Thematic patterns in the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa

Abstract

In this age of globalization, it is usually very difficult to categorize some writers and Bapsi Sidhwa is one of them. She belongs to India, Pakistan and the United States simultaneously but she likes herself to be described as a Punjabi-Pakistani-Parsi woman. All her four novels The Crow Eaters, The Pakistani Bride, Ice-Candy-Man and An American Brat are about her perceptions of life as a Parsi, Punjabi, Pakistani and American woman respectively. Sidhwa believes that all of her works have some degree of autobiographical elements. She picks up some significant incidents from her own life or from the lives of other people and flashes them to create a larger reality of fiction. To her, each book is a cathartic release. Together with these four novels, Bapsi has also published Water: A Novel, a work of fiction based on the movie of the same name by Deepa Mehta, and City of Sin and Splendour: Writing on Lahore. In addition, her stories, reviews and articles have appeared in New York Time Book Review, Houston Chronicle, Harper s and Queen, The Economic Times and The London Telegraph. Bapsi Sidhwa has shown considerable accomplishment as well as promise as a novelist. Like all good novelists, Bapsi Sidhwa s works have aroused a variety of reactions. Her interests are vast and she cannot be easily categorized as just a comic writer or a Parsi novelist. Her novels are remarkably different from one another in both subject and treatment. One can find variety of themes in her fiction such as the partition crisis, expatriate experience, the Parsi milieu, social idiosyncrasies of the small minority community, the theme of marriage, women s problems, patterns of migration. Her treatment of such wide ranging themes is a testimony to her growth as a powerful and dramatic novelist who is both an affectionate and shrewd observer of human society and a keen teller of stories. She is perhaps Pakistan s finest English language novelist. There is a complex sprinkling of themes in her novels which defy any simplistic interpretation.