Bapsi Sidhwaਬਾਪਸੀ ਸਿਧਵਾ

Bapsi Sidhwa (11 August 1938 to 25 December 2024) was a Pakistani novelist who wrote in English and lived much of her later life in the United States. Raised in Lahore, she drew on her own childhood in that city during the 1947 Partition to write Ice Candy Man, published in America as Cracking India, the novel that carried her name around the world.

Early life

She was born in Karachi to Parsi Zoroastrian parents, Peshotan and Tehmina Bhandara, and moved with her family to Lahore when she was about three months old. At the age of two she contracted polio, which meant major surgeries in childhood and left its mark on her for the rest of her life. The small Parsi community of Lahore, neither Hindu, Muslim nor Sikh, watched the approach of Partition from the edge of the storm, and the child watched with it: she later recalled walking with the family gardener a few months before Partition and coming upon a gunny sack that held a young man's body. The scene stayed with her, and decades later it found its way into her novel.

Sidhwa called herself a Punjabi-Parsi. Her first language was Gujarati, her second Urdu and her third English, the language she read and wrote in best. She took her BA from Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore in 1957, married at nineteen and moved to Bombay. That marriage ended after five years and she returned to Lahore, separated for years from her son by the new border's restrictions. She married again, to Noshir Sidhwa, raised three more children, five in all, and began her career as an author.

Writing career

Lahore is the centre of her fiction. Her first novel, The Crow Eaters (1978), is a comic portrait of a Parsi family in the colonial city, and it was especially acclaimed, receiving the David Higham award. The Bride (1982), published in the United States as The Pakistani Bride, tells of a young bride carried into the tribal hills of the north. Then came the book her city had been waiting inside her since 1947: Ice Candy Man, published in England in 1988 and in the United States in 1991 as Cracking India. Narrated by Lenny, a Parsi girl disabled by polio, it shows the mixed streets of Lahore tearing themselves apart, and it remains the fullest novel of Partition written from inside Lahore itself.

An American Brat (1993) followed a Parsi girl to America. In 2006 she published Water: A Novel, written from Deepa Mehta's film Water, and edited City of Sin and Splendour, an anthology of writings on Lahore. Her work with Mehta ran in both directions: Mehta's 1998 film Earth is made from Ice Candy Man, and Sidhwa wrote the novel of Mehta's Water. Alongside the writing she taught at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Rice University, Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University, among others.

What is Bapsi Sidhwa best known for?

Bapsi Sidhwa is best known for Ice Candy Man (1988), her novel of the 1947 Partition seen through the eyes of a child in Lahore. The University of Southampton's summary is plain: it is her best known work, and it draws directly on her own childhood in the city at the time of Partition. In 2019 BBC News placed the novel on its list of the 100 most influential novels, a sign of how far a story rooted in one Lahore street has travelled.

Honours and later life

Pakistan gave her the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, its highest national honour in the arts, in 1991. She held a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe and Harvard in 1986, won the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award in 1994, was inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame in 2000, and in 2007 received Italy's Premio Mondello for foreign authors for Water. The Citizens Archive of Pakistan released a documentary on her life, Bapsi: Silences of My Life, in 2022. She died in Houston, Texas, on 25 December 2024, at the age of 86.

Legacy

Sidhwa wrote the Parsi community into the centre of the Partition story, where the standard accounts had left it at the margins, and she wrote Lahore as a lost shared world rather than as a prize fought over by two new nations. For Punjabi readers on both sides of the border, and for the diaspora that carries Lahore in family memory, Lenny's street remains one of the clearest windows into 1947. Her novel Ice Candy Man has its own entry in this Kosh.