Awards-Bunting Fellowship Sitara-i-Imtiaz Lila Wallace-Reader'sīorn in Karachi, Pakistan and raised in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa has been lauded as “Pakistan’s finest English-language novelist.” Sidhwa is the author of four novels: The Bride, Crow Eaters, An American Brat, and Cracking India ( Ice-Candy-Man), which was a New York Times Notable Book, nominated by the American Library Association as Notable Book, and won the Literature Prize in Germany in 1991, and was made into the award-winning film Earth by Indian director Deepa Mehta in 1999.Sidhwa personalizes the history of political unrest in South Asia and the Middle East, an issue as pertinent today as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. The story depicts the planting of the seeds of religious intolerance and political violence that remains to this day in India and Pakistan, and much of the rest of the Middle East.Ĭracking India provides a timely reminder that contemporary American rhetoric of the “War on Terror” and post-9/11 politics echoes eerily that which is recorded in this novel. Sidhwa humanizes the violence and strife caused by religious intolerance by putting the innocence of a child, an outside narrator due to both her age and her ethnicity, on the line, caught in the crossfire of political unrest. The Ice-Candy-Man, a popsicle vendor and the title character in the British edition, initially the most aggressive of Ayah’s suitors, transforms several times over the course of the novel, symbolically representing the subcontinent's own transformations.

As she matures, Lenny begins to identify the differences between the Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs engaging in political arguments all around her.Īs a Parsee, Lenny is separate from these groups and their conflicts, though they play a tremendous role in her life.

It is in the company of these working class characters that Lenny learns about religious differences, comes to recognize religious intolerance, and provides a lense into the blossoming genocidal strife on the eve of Partition. Thrilled with the attention that comes with her invalid status, Lenny manipulates the activities of courtship to better spoil herself. Young Lenny is kept out of school because she suffers from polio, and so spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, visiting with the large group of admirers that Ayah draws.

Cracking india book