminist framework, the South Asian fiction writers also demonstrate a feminist approach in their works. Pakistani authors have indicated religion's exploitation as one of the central intersectional tropes in their literary work. Bapsi Sidhwa is one of the prominent feminist voices from Pakistan in diasporic English Literature. One of her novels, Water (2006), is based on Deepa Mehta's award-winning film, explores the life of the marginal and subaltern Hindu widows in India. The novel provides an insight into the intersectional nature of the Indian Hindu widows in a patriarchal society of a subcontinent where different power domains hold and impose dominant hierarchies. The paper's objective is to highlight the intersection of religion, gender, caste and politics against the backdrop of the Indian anti-colonial movement. It shows how power relations can manipulate cultural norms and use religion as a powerful tool to establish its hegemonic control over these marginalized widows who suffer as silent victims.

Power and Gender Issues in Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This critical discourse study explores power and gender issues discursively constructed in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride. The study aims to examine gender issues in the tribal patriarchal social system in Pakistan. The novel understudy critically explored the abuse of power in a patriarchal society. Lazar’s concept of Feminist critical discourse analysis and Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis has been chosen to examine the main issues faced by women in remote areas of Pakistan. Fairclough’s (1989) model has been adopted as a method for the analysis of the selected excerpts taken from the text of the novel. The analysis of the text has been made on the ground to explore women's marginalization, patriarchal hegemony, and power exercise in Pakistan’s remote areas.

Sub-continental Subjectivity of Women’s Victimization in Partition Violence : Gynocentrism in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels

Sub-continental Subjectivity of Women’s Victimization in Partition Violence : Gynocentrism in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels

The Transformation of Ice-Candy-Man: Account of Partition Trauma in Cracking India

This article aims to unveil the capricious transformation of the key figure, Ice-Candy-Man (named Dilnawaz) and the riotous traumatic impact of the Partition of India on his personality in Cracking India. The most arousing, poignant, efficacious figure Ice-Candy-Man of Bapsi Sidhwa’s magnum opus Cracking India traps the mind of the readers. Sidhwa, the original mark and a victim of the Partition in 1947, had sensed the brutal incidents which impaled her heart with pathos and enforced her to pen it down by presenting vivacious, colorful characters with autobiographical touches. The Ice-Candy-Man appears with a different disguise each time. Why did Sidhwa characterize him in such a specific and dynamic manner? His gestures, speech and even his transition stages and his every next footstep are the symbols and metaphors of the changing society during the traumatic events of Partition—they denote how an individual turns his course of life. His act of transformation is the core to unlocking Sidhwa’s magical world. Without analyzing the Ice-Candy-Man, all endeavors to interpret Sidhwa’s messages are futile.

Study of Trauma and Transgression of the ‘Adult-child’ in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man

Bapsi Sidhwa’s characterization of Lenny Sethi in her fourth novel, the 1991 historical fiction Ice-Candy-Man, is formulated by the heterogeneous impact of the 1947 partition of India on the psychopathology of children. This paper observes how the trope of trauma problematizes the embodiments of childhood, contradicting its axiomatic paradisiacal nature. Parallel to the chaos of communal massacre, mass migration, dysfunctional parenting and the marginality of women and children, Lenny’s traumatic experience surpasses a singular-episodic trauma, and is laden with a multiplicity of source factors, thereby generating “complex trauma” (van der Kolk et al., 2007, p. 202). The child narrator acquires symptoms of irregular curiosity, hyper-vigilance, somatic complaints, fear, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and transgresses specific social norms. Lenny is a choreographed child, a problem-child, taxonomized as the ‘adult-child’ in the paper. Now, the question is whether to see the ensuing malfunction symptoms as a diagnostic criterion or adaptative human resilience? Drawing from Anjali Gera Roy’s concept of “intangible violence” (Roy, 2020, p. 43) the paper examines textual openings where the stages of childhood and adulthood deconstruct itself, approximates, and overlaps inside each other; taking cues from a relatively less-documented narrative angle of the child victim of partition.

A Study Of Female Victimization In Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man

In literature, a woman acts as a forceful vehicle for the author’s viewpoint. She contributes significantly to a web of familial, social, and cultural traditions, sometimes acting quietly and other times defiantly. A more emancipated and forward-thinking woman has replaced the passive and servile feminine. Women’s ideas change as a result of the emergence of feminist movements and female consciousness. This offers fresh perspectives and creative literary expression. Women have long been prominent characters in literature. One such author who has emerged as one of the most contemplative voices in contemporary English writing is Bapsi Sidhwa. The diasporic literature provides a wealth of knowledge on the thoughts of women. The female protagonists in Bapsi Sidhwa’s works, in particular, experience uncontrollable anxiety and psychic suffering as a result of being involved in a cross-cultural clash. The female lead characters experience the agonising dislocation within the domestic context. We discover that the inner lives of the female characters in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels are made known. To better understand the female characters’ inner lives, sheprobes their psychology in greater depth. Feminism, one of the main themes in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, is the subject of the current essay. In Ice-Candy-Man, Sidhwa envisions a society devoid of hierarchy and power dynamics, one that is truly human and founded on the ideals of fairness and equality.

Impact of Multicultural Diversity on the Gender Stereotyping in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride through the Deconstructive Perspective

The article analyzes the impact of multicultural fictional representation of the two female characters on the gender stereotyping in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride (1990) by applying Judith Butler’s gender approach. The novelist (1938) is a distinguishing Anglophone, post-colonial and diaspora writer in South Asia (Suleri, 2001) who is known to be the pioneer of Pakistani novel in English. Sidhwa’s portrayal of different cultural milieu in the novel under study is to highlight the impact on gender identification through the analysis of the performativity of the two brides, Zaitoon and Carol. The first lady, one of the key characters, confronts and challenges the tribal gender norms of a Pakistani society and the second bride mirroring of an American culture projecting of a diverse identification. The multicultural contextual background of the novel leads the debate to analyze how different gender roles are performed by each of the brides to support the research contention that gender is wrought not by sexual categorization but by socio-cultural stereotyping. Therefore, the cultural differences in the book necessarily require fluid shades of gender identification accordingly. It is the targeted objective of the research framework applied by the study that gender is an action, it is a fluid and instable feature as has been manifested through the performance of the focused characters in the novel.