Cracking India Book

The Partition of India is not something that is often explored in English-language literature. The birth of Pakistan came at a time of tremendous violence in the region, and it is Bapsi Sidhwa's ability to capture this brutality on the page that is so powerful when reading her novel.

Sidhwa has often been heralded as Pakistan's finest novelist, and when reading Cracking India, it is easy to see why. She has a way of pulling you into the story that goes above and beyond the capabilities of most authors. In this novel, we are confronted with the Partition through the eyes of a young girl, Lenny. It is through these eyes that we see the world, and thus through these eyes that we are to understand it.

Yet Sidhwa also infuses our narrator with moments of adult knowledge that bring a startling maturity that really drives home the gradual corruption of Lenny's innocence as she is witness to the destruction of the people and places that she has grown up and fallen in love with. The brutal violence literally arrives upon her doorstep and takes from her her nearest and dearest Ayah, the family childminder, with whom Lenny has developed an almost mother-daughter bond.

Through the early parts of the novel, set in the build-up to Partition, we see Lenny surrounded by adults of different classes, religious beliefs, and nationalities, and they happily and peacefully live amongst each other, discussing the politics of the region more or less in abstractions.

However, these abstractions cannot remain so distant for long, and as Partition comes, the novel instantly takes on an entirely different tone, with a sense of cannibalism quickly entering the text. These people who had once lived so peacefully alongside each other, regardless of class, faith, and nationality, are in an instant transformed into distrusting and fiery souls as a country and its people are torn in two.

The joyful start to the novel, filled with the enjoyable thoughts of a young child going about her daily life, is starkly contrasted with the latter half and the gradual erosion of her innocence by all of the terrible things she bears witness to. Though the novel is indeed fictional, it has its basis in fact, and it is that that makes Cracking India simultaneously an incredibly powerful and at times difficult book to read. It is a topic that few writers, especially in the English language, have approached, but it is one that is certainly important to write about. 'Important' seems like a very appropriate word when describing this novel, for it is an important book; important to write, and important to read. It may well not be the easiest book you will ever read, but it will certainly be one of the finest and most interesting. Few writers hit home as hard as Sidhwa does with this novel, and it is evident throughout how much she deserves her title as Pakistan's finest novelist.