Abstract
Much of Cracking India’s scholarship focuses on how the text provides a representation of gendered trauma during Partition. These analyses, however, overlook the reader’s role, which minimizes literary works to analyzable objects rather than interactive opportunities. Following the work of postcolonial trauma scholars such as Steph Craps, Abigail Ward, and Jay Rajiva, I argue that postcolonial trauma narratives are crucial spaces of testimony in which the ongoing traumatic effects of colonialism intersect with reader engagement. Using Dori Laub’s trauma interview model, I examine how Bapsi Sidhwa uses the narrative techniques of perspective, time, and presence in Cracking India to implicate the reader as a witness in gendered postcolonial trauma affecting women. In pairing the examination of how narrative technique engages the reader as a witness with current scholarship on gender in Sidhwa’s novel, I show how such consideration of the reader speaks to how gendered violence contributes to postcolonial identity formation over time.
Bapsi Sidhwa’s (1991) novel Cracking India is a narrative describing the Punjab’s 1947 Partition-related events. 1 The novel positions the main character and narrator, a Parsi and middle-class child named Lenny, as a voice that can bear witness to the multiple gender and class identities within the newly formed nation of Pakistan. Cracking India’s unique portrayal of women during Partition events leads academics to focus on Lenny’s mobility between these identity groups. Their analyses, however, have left open questions around ethical reader engagement — what is the purpose of the reader in fictional trauma narratives? What is the reader’s responsibility to the text? How can a reader’s interaction with this text help us better our interactions outside the text?
In this article, I argue that Cracking India ethically engages the reader as a witness to the violent formation of individual and national postcolonial identity. I analyse how current criticism on the novel does not consider the role of the reader to any significant degree. From this gap, I explain how Partition trauma from Sidhwa’s own life influences Cracking India’s narrative as testimony. This correlation, I argue, invites us to consider Cracking India as a testimony to Partition trauma, in which the reader is a part of witnessing. Witnessing, however, originates in Western trauma theory, which has a known history of not including non-Western experiences. Cracking India, therefore, provides an opportunity for readers to conceive of a more ethical interaction with trauma because of the lived experience to which it testifies. By including experiences normally excluded from trauma theory, Cracking India’s use of trauma has a significant impact on our understanding of the novel as testimony and trauma theory broadly.
I show the significance of witnessing to Cracking India by pairing Dori Laub’s model of witnessing, in which the interviewer (or, as I argue, the reader) participates in the act of witnessing to create a trauma narrative, with Dominick LaCapra’s ideas of historic “loss” and transhistoric “absence” (2001). Combined, Laub and LaCapra provide a way for readers to interrogate how and for what purpose the novel narrates national identity for women. By taking the audience’s interaction with the novel into account, I argue that Sidhwa makes reading a technique of ethical witnessing through which the reader bears witness to the gendered trauma of Partition. Using Lenny as its primary focalizer, the novel uses the narrative techniques 2 of perspective, time, and presence to communicate through witnessing how the gendered trauma of Partition forms representations of individual and national identity. In this way, Cracking India provides insight into how postcolonial literature can bear witness to postcolonial identity and provide a case study as to how this literature can expand the ethics of trauma studies to include non-Western trauma.
Reading gendered trauma in Cracking India
Critical scholarship on Cracking India tends to focus on the novel’s multifaceted portrayal of Partition violence through women characters. Cracking India follows a polio-stricken, middle-class, Parsi girl named Lenny as she grows up during Partition in Lahore. Through the interactions shown in the novel, these aspects of her identity allow her the privilege to move in and out of various social groups, which she captures in snippets of her own narrative. As Lenny grows, so do the tensions in the Punjab, culminating in the 1947 Partition that cracked the Indian subcontinent and created Pakistani and Indian identities within the characters around her. Lenny’s Parsi family is removed from the majority conflicts between the surrounding Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities. Nevertheless, the violence that creates Pakistan penetrates their lives through adjacent characters that influence Lenny’s narrative.
Cracking India stands out as a Partition novel due to Lenny’s coverage of the adjacent women characters. From her participation in Ayah’s abduction by Ice-candy-man to watching how other girls like Papoo bear the unjust burdens of familial bonds, Lenny narrates the reality of being female during Partition. Focusing on this novel narration, academic analyses of Cracking India tend to focus on how the narrator’s gendered perspective provides a previously unseen look at the women of Partition. Within these investigations, there are three trends.
