Every thing in the description
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crackingindia_lecture2_2-28-2017.pptxBapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India
1947 Partition
Lecture 2: chapters 9-16
The Day India Burned – Class Discussion
1) In the documentary, did you agree with Mountbatten’s decision to leave India early?
2) Rape and abduction of women was a pretty common occurrence, so were honor killings. What were your thoughts on Bir Bahadur Singh’s sister’s decision to willingly accept death in order to protect her honour?
3) What were your thoughts about the ways in which Cyril Radcliffe’s precarious position to divide British India?
4) How were the refugees treated during the migration between India and Pakistan?
5) Do you think the politicians made strong decisions, especially Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi? What were their goals? What were the consequences of their decisions?
Cracking india
What does The Scarlet Letter reveal about early attitudes toward Native Americans? Think of Pride and Prejudice and Lord of the Flies as texts about class and gender roles and expectations.
Similarly, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India is an international classic that reveals the gender and class politics during the time of the Partition in India.
Cracking india - themes
The experience of being handicapped
the effects of religious racia lconflicts
the subjugation of women (e.g., arranged marriages, prostitution); sexuality; class and caste prejudice; and political violence.
The novel also concerns generational differences, and children’s rights and vulnerabilities. By writing about a child growing up during this time in India and Pakistan’s history, Sidhwa confronts many important social, historical, and political issues with humor and compassion.
The end of colonialism
Page 25 – “Lenny is weak. Some child with only the symptoms of a severe cold could have passed the virus.” And he roars a shocking postscript: “If anyone’s to blame, blame the British! There was no polio in India till they brought it here!” – product of colonialism? Trauma?
CracKing India –Pg 11-78
“The Goddamn English!” I think, infected by Colonel Bharucha’s startling verocity at this “dastardly” (one of Father’s favorite words, just as “plucky” is Mother’s) instance of British treachery. “They gave us polio!” And not withstanding the compatible and sanguine nature of my relationship with my disease. I feel its my first personal involvement with Indian politics: the Quit-India sentiment that has fired the imagination of a subject people and wil soon sweep away the Raj! (page 26)
Quit India movement: civil disobedience movement launched by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 8 August 1942, during World War II, demanding an end to British Rule of India.
Cracking India
Far away I hear a siren…into a single German soldier in a motorcycle (31)
I recal another childhood nightmare from the past. Children lie in a warehouse. Mother and Ayah move solicitiously. Godmother sits by my bed smiling indulgently as men in uniforms quietly slice off a child’s arm here, a leg there. She strokes my head as they dismember me. I feel no pain. Only an absymal sense of loss- and a chilling horror that no one is concerned by what’s happening (31)
Themes: foreshadowing; dismemberment of self/other, siren = impending violence?
Cracking India
The role of Gandhi – page 41
Suddenly I hear him declare – “Gandhi says, we must stop buying salt. We should only eat salt manufactured from the Indian Ocean!”
The colonel pauses, dramatically, and my loafing mind becomes attentive. The pause, shrewdly timed to permit just that tiny license so dear to a Parsee audience, is snapped up. “Who does this Gandhi think he is?” shouts an obliging wag promptly for somewhere in the middle. “Is it his grandfather’s ocean?” (44)
Cracking India
“When we were kicked out of Persia by the Arabs thirteen hundred years ago, what did we do? Did we shout and argue? No!” roars the colonel, and hastily provides his own answer before anyone can interrupt. “We got into boats and sailed to India” (page 46)
Cracking India
Hari’s character
“spare dark body” (pg 53)
Lower caste/class
Gardener
Fate after the Partition – guesses?
Cracking India
Imam Din: “I’ve not come all this way without a reason.” The villagers, who are wondering why he is visiting them, look at him attentively. He rubs his face with both hands; as if it pains him to state the reason. “I don’t think you know how serious things are getting in towns. Sly killings; rioting and baton charges by the police…long marches by the mobs...The Congresswallahs have started a new stunt...they sit down on the rail tracks – women and children, too. The police lift them off the tracks...but one of these days the steam engines will run over them...Once aroused...the English are savages”
“Then there is the Hindu-Muslim trouble,” he says, after a pause. “ugly trouble. It is spreading. Sikh Muslim trouble also.”
The villagers, Sikh and Muslim, erupt in protest.
“Brother,” the Sikh granti says when the tumult subsides. “our villages come from the same racial stock. Muslim or Sikh, we are basically Jats. How can we fight each other?” (64)
Cracking India
“Rivers of blood will flow all right” General Rogers shouts, almost as loud as Mr. Singh. “Nehru and the Congress will not have everything their way! They will have to reckon with the Muslim league and Jinnah. If we quit India today, old chap, you’ll bloody fall at each other’s throats!”
“Hindus, Muslims, Sikh: we all want the same thing! We want independence!”
