Negotiating Conflict: Regional and National Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English

Pakistan has frequently been viewed as a stronghold of Islamic radicals, often overlooking the fact that various trends of both dormant and obvious conflicts exist between the politics of religion and region. Whereas the former is mainly controlled by the state, the latter is generally influenced by language and ethnicity. The state’s monolithic notion of national identity, from the country’s birth in 1947 to the present, has overshadowed the regional identities mainly the Pashtuns, Baluchis, and Sindhis, and disregarded the minority credos such as Shias, Parsis, Ahmadis, Hindus, and Christians. The present article aims to explore how contemporary Pakistani fiction in English spotlights images of a fragmented national self, underlining plights of the aforementioned marginal groups and exhibiting strong resistance to hidebound national identity. Reviewing contemporary Pakistani fiction in English with a particular focus on the fiction of Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Bina Shah, and Jamil Ahmad, this paper aims to bring critical attention of the scholars to the socio-cultural and political valuation of the regional identities.

Sacks of Mutilated Breasts: Violence against Women and Body Politics in Partition Literature

South Asian writers’ partition accounts attest that women from all backgrounds of culture and religion were the worst victims of the newly-created India-Pakistan border of 1947. Women's bodies were kidnapped, stripped naked, raped, disfigured (their breasts were cut off), engraved with religious symbols, and slain before being transported in train carriages to the "other" side of the border. Taking the romantic example of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988), we will look at the symbol of women's breasts, following on the theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on power and governmentality, framed within the rhetoric of Mother India, where violence against women is a commonplace Bapsis Sidhwa’s theory of women's rights. As a result, we will examine the passage of sacks of damaged breasts as a horrible testimony to Partition history and as a metaphor for border crossing, undermining the nation's stability. In light of Julia Kristen's abjection theory, we will view female corpses with damaged breasts as abject who push the bounds of normative society, exposing its frailty. Finally, the novel covered in this document can be seen both as a disgraceful condemnation of a brutal de/colonial process and as a witch for feminist resistance (doing Herstory). The agony and grief of mutilated women's bodies are depicted in authors such as Bapsi Sidhwa to reveal the dialectic of history/body (the trajectory of the violation of women's rights).

Female Corporeality and the Sublimation of Pain: A Study of The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa

This study explores in detail the crisis of female corporeality and how the self sublimates the resultant pain into psychological empowerment. Pakistani women have long been viewed as having no space for themselves. They could not master their choices or muster up courage to fight for the fulfillment of their desires. Similarly, the female characters in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Pakistani Bride (1990) appear to be oppressed and marginalized entities, dependent on men for their socio-economic needs. Yet, this research argues that their corporeal pain transforms into a psycho-emotional haven providing them a space of their own to think and make their own decisions. This specific strand has been a neglected area of research in the Sub-continental context. The research design used in this study is qualitative while the textual analysis is used as a method to analyze the data. The research pursues feminist literary standpoint theory posited by bell hooks (2004) in the postcolonial feminist context, while the Foucauldian (1979) concept of “Panopticism” (p. 195) and “Docile Body” (p. 135) are threaded to highlight the concept of complete physical and mental surveillance of the autonomous body/person in order to investigate the shift of gender/power roles from male hegemony to female empowerment.

A Psychological Exegesis of Displacement in Bapsi Sidhwa's Novel The Bride: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

This reports the psychological perspective of displacement in the English Pakistani novel The Bride (also published as The Pakistani Bride), written by a Pakistani American novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. This is a sociolinguistic study with the employment of Close Reading (CR) and Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study involves social, psychological and semantic aspects with the aim to present the psychological impact of displacement on the personal and social life of the characters. Close-Reading provides the analysis of the novel and the author. Systematic Functional Linguistics provides context and semantics as tools to analyze the historical and conceptual background of the novel. The findings of the study present mixed results, supporting the supposition that displacement affects the psychological state of the characters and disturbs their individual functionality. It partially proves that their social functionality is equally affected. It may be because people are more careful in playing their social roles.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of 'An American Brat' by Bapsi Sidhwa

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the novel written by an eminent 21st-century female writer Bapsi Sidhwa. The text was analyzed critically in the backdrop of the checklist developed by the researcher. The findings reveal that a significantly tough language has been used for the depiction of men and women. Roles and responsibilities given to them have been found to be assigned on the basis of gender discrimination. Therefore, it is contended that colonialism still prevails in the form of social, economic and educational disparities in the third world countries as compared to the developed and privileged countries. Similarly, power structures have been found functional in every sphere of life and are decided by the institutions which hold the utmost power. Racism has also been revealed in the text. Ethnicity, race, color, culture and language have been found superiority over all the other ethnicities, cultures, races and languages.