The first trend sees Cracking India’s narration as giving voice to women’s experiences and, potentially, other subaltern experiences. Harveen Sachdeva Mann identifies Lenny’s privilege as neutrality and Ayah’s subaltern body as a metaphor for Partition (1994: 72–75). 3 Karman Rastegar, comparing Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror (1994) and Sidhwa’s Cracking India, focuses on Lenny’s “naïve perspective” as being key to gaining access to stories left out of history (2006: 27). Vishnupriya Sengupta also compares three Partition-related novels that “defy state-sponsored national identity” using child narrators (2009: 511). All of these analyses, however, hinge on the use of Lenny as a neutral narrator by default, leaving out the powerful privilege she has within the novel. An ethical analysis of the novel, I argue, must reckon with Lenny’s privilege exposed via her mobility through the novel’s form.
The other two trends approach the ethical function of the novel within Partition’s patriarchal context. The first of these two trends highlights how the novel brings awareness to unspoken women’s trauma and women’s rights during Partition. Jill Didur’s work focuses on how women in the novel use “silence” to exert their own “indirect agency” (2000: 67; 1998: 51). Kavita Daiya also points to the hidden agency of women during Partition by focusing on Cracking India as Partition testimony that continues to shape how new narratives around Partition are told (2002: 223). Ananya Jahanara Kabir further explores this parallel between Partition collective memory and fiction through Sidhwa’s use of Lenny as a narrator (2005: 184). Madhuparna Mitra draws a parallel between the violence against women in Partition and the violence of specific women characters — including those who seem “empowered”, such as Godmother (2008: 38–9). These evaluations highlight a clear connection between the violence against women in both the historical and fictional representations of Partition. Lacking, though, is the connection between Cracking India’s form and its content. What makes Cracking India stand out in relation to other testimonies regarding Partition? I argue that Sidhwa’s use of the novel as a form helps illuminate the testimony within its pages by bringing attention to power dynamics within these women’s narratives.
The final trend focuses on the novel as liminal space, particularly as a tool for social and political commentary regarding women during Partition. Lopamudra Basu argues that Sidhwa’s novel means to represent historically underrepresented people through a “multilayered palimpsest, gesturing at several different threads in the complex motivations and facts, which comprise Partition” (2007: 12). Jacquelynn M. Kleist further blurs binary classifications of women characters to argue that Cracking India functions, along with other women-authored texts, as “a distinct female counter-narrative” (2011: 69–70). Sobia Khan posits the idea of the novel as a distinct space for Partition histories by considering it as a space in which transnational subjects are “trapped” (2015: 56). All of these works focus more on the novel as a specific form for Sidhwa’s Partition narrative; but, why a novel at all? Sidhwa could have chosen any form to communicate her points about women during Partition. So, why a novel? Why does her message resonate so well using the novel as a literary mode? I argue that Sidhwa’s choice of the novel for Cracking India’s story works because it assumes a reader. By assuming two subjects (reader and text), the novel mimics testimony while retaining the affordances of fiction.
Jennifer Yusin and Deepika Bahri make the connection between the novel and testimony by arguing that they are similar environments: “In its inherent failure, fiction enacts the impossibility of trauma and in doing so, makes witness possible” (2008: 85). Using the narrative voice and the parallel imagery within Lenny’s nightmares and observations of Partition violence culminating in the destruction of a symbol (the doll), Yusin and Bahri also make the connection between the personal and historic trauma: “In its fury-driven collapse into Lenny’s individual traumas and the trauma of the violence of the Partition, this scene opens the fictional space in which the question of history and its return to the individual is answered in Lenny’s attempt to partition herself as well as the image of the doll that comes to represent the nation” (2008: 97). Yusin and Bahri’s work establishes fictional narratives like Cracking India can be a form for bearing personal traumas and their connected historical traumas (2008: 83). My work provides more insight into how Cracking India uses this form to communicate a specific testimony by invoking the reader within its witnessing process.
