Celebrating Indigenous Culture and Identity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man: A Postcolonial Critique

Abstract

To justify colonialism and perpetuate colonial rule the colonizers appropriated their political, 
cultural, academic, literary, and linguistic supremacy which left a tinge of mimicry and 
hybridity among the natives. The colonizers, being in the centre, employed colonial discourse, 
Eurocentric historic construct, Western education system, English language, missionary and 
creative literature to portray the periphery, the colonized, as uncivilized, accultured, 
incompetent, uncouth and diabolical evils. To rebut this, the postcolonial writers rejected 
colonialist ideology and cultural supremacy by asserting native culture, identity, language, and 
societal values. They disassociated themselves from cultural imperialism and celebrated their 
indigenous culture. This study analyses the portrayal of celebration of the indigenous culture 
and identity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man (1988-89) from the vantage point of 
postcolonial theory. It has been found that Sidhwa celebrates indigenous culture, identity, 
tradition, language, and localization in the novel. To this effect, she employs code-mixing to 
add indigenous semantics, delineates characters from the locality, asserts her Pakistaniness and 
objectifies Pakistani leadership and narrative in the novel and thus she continues to live as a 
postcolonial writer.