Bapsi Sidhwa (1938-2024): The Cross-border Author

Deepa Mehta’s film 1947 Earth immortalised Lenny, the child protagonist of big eyes and a telltale limp, who is afflicted with polio. Through her gaze we saw the horrors of Partition, and the absurdity of how neighbours could turn into enemies. Lenny arose from Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel, Cracking India, which was originally published as Ice Candy Man (1988, UK). In India, Sidhwa might be best known for Ice Candy Man, but in Pakistan she is known for throwing open the doors of writing in English. Sidhwa died in Houston, Texas, on December 25. She was 86.

She is uniquely celebrated in Pakistan, by the Parsi community, and the US where she lived and taught for many years. Her accolades included the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1991, Pakistan’s highest national honour in the arts. She was also inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame, reflecting her status as a global literary ambassador for the community.

Like her protagonist, Lenny, Sidhwa too had polio, which she contracted just two years after her birth in Karachi. Sidhwa stayed in Pakistan till her BA, and then moved to Bombay in her late teens. She went on to live in the US for more than four decades.

From childhood onwards, her physical disability plucked her away from the typical exertions of childhood and nudged her towards books. She was educated at home until she was 15. Not allowed to go to school and confined largely to the house, she would often read for up to eight hours a day. Sidhwa soon struck up a deep friendship with Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (the eternal sisters of Little Women). While she befriended books, she also learned from them. Her hours of reading as a child moulded her into one of the first Pakistani writers in English. Today, Pakistani writers writing in English are a force unto themselves, but few would realise that a soft-spoken Parsi woman was responsible for first opening the doors of opportunity, as she was one of the first to publish in English in Pakistan. Of the early challenges she said in an interview to me in 2013, “It is true, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Her first novel, The Pakistani Bride (1981) arose from the need to tell the world that patriarchy and misogynist laws can destroy young women. Sidhwa wrote the deeply layered novel after travelling to the Karakoram Mountains in northwest Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. There she heard of a young Punjabi girl married to a tribal man. Subject to immense cruelty, she tried running away, only to be captured and beheaded by her husband’s family. The Indus carried her headless body to shore. The story struck Sidhwa’s feminist core. As the wife of a businessman and mother of three, she found herself sneaking out of bridge games to write, and would share what she wrote only with her husband, as she felt her card-playing friends might mock her.

Sidhwa continued with her feminist work outside of novels as well. She worked in the Destitute Women and Children’s home in Lahore for years, and was a member of the advisory committee on women’s development to former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Sidhwa wrote in depth about her many homes. An American Brat dealt with a teenage Pakistani girl coming of age and finding herself in America. In 2006 she edited City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore, which she called a “labour of love”, and added, “I felt I owed it to the city that nurtured me as a writer.” Even though she moved to the US back in the ’80s, the subcontinent inked work. Longing for the texture and details of Lahore and Bombay, she continued to travel to India-Pakistan as frequently as her visa and health allowed.

Best known for her novels, the last book she wrote was a collection of short stories titled Their Language of Love (2013). When I interviewed her the same year, the author of six novels at that time said her natural impulse propelled her towards the novel, as she was incapable of omitting details and was determined to include almost everything. However, novel writing is a long and arduous process and one she was wearying of.  She had said, “I no longer have the energy to write a novel. This is my first foray into the short story. It is not as fulfilling, but I’m satisfied with the outcome. As a writer, I will keep writing till the day I die — what else can I do?”

1947 EarthBapsi SidhwadeathDeepa MehtaIce Candy ManIn MemoriamobituaryPakistanWeb Exclusivewriter