The specificity of Sidhwa’s testimony can be seen in the connections between Cracking India and her life experiences. In a series of blog posts about her writing, Sidhwa describes the formative events from her life that influence her writing. Her second blog post in this series recounts a story told on her honeymoon about the murder of a village woman fleeing a marriage (2016b). Sidhwa describes this story’s influence on her and her writing as a haunting: “But the girl continued to haunt me and I began to write a short story about the young life that had ended so tragically: I named her Zaitoon” (2016b). This listening experience turned into The Bride (1983), subsequently The Pakistani Bride (1990). However, in the sixth blog post of the same series (2016c) she also notes how the experiences of Partition’s gendered violence continued to haunt her and her writing later on in her career as an author. In both blog posts, Sidhwa conveys that her novels are inspired by a response to individual and collective gendered trauma around Partition. Even though she provides us with her inspiration, Sidhwa does not specify why novels, which make me as a reader wonder what Sidhwa wants out of these narratives. I argue that her response of writing fiction in response to those traumas shows a need for interaction that cannot take place in a more traditional form for testimony. 4 Coming from her own place of privilege in Partition and seeing the aftermath of related gendered traumas, the novel becomes the space in which Sidhwa can collect a testimony defying empirical historical truth, or the idea of a singular narrative of Partition history. 5
Despite being fiction, Cracking India displays several characteristics indicative of nonfiction trauma narratives. One of the key characteristics is how the narrator recollects her experiences surrounding Partition from a contemporary vantage point. This framing through the recollecting narrator provides a narrative similar to autobiographical testimony from trauma archives in which subjects narrate what they sensed during a traumatic event through a removed and/or more experienced self. Sidhwa further blends testimony and fiction by basing much of Lenny’s life on her own lived experiences in Lahore during the same period of history. In her first blog post about her history of writing, Sidhwa recounts her early life, which has obvious parallels with Lenny including a Polio diagnosis, home schooling and diminished future prospects, and the care she received from others (2016a). Together, these similarities between Cracking India’s fiction and other nonfiction trauma narratives produce a fictional text that reads much like a first-person testimony. So, what happens if we read Cracking India as testimony 6 ?
Trauma theory, however, has a problematic relationship with postcolonial experiences. Primarily rooted in the West, critical development of trauma theory sprouted from the seeds of Freudian psychoanalysis. Expanded through an analysis of Holocaust literature, Cathy Caruth’s work in the 1990s opened up the trajectory of trauma studies that held a literary focus. Her work culminated in the identification of a crossroads between literary representation and psychoanalysis in Caruth’s Unclaimed Experiences and her edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1996: 3; 1995). Such a trajectory, however, came at the price of silencing traumas that do not fit the Western model. Much of her work refined the definition of trauma as a contagion and event-based model that could not fully account for traumas outside of the Holocaust. 7 Ruth Leys spends much of Trauma: A Genealogy (2000) analysing these aspects of Caruth’s model and her interpretation of Freud. Leys’s monograph opened the door for more genre-specific critiques that could better explain the stakes around this model of trauma.
The recognition of silenced non-Western experiences has increased its urgency over the last decade as trauma studies scholars and literary scholars, particularly postcolonial scholars, consider how trauma studies models can adapt to include the rest of the world. Steph Craps and Gert Buelens created a flash point for these concerns in the special issue of Studies in the Novel entitled “Postcolonial Trauma Novels”, which highlighted the ethical concern of trauma studies and asked how we might move forward in a consideration of trauma studies that is inclusive of postcolonial studies (2008). 8 Since then, scholars such as Craps (2013), Abigail Ward (2013), and Irene Visser (2011) have taken up this question and, through their work, better informed our understanding of trauma and the ethical application of its models using postcolonial literature.
Within the last decade, the theorization of postcolonial trauma brought insight into how it differs from Western trauma theory and improves models for analysing trauma in literature. In Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013), Steph Craps extended his and Gert Beulens’s work from the Studies in the Novel special issue by theorizing how Western trauma concepts do not fully describe postcolonial situations, as the events may be ongoing with other repercussions that defy the boundaries of Caruthian event-based models. More recently, Jay Rajiva (2017) presented a model of postcolonial trauma that approaches but never crosses the boundaries of the trauma in question by adapting phenomenological models of touch for literary aesthetics. Similarly, Daniela Rogobete’s (2018) analysis saw aesthetics as a mechanism to further the argument of how silence and objectification characterizes women’s trauma. Building on these theoretical foundations, I argue that Cracking India acts an exemplar of how the consideration of postcolonial texts ethically expands trauma studies. By considering the readers’ role within Cracking India’s trauma narrative, the novel tells a very specific story about gendered trauma during Partition.
Reader ethics
Considering its links to testimony, I argue that Cracking India is best read through a modified model of witnessing. Dori Laub, cofounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and former Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, defines witnessing as cooperation: “The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to — and heard — is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to” (1992: 57). Laub’s model of witnessing makes testimony a dynamic subject dependent on the interaction between the interviewee and the interviewer. In a literary context, the interviewee parallels the novel and the interviewer the reader.
