First published as Ice Candy Man in 1988, Cracking India tells the story of the Partition of India. This historical event occurred in 1947 when the British colony of India was split into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. The story is told from the perspective of Lenny Sethi, a four-year-old girl who lives in the Punjabi city of Lahore. She describes her family and the colorful group of suitors of various religious backgrounds who gather around her beautiful and charismatic nanny, Ayah. As India moves closer to being split, tensions appear both in this friend group and in Indian society as a whole. Lenny’s life and community provide a window onto the violence that occurred during Partition.
Bapsi Sidhwa, the author, is a Pakistani-American novelist. Like Cracking India’s main character Lenny, Sidhwa grew up in Lahore and lived through Partition. Also like Lenny, she suffered from polio as a child and her family was part of Lahore’s small Parsi community (followers of the Zoroastrian religion who left Persia for India in the Middle Ages). This experience of watching Lahore transform from part of British-ruled India to a city in independent Pakistan informed Sidhwa's novel.
There are several other novels that describe the traumatic events of Partition, including Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). However, Cracking India is unique in that its narrator is a young girl and the novel specifically focuses on how Partition affected women’s lives. The novel can be seen as an influence on later feminist accounts of partition, such as Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (2001).
Cracking India is on the BBC News list of the 100 most influential novels. In the United States, the New York Times named the novel one of its Notable Books of the Year. Cracking India also earned Bapsi Germany’s prestigious literary award, the LiBeraturepreis. Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta directed a film based on the novel entitled Earth (1998).
In 2005, the novel made news in the US when a complaint was filed in Florida that argued that it should be banned from the high school reading list for containing “pornographic material.” After an investigation, the school district of Volusia County decided not to ban the book.
