Lenny as a narrator moves from one phase of her life, i.e., childhood to adolescence. Her lameness is suggestive of handicap, a woman writer faces, because writing – an intellectual exercise – is considered a male bastion, outside the domain of women. The narrator is a young Parsee girl named Lenny, who is suffering from polio. This novel highlights feminist concerns about women’s issues, particularly their experience of victimization and suppression within patriarchal societies and how this suppression takes a brutal form in the face of national upheaval. Ice-Candy-Man is a significant testimony of a gynocentric view of reality in the backdrop of a religious turbulence. Sidhwa, through Ice-Candy-Man critiques the stereotypical images of women and fights for their empowerment. The novel Ice-Candy-Man may be read as a postcolonial novel attempting to portray the life and times of the Partition of India giving due importance to the other marginal sections of society based on the distinction of gender, class, caste, or religion. This religion based division resulted in mass violence, murder, and rape. It represents a series of female characters who have survived in a chaotic time of 1947 in India, the period of worst religious riots in the history of India. Originally published as Ice-Candy Man, Cracking India is a semi-autobiographical text in which Bapsi Sidhwa through the lens of her childhood memories recounts the events surrounding Partition.
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