Laub positions the interviewer as a facilitator, someone who assists in bringing the trauma narrative into literary existence: “The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (1992: 57). How the interviewer approaches an interaction can wholly change how an interviewee responds, creating a particular narrative witness. As a creative participant, the interviewer must respect the limit between their own lived experiences and the interviewee’s lived experiences: “While overlapping, to a degree, with the experience of the victim, [the listener] nonetheless does not become the victim — he preserves his own separate place, position and perspective; a battleground for forces raging in himself, to which he has to pay attention and respect if he is to properly carry out his task” (1992: 58). This respect enables a dynamic model of witnessing where the interviewer/reader must participate as a partner creating a text that centres the interviewee’s needs. Since this role of the interviewer parallels the role of the reader, I argue that the reader of trauma literature retains similar obligations in relation to their interactions with a text. The reader’s obligations depend on the needs of the text. The communication of those needs comes through the narrative techniques employed by the author within the text.
In Cracking India, different kinds of trauma get conveyed in different ways. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra proposes a model of trauma made from two kinds of related trauma concepts: one that is based on events and the other not. His event-based trauma depends on the concept of loss, or historical trauma, established through a time before or time after the trauma (2001: 48–49). Cracking India navigates LaCapra’s traumatic losses related to Partition by establishing a time before as well as a time after for individuals and the nations involved. Cracking India portrays individuals who lived through the events as changed, reshaping their identities into being Indian or Pakistani, including associated changes of faith communities, with Partition being the epicentre for traumatic change. Lenny acknowledges these changes as “sudden” and dehumanizing: “One day everybody is themselves — and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian” (1991: 101). 9 Subsequently, Lenny continues to narrate post-Partition losses in identity of other characters from their pre-Partition selves throughout the rest of her own narrative.
This division of time through status change is similar to Veena Das’s analysis of the “abducted women” and their “returns” (2007). In her work, Das identifies how men from both “sides” abducted women during the Partition riots and the violence that followed. There were, however, instances where these women made lives for themselves in these abduction situations only to be ripped from their homes again to be “returned” to their legitimized patriarchal family as it existed prior to Partition. In the cases of abduction and return, Das identifies how these women experience repetitive losses by the removal from and return to their families (2007). This understanding of loss is particularly relevant to an analysis of Cracking India given its focus on the roles of women during Partition and the new identities thrust upon many women. One example can be seen in Ayah within the same paragraph as the one quoted above. Lenny acknowledges the sudden changes in identity for everyone around her, specifically calling attention to changes to how she views the caregiver: “Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah — she is also a token. A Hindu” (101). Lenny acknowledges that the version of Ayah after Partition does not match the one she knew before. This version of Ayah is not just different; it is more symbol than person because of Partition. Moreover, Ayah’s continued transformation into a different person, from an abducted woman to a returned woman, continues the example of individual identity losses positioned around a cause: Partition.
LaCapra’s other trauma concept, absence, is transhistorical in that it defies temporal origin or conclusion (2001: 50–51). Similar to its management of loss, Cracking India also navigates Partition as absence regarding agency for women. One example takes place just after the announcement of Partition in the novel. Just as people seem to change after the event, Lenny notices that Papoo, ever the rogue, encumbers more domestic responsibilities like caring for a child as she sweeps (102–103). Moreover, she learns that Papoo’s mother is planning an arranged marriage for Papoo as the girl is around 11 years old. While these events take place after the announcement of Partition, it is doubtful that they happen as a result of Partition. Given that Papoo’s relationship with her mother, Muccho, has always been strained (according to the information the reader has from Lenny’s narration), especially around Papoo’s work ethic and the family’s social status, the marriage seems almost inevitable. The absence of Papoo’s identity has more to do with her gender and her relationship to her mother than anything else. Partition becomes incidental to the forced arranged marriage of Papoo even though it does not make it any less traumatic.
According to LaCapra, absence “also opens up empowering possibilities in the necessarily limited, nontotalizing, and nonredemptive elaboration of institutions and practices in the creation of a more desirable, perhaps significantly different — but not perfect or totally unified — life in the here and now” (2001: 58). Even though LaCapra acknowledges positive potential, I want to focus on how transhistorical trauma introduces trauma as something that can become part of our identities. Laura Brown exposes the negative side to this possibility through her use of Maria Root’s “insidious trauma”, trauma that holds a constant threat because it is enforced by systemic norms that threaten a “nondominant” population (1995: 107). This concept of insidious trauma and its transhistorical, gendered consequences are particularly important for understanding the role of women within the national identity narrative of the 1947 Partition.
