6/30/2023 0 Comments Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa![]() ![]() ![]() Just as Netsai’s amputated leg surfaces compulsively throughout The Book of Not as a signifier of the trauma of chimurenga, Cracking India’s Partition narrative is haunted by recurring images of corporeal dismemberment - tearing, cracking, bleeding, pain - that emerge from the protagonist Lenny’s childhood experiences of disability (she is lame as a result of polio). Echoing a problematic conflation of individual and national bodies that was apparent in nationalist discourses in this period, the text performs a discomfiting oscillation between materialist constructions of disability as a social presence and the deployment of disability as a prosthesis standing in for colonial disablement and the mutilated - partitioned - body politic. Of all the texts analysed in this book, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991), 1 a child-narrated account of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, offers the most conflicted negotiation between material and metaphorical modes of representation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |