Mapping the Female Body as Battleground: Feminist Perspectives on Gender-based Violence in Ice-Candy Man

Abstract

This study analyzes Bapsi Sidhwa’s partition novel Ice-Candy-Man (1988), also named as Cracking India, written against the backdrop of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The novel portrays that communal violence, unleashed during the partition, resulted in massive gender-based violence, indiscriminately targeting women from the different religious backgrounds, including Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. The study employs feministic theoretical framework based on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), patriarchal violence (MacKinnon, 1989; Butler, 1990; Nussbaum, 1995) and subalternity (Spivak, 1988) to better understand the politics of the body in a society with cultural and religious differences. The study establishes that women’s bodies, as a symbolic battleground, embody violence triggered in the wake of communal strife among distinctive religious, national, or patriarchal groups living in the British colonized Indian Subcontinent. The study posits that women are doubly oppressed, regardless of their religious, national, and cultural affiliations: first by the engrossed intersectionality and patriarchy, and the second by the simmering outbursts and rhetoric of nationalism that broke out in the wake of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. It is established that Sidhwa’s narrative reveals the intersection of working-class women, patriarchal sexual violence, and female subalternity, objectifying the bodies of women for body politics. In addition, it is found that the communal anger and honour, masculinity, religious and political vengeance transformed women's bodies into territories to be trespassed, seized, conquered, molested, and destroyed. Thus, the intersection of class, religion, and gender degenerates into the odd experiences of abduction, rape, forced prostitution, and commodification. Finally, the study establishes how Sidhwa’s narrative portrays the trauma and violence borne by the women during the gender and communal-based differences during the partition of the subcontinent from a feminist perspective.