Absence is foundational for narrating the silences around the patriarchal abduction and removal justifications within the historical 1940s Partition context of Pakistani identity. Das elaborates on the individual losses of women being “abducted” or “returned” as objectification. The women became commodities transferred across the borders; their fate relied on patriarchal lineage (2007: 41). In both cases, abduction and removal, this enforced national identity system relied on the absence of women’s agency — something that did not happen solely because of Partition. By highlighting the absence of women’s agency (their objectification through abduction and return) and its transhistorical reach (a practice that cannot fully be attributed just to Partition), the concept becomes insidious as it relates to gender. Much like the example with Papoo, the historical silence of women’s narratives indicates that the treatment of women in Partition is a symptom of a larger issue around the role of women and their lack of agency within a patriarchal context.
On the surface, using two Western scholars, Laub and LaCapra, to establish a model of ethical reading in postcolonial trauma texts seems like a red flag given the critical turn in trauma studies via postcolonial studies I mentioned earlier. However, both Laub and LaCapra work against certain conceptions in Western trauma theory to make for a more ethical model. Ruth Leys takes time in her work to note that Caruth and Laub are not “in complete agreement on all issues” when it comes to the issue of contagion, or the listener being vicariously traumatized through the telling of the narrative (2000: n.p.). In her analysis of the witnessing model, Leys notes the difference between Laub and Caruth’s understanding is in the agency it gives the victim “to remember and narrate the past in a procedure that bears some resemblance to the analytic process of ‘working through’” and the responsibility of the interviewer “to distance himself from it’” (2000: n.p.). Leys’s attention to the difference in agency and responsibility between Laub and Caruth provides an ethical opportunity for Laub’s interview model.
Additionally, Craps notes that LaCapra’s model of trauma provides a more nuanced understanding of trauma as an action by building on and revising the previous theories of trauma via History (his home discipline) (2013: 10). Along with Leys’s critiques, LaCapra’s definitions of trauma mark a consideration of complications to the literary model of trauma furnished by Caruth (1996). Moreover, LaCapra’s distinction between loss and absence contains a scepticism of binary models: “the distinction between absence and loss cannot be construed as a simple binary because the two do interact in complex ways in any concrete situation, and the temptation is great to conflate one with the other” (2001: 48). These nontotalizing categories allow room for change depending on what the model encounters rather than enforcing arbitrary boundaries like a cookie cutter to pastry. While not perfect, these models combined help us move towards a more ethical model, something Cracking India enables.
Given Cracking India’s inclusion of both loss and absence related to the 1947 Partition, the reader’s role becomes integral to understanding of how the text makes the conversation of postcolonial trauma narratives relevant to postcolonial identity. The engagement of the reader as a facilitator for witnessing these gendered losses and absences comes through in the way the novel positions the reader. In other words, the novel must help the reader establish what Sidhwa needs from this interaction in order to facilitate cooperative creation. The signs for this positioning in Cracking India, I argue, can be found in Sidhwa’s deployment of particular narrative techniques.
For ethical reader engagement with the losses and absences contributing to individual and national postcolonial identity, the narrative must provide an environment encouraging such an interaction with the reader. 10 In this section, I will examine three of the most prominent narrative techniques in Cracking India, perspective, time, and presence, to show how Sidhwa establishes a witnessing dynamic through interaction with her reader and how that interaction affects our reading of the novel when it comes to postcolonial identity.
Perspective
Sidhwa’s most noticeable narrative technique in Cracking India is perspective through Lenny’s narration. 11 Samina Azhar emphasizes the traumatic impact on this perspective in “Trauma and travails of innocent victims of Indian Partition in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India” by noting that Lenny, while not directly touched by the violence, is psychologically traumatized as she observes several shocking acts of violence to her family and relational communities within the new nation (2014: 3). Because Lenny is narrating the story from her perspective, the way she describes Partition becomes integral to how the reader connects those experiences to the novel’s larger themes of personal and national identity.
One way for readers to see this connection between Lenny’s perspective of trauma and how it impacts her identity is through her moments of self-reflection. Throughout Lenny’s narration, her reflective moments identify how and when aspects of her identity formation occur within the context of Partition. These reflective moments are familiar to testimony and other types of reflective writing, which could be considered genre norms, an unsurprising move from a narrator looking back at an experience. What is particularly interesting, however, is the difference between changes occurring from loss or absence and the similarity around gender.
