Gendered Treatment and a Cautionary Purpose in Cracking India Anonymous College

Cracking India, also known as Ice-Candy-Man, is an incredibly dense novel filled to the brim with a myriad of things to dissect. The book catalogs a host of changes to the country of India, and to the individuals that live there, as British rule there slowly comes to an end following World War II. The story takes place before, during and shortly after the partition, with the country being fragmented into several separate countries, each “belonging” to a different religious or political group. On the whole, this story echoes the experiences that Bapsi Sidhwa lived through during that time period in her life, with the protagonist acting almost as an autobiographical narrator. Thanks to Sidhwa’s excellent writing and firsthand experiences of this partition as a young woman, she is able to transport readers to an incredibly violent and oppressive time for women in particular. This violence is used as a tool of oppression and dehumanizes women in the wake of a patriarchal schism.

While it can be hard to describe exactly what kind of book Cracking India is, it has been said that “the distinction between literary work and critical social history [has produced] what we may term counterhistories of the. . . Partition of India. In . . ....