An Intersectional Feminist Reading of Bapsi Sidhwa's Water

Intersectionality has been recognized and widely taken by interdisciplinary fields that include Cultural studies, American studies, and Media studies to demonstrate a range of social issues. It focuses on the experiences of people in a different social and political context. The intersectional framework confronts significant social division axes that include race, class, gender, and disability that function together and influence each other. These social axes operate the power structures of a particular society that can cause inequality and discrimination. In literary studies, women's representation is no more confined to European and American academic writings. Within the feminist framework, the South Asian fiction writers also demonstrate a feminist approach in their works. Pakistani authors have indicated religion's exploitation as one of the central intersectional tropes in their literary work. Bapsi Sidhwa is one of the prominent feminist voices from Pakistan in diasporic English Literature. One of her novels, Water (2006), is based on Deepa Mehta's award-winning film, explores the life of the marginal and subaltern Hindu widows in India. The novel provides an insight into the intersectional nature of the Indian Hindu widows in a patriarchal society of a subcontinent where different power domains hold and impose dominant hierarchies. The paper's objective is to highlight the intersection of religion, gender, caste and politics against the backdrop of the Indian anti-colonial movement. It shows how power relations can manipulate cultural norms and use religion as a powerful tool to establish its hegemonic control over these marginalized widows who suffer as silent victims.

Oppression of Women in Pakistani Society: A Corpus-Based Study of Patriarchy in Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride

This paper deals with a corpus-based analysis of patriarchy in The Pakistani Bride, a novel written by Bapsi Sidhwa. The primary concern of the study is the adjectives used for the sketching of the Pakistani patriarchal society. Computer technology is widely used these days for the corpus analysis of literary texts such as novels, plays, poetry, etc. For this study, the text of the novel was collected from the internet and used for the corpus compilation. The corpus was analyzed using a corpus tool, AntConc. All the adjectives used in the text were analyzed and explained, highlighting the theme of patriarchy in the novel. The findings of the study suggest that patriarchy is a major theme of this novel, and adjectives play a crucial role in the description of gender discrimination, social constraints, and oppression of women.

Borrowing As A Tool To Fill The Ideological Thoughts: The Role Of Code-Mixing In An American Brat By Bapsi Sidhwa And The Escape By Qaisra Shiraz

This research article highlights the temperament, inference, scope, and motives of code mixing in Pakistani English works. One novel from Pakistani English novels namely, An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa and one short story namely, The Escape by Qaisra Shehraz are being selected as an illustration of this reading. In this novel and short story the writers have already dealt with the characteristics of post colonialism. English language and literature pierced into the privileged civilizations of the sub-continent, after the end of British Imperialism. Pakistani writers in English are the best interpreter of the post-colonial communal language. In this study, I have hit upon code mixing in English works written by Pakistani authors to a bigger echelon. These works are paragons of arts and the unbelievable mixture of rhetorical and fictitious study. In these works the writers have not abased the confined diversities. They have tinted the value of Pakistani English in order to achieve the chatty desires of native people. These borrowings from the native languages are used to fill the lexical fissures of ideological thoughts. The reason of these borrowings is not to represent the English as substandard assortment. Through the utilization of native words we conclude that the significance of native languages has been tinted to question mark the dialect as well. The words of daily use also have an area of research for English people without having any substitute in English. That’s why in English literature innovative practices and ideas of code-mixing have been employed.

Deplorable Condition of Women and Patriarchal Domination in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride

Parsi writers have contributed a lot to Indian English Literature. The Indian Parsi novelists express their feelings in the form of art. The novelists reflect the psychological dilemma of the minority community and its identity crisis through their works. Being a Parsi writer, Bapsi Sidhwa sees a kind of mental migration when she hybrids from her native land, and pours her feelings and thoughts in to her novels. She is known for her exploration of women’s inner psyche who aspire to live in modernity, inept to break traditional quality intrinsic in them. Most of her writings contain a pinch of migration and male dominance taste when one chews them. The expatriate writers face multi-cultural situation which merges with their personal anguish due to prejudice. They project the cultural confusion and confrontation of a multi-racial society. The quest for identity, aspiration for belongingness and love for native land is found as a part of non-erasable conscious in all expatriate writers. This paper reveals the socio-cultural background and the authoritative patriarchal Pakistani society in the novel The Pakistani Bride The novel portrays how the institution of marriage and patriarchy deplores and represses an orphaned girl’s self-identity. It also pinpoints the problems of a little girl Zaitoon as an alien in an alien land or culture. It enforces deportation as a pathway to sculpt for belongingness of her ‘self’. At the end, Zaitoon succeeds by rejecting the alien culture and tradition.

Witnessing gendered testimony: Reader ethics in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India

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.