Loss manifests in how Lenny notes changes in her identity from one state to another based on violent interactions with other characters, particularly men. For example, when Lenny meets Gandhi, she notes a sudden swerve in her sense of her own femininity: “This is the first time I have lowered my eyes before a man” (96). The experience of meeting this powerful man as a young girl marks Lenny as she changes her behaviour, conforming to perceived gender norms. Her loss of indignation and its effects follows in the next paragraph before ending the chapter: “It wasn’t until some years later — when I realized the full scope and dimension of the massacres — that I comprehended the concealed nature of the ice lurking deep beneath the hypnotic and dynamic femininity of Gandhi’s non-violent exterior” (96). Here, Lenny perceives Gandhi, a figure beloved by many other women in the novel, as cold and calculating. Her understanding hinges on how Gandhi weaponizes femininity. Gandhi shows Lenny the power in femininity, which he harnesses to control the women around him. Besides the devotion with which his entourage and the Lahori women shower him, he also takes physical control of the women by overprescribing enemas that make them sickly: “‘Look at these girls,’ says Gandhijee, indicating the lean women flanking him. ‘I give them enemas myself — there is no shame in it — I am like their mother’” (95–96). By using femininity against Lenny and the other women, Lenny’s perception of meeting Gandhi brings to light a loss in feminine agency by women in the novel. The identification of this loss through Lenny’s perspective is key to helping the reader connect its influence on identity around Partition. By reflecting on how that experience influenced the rest of her life, Lenny’s perspective enables the reader to understand the impact of these seemingly harmless experiences contribute to larger issues around identity and gender in the novel.
In addition to loss, Lenny’s perspective also exposes absences in her identity around gender. Many of the absences revolve around her familial interactions. One example is Lenny’s recollections of her father’s regular returns home for lunch. Upon his arrival, the women of the family, Lenny and her mother, entertain him with stories of the day while he gives minimal feedback to their presence. From Lenny’s perspective, this toxic behaviour has a negative impact on her identity: “And as the years advance, my sense of inadequacy and unworthy advances. I have to think faster — on my toes as it were. . . offering lengthier and lengthier chatter to fill up the infernal time of Father’s mute meals” (88). From this moment of reflection, Lenny notes how the repetitive nature of this behaviour, which objectifies her and her mother for the unknown but expected benefit of her father, is something she does not enjoy but is expected to perform. She and her mother must perform for the patriarchal figure of the household at their own detriment. This situation is like the one with Gandhi in that it focuses the reader’s attention on gender and agency in identity formation for Lenny. It differs, however, in that these moments with her father defy historical time — this experience with her father repeats throughout Lenny’s life. The recurrence of this harmful behaviour by women for the benefit of a patriarchal figure, especially Lenny’s father, becomes normal. In these recurring moments, Lenny’s family obligations leave the reader wondering what agency looks like for the women of Cracking India.
Both the losses and the absences indicated by Lenny’s perspective directly influence her identity in a way that connects to her gender so blatantly that it is essential for the reader to recognize it when engaging with the text. More precisely, both contain negative connotations around women’s agency. Using Lenny’s perspective to reflect on these very different kinds of trauma experiences allows Sidhwa to highlight the importance of feminine agency and identity formation through trauma. By having these moments filtered through Lenny’s perspective and showing her development over the course of the narrative arc, Sidhwa positions the reader to make connections not explicitly stated within the text. Such indirect statements are indicative of how witnessing is essential to understanding the novel since it is up to the reader to make these connections.
This model of how Lenny’s perspective works in the novel also addresses some of the concerns I have regarding Lenny’s privilege in the novel. Many critics have focused on the mobility of Lenny’s perspective. Critics such as Harveen Sachdeva Mann (1994) and Vishnupriya Sengupta (2009) have commented on Lenny’s privileged perspective in a way that essentially makes her a reflective surface for the novel. Specifically, her young age, gender, upper middle-class status, and Parsi religion frame her as a passive and accessible character regarding the violent acts of Partition. Seeing Lenny’s mobility as her perspective, however, conflates the two elements in a way that oversimplifies the identity construction performed in the narrative’s creation. One way that Sidhwa distinguishes Lenny’s mobility and perspective is through Lenny’s subtle self-reflections within the text. For example, Lenny actively acknowledges her privilege via her assessment of internal identity as a “spoilt brat” and her ironic reading of external Parsi passivity-as-strategy (113; 49). Given her power as a narrative agent and her tactful acknowledgement of her own privilege, Lenny comes across as an active agent within the novel rather than a subaltern agent like the abducted women she depicts within her story.
If Lenny does not speak for the subaltern or Pakistan, then the reader must ask why this Partition narrative is delivered from her perspective. Jennifer Yusin and Deepika Bahri put this question in the context of trauma by explaining that individual trauma presupposes collective trauma (2008: 84–85). According to their logic, Lenny’s individual trauma presupposes the collective trauma of Pakistan. As such, Lenny’s narrative neither gives voice to subaltern subjects nor offers an allegory for the nation. Instead, it offers a glimpse into identity creation at both the individual and communal levels through testimony. Readers, then, must interact with the text to facilitate a narrative of personal and national level identity within the context of Partition. Only the reader can make the unspoken connection between gender and identity.
Time
Another prominent narrative technique used by Sidhwa in Cracking India is the novel’s unusual portrayal of time. 12 Two major uses of time position the reader in relation to trauma and identity: the analeptic recounting of Lenny’s childhood and the proleptic expansion of Lenny’s experiences into the future.
The analeptic references in Cracking India are so common that in my initial reading I often mistook them for current events. After all, the entire novel is one where Lenny recounts her childhood experiences during Partition, making the past into the present for the reader. The analeptic technique, then, is most noticeable when Lenny mentions how things from childhood affect her as an adult, which is the most current chronological moment in the text. For example, in the scene where Lenny and Yousef pass a Brahmin Pandit while walking, Lenny notes the disgust exhibited by the Pandit (125). Her feelings at this memory of her self’s perceived value expand into a more recent experience in her adulthood where she faces similar disgust by a Parsi priest she encounters at a wedding who thinks she is menstruating (125). The affective register in both situations revolves around an internalization of external dehumanization, or a loss of self-worth in a woman brought on by an interaction with a man. In both moments, Lenny has a sense of self, even if not explicitly stated, that she loses after these interactions. Even though they occur at different times in her life, Lenny’s loss of self-worth is tied to asymmetric gender power dynamics linking the two events. By tying these two experiences together through disgust, Sidhwa shapes how the reader interacts with both experiences to narrate a loss. As such, Sidhwa engages the reader as a witness to Lenny’s identity formation by reading the unsaid connection. This positioning of the reader emphasizes how gendered trauma contributes to Lenny’s identity formation in different times.
Given the premise of the novel as a recollection of Lenny’s own childhood, there are not many proleptic moments; but, when they happen, these moments tend to stick out. In particular, proleptic references towards an unknown future are strikingly different from the analeptic references despite their overall concern with narrative time. One such example is the final sentence of the novel. The last scene of the novel closes Lenny’s Partition narrative with Ayah returning to her family in Amritsar. No one knows what happens to Ayah from here. Her fate as a returned woman is undecided but likely negative, as we learn from her conversation with Godmother (274). The final sentence hangs over the future outside the novel as a way to emphasize the probability of misery because it invokes the narrative’s most infamous abuser as its subject: “And Ice-candy-man, too, disappears across the Wagah border into India” (1991: 289). The air of uncertainty around Ayah’s future, being a victim of Partition violence as both an abducted bride and returned woman, is heavy with the presence of the abusive Ice-candy-man as if the question of his interference is not one of if but when. His continued intrusion into Ayah’s life without her consent highlights the absence of agency she has as a woman in the context of Partition. This pairing of an uncertain yet negative future with the ending of the novel positions the reader to connect the unsaid implications of the patriarchal conventions guiding Partition regardless of time.
In addition to connecting the unsaid, Sidhwa also positions the reader as a continuing witness to gendered trauma. The content reinforces that gendered trauma is a focus for the novel and the context in which the text lives by being the last thing that the reader sees of the text. Sidhwa’s final statement revokes a sense of closure for the reader. Without a definite ending for Ayah, the reader’s role is not complete when it comes to bearing witness to this gendered trauma. Instead, the ahistorical trauma of returns continues in the reader, acknowledging their existence despite the ending of both the historical Partition period and Sidhwa’s novel.
Both traumatic experiences differ in terms of mode, but both revolve around how time connects gendered agency to identity formation. The women of the novel exhibit limited agency within the patriarchal context of Partition both individually and collectively. The different modes of time show how such trauma has shaped and continues to shape gendered individual and national identities even though this is not explicitly stated. As readers, we connect these temporal dots through Sidhwa’s use of analepsis and prolepsis to facilitate the creation of this gendered Partition narrative.
Presence
The last prominent narrative technique I will discuss in my analysis of the reader’s role as testimony in Cracking India is presence: the literal occupation of space on the page by speaking subjects. 13 As pointed out in the previous sections, Cracking India’s representation of women provides a unique outlook on Partition and post-Partition history from Lenny’s perspective. This singular perspective along with Lenny’s privilege means that she cannot give voice to the subaltern. Instead, she can only represent how she sees them. Rather than a failing of the narration, this preoccupation with perspective emphasizes the fact that none of the women has presence to narrate the traumatic event occurring to them. In other words, their absence is palpable.
Sidhwa uses the silence of these individual perspectives as an ethical way of structurally representing the absence of women’s narratives from national identity. My emphasis on this ethical representation is similar to the argument made by Jill Didur in “At a loss for words: Reading the silence in South Asian women’s Partition narratives”, who reads abducted women’s silences as “a refusal to identify with the project of (patriarchal) modernity that has produced it in the first place” (2000: 67). The historical silence of the abducted women parallels the silence of voice within the novel’s narration, which suggests that Sidhwa could be employing a similar tactic of rejecting the patriarchal perpetrator. As such, the only ethical way to represent the women that does not continue the objectification created by a patriarchal narrative is to leave them out of Cracking India. By leaving their voices out of Cracking India’s narrative but making them a focus of the narrative, Sidhwa brings awareness to their absence across a historical narrative of Partition. The reader, then, must take the next steps. Rather than passively relying on a representation of these absent voices, the reader must contend with the fact that they are not there and that their absence is foundational to the historical narrative of national identity the reader brings to the text.
In addition to this absence, Sidhwa’s use of presence also draws attention to gendered violence through loss in the novel. The most prominent loss of presence in the novel is its only narrative interruption, Ranna’s narrative of the massacre at Pir Pindo. Just as was the case with the abducted women, it would be unethical for Lenny to give perspective to the violence at Pir Pindo since she was not there. Instead, Lenny surrenders her narrative perspective to Ranna for 13 pages describing the massacre and Ranna’s survival (207–220). Ambreen Hai argues that the inclusion of Ranna’s perspective in the novel mirrors Lenny’s narration as it brings to light the trauma of his village’s slaughter (2000: 402). While I could compare Ranna’s narrative to Lenny’s, it seems more likely that this move is in connection with the other narrative techniques. Meaning, I argue, that this loss of agency connects to the absence of women’s narratives from the Partition narrative. To connect the two, I read Ranna’s interruption as a literal silencing of Lenny’s presence. In looking at this interruption, Ranna, disenfranchised in terms of class in comparison to Lenny, is, however, in possession of a male voice that, ultimately, can only give his gendered perspective on the violence. This singular perspective not only narrates the trauma of his entire community but also enables the only break in our female narrator’s own identity-formation narrative. Through Ranna’s interruption of Lenny’s narrative, Sidhwa draws attention to who can speak to these traumatic events: whose individual experiences have a role in shaping the national identity because they have been seen and heard, bearing witness to these foundational perspectives. Sidhwa’s narration, then, propels the reader into a space where they must engage with this reality of presence and absence along gender lines as it relates to Lenny’s narrative of her own identity formation.
Sidhwa’s use of gendered absences parallel the gendered losses within the narrative techniques, which positions the reader to focus on specific gendered issues in the text. This dual approach supports the idea that the entire text works together to bring awareness to the patriarchal history of Partition and its effects. Additionally, the text invites the reader to participate in the same ethical issue by removing Lenny’s subjectivity and replacing it with Ranna’s story. By participating in this act of witnessing, the reader must determine what to make of this lacuna by determining their own response to the silence. As a reader, we play a part in determining whether or not that silence within the text applies the continued act of Partition witnessing. By bringing such obvious and intentional losses and absence to the audience’s attention, Sidhwa makes it harder for readers to continue in ignorance, suggesting that we should not continue the ways of witnessing that depend on and continue gendered violence.
Conclusion
Through Cracking India’s narration, Sidhwa positions the reader as an ethical witness to the gendered trauma of individual and national postcolonial identity within the context of the 1947 Partition. The narrative techniques of perspective, time, and presence provide readers with an opportunity to interact with gendered traumas through witnessing. By using Lenny’s perspective as a child during Partition with relative safety via her class, religion, and ability, the narrative can focus on the gendered traumas that are incorporated into Lenny’s individual and national identities. The attention to time in the narrative via analepsis and prolepsis reminds the reader that we read about the events of Partition as they intersect with gender and their continued impact on postcolonial identities. Lastly, the presence of certain narratives over others in the text draws attention to who gets to define identity through telling narratives and provides an ethical way of emphasizing the gendered silences. By providing this crafted narrative, Sidhwa positions the reader in a very specific ethical relationship with the text in which they must facilitate an overtly gendered postcolonial trauma narrative. By reading it, the text confronts the reader with their responsibility to the text: will they witness the gendered trauma as crafted by Sidhwa within the novel or perpetuate systems of violence that precipitate Sidhwa’s narrative?