Inspector General Rogers recovers his imperial phlegm. “My dear man,” he intones, “Don’t you know the Congress wont agree on a single issue with the Muslim league? The cabinet mission proposed a federation of the Hindu and Muslim majority provinces. Jinnah accepted it; Gandhi and Nehru didn’t! (pg 71)
Cracking India
Sarbat Khan cautions Ayah: “These are bad times-Allah knows what’s in store. There is big trouble in Calcutta and Delhi: Hindu-Muslim trouble. The Congresswallah are after Jinah’s blood…”
What’s it to us if Jinnah, Nehru, and Patel fight? They are fighting our fight,” says Ayah, lightly. “ (84)
Ayah says, “Funny things are happening inside the old city...Stabbings...Eiher the police can’t do anything-or they dont want to. It was discovered this morning becasue of the smell: a young, good, looking man. Several bodies have been found in the gutters and gullies of Kashmiri, Lahori, and Bhatti Gates and Shalmi. They must have been dumped there from different neighborhood because no one knows who they are.”
“Are they Hindus?” asked Ayah, her carefree mood dispelled
“Hindu, Muslim, Sikh. One can tell they are from prosperous, eating-drinking households...” (84)
Cracking India
“I was set firmly and relentlessly on the path to truth the day I broke a Wedgwood plate and, putting a brazen face on my mischief, nobly confessed all before Mother bent over me, showering me with the radiance of her approval. “I love you. You spoke the truth! What’s a broken plate? Break a hundred plates! “
I broke plates, cups, bowls, dishes. I smashed livers, kidneys, hearts, eyes…the path to virtue is strewn with broken people and shattered china.” (94)
Cracking India
Gandhijee visits Lahore. He is small, dark, shriveled, old. He looks just like Hari, our gardener, except he has a disgruntled, disgusted, and irritable look, and no one’d dare pull of his dhoti! He wears only the loin cloth and his black and thin torso is naked.
Gandhijee certainly is ahead of his times. He already knows the advantages of dieting. He has starved his way into the news and made headlines all over the world (94).
Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamdas Gandhi
He began his activism as an Indian immigrant in South Africa in the early 1900s, and in the years following World War I became the leading figure in India’s struggle to gain independence from Great Britain.
Gandhi was imprisoned several times during his pursuit of non-cooperation, and undertook a number of hunger strikes to protest the oppression of India’s poorest classes, among other injustices.
As part of his nonviolent non-cooperation campaign for home rule, Gandhi stressed the importance of economic independence for India. He particularly advocated the manufacture of khaddar, or homespun cloth, in order to replace imported textiles from Britain.
Gandhi strongly opposed Partition, but he agreed to it in hopes that after independence Hindus and Muslims could achieve peace internally. Amid the massive riots that followed Partition, Gandhi urged Hindus and Muslims to live peacefully together, and undertook a hunger strike until riots in Calcutta ceased.
On January 30, 12 days after that fast ended, Gandhi was on his way to an evening prayer meeting in Delhi when he was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic enraged by Mahatma’s efforts to negotiate with Jinnah and other Muslims.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was a leader of India’s nationalist movement and became India’s first prime minister after its independence.
His father was a renowned lawyer and one of Mahatma Gandhi's notable lieutenants.
Educated in England, like Gandhi. He eventually practiced law.
In 1919, while traveling on a train, Nehru overheard British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer gloating over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The massacre, also known as the Massacre of Amritsar, was an incident in which 379 people were killed and at least 1,200 wounded when the British military stationed there continuously fired for ten minutes on a crowd of unarmed Indians. Upon hearing Dyer’s words, Nehru vowed to fight the British. The incident changed the course of his life.
Jawaharlal nehru
After his father's death in 1931, Nehru became more embedded in the workings of the Congress Party and became closer to Gandhi, attending the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Signed in March 1931 by Gandhi and the British viceroy Lord Irwin, the pact declared a truce between the British and India's independence movement. The British agreed to free all political prisoners and Gandhi agreed to end the civil disobedience movement he had been coordinating for years.
Unfortunately, the pact did not instantly usher in a peaceful climate in British-controlled India, and both Nehru and Gandhi were jailed in early 1932 on charges of attempting to mount another civil disobedience movement. Neither man attended the third Round Table Conference.
At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, British viceroy Lord Linlithgow committed India to the war effort without consulting the now-autonomous provincial ministries.
Nehru's four pillars of domestic policies were democracy, socialism, unity, and secularism, and he largely succeeded in maintaining a strong foundation of all four during his tenure as president.
Mohammad ali Jinnah
Mohammad Ali Jinnah
Jinnah was an Indian politician who successfully campaigned for an independent Pakistan and became its first leader. He is known there as 'Quaid-I Azam' or 'Great Leader'.
Jinnah studied at Bombay University and at Lincoln's Inn in London. He then ran a successful legal practice in Bombay. He was already a member of the Indian National Congress, which was working for autonomy from British rule, when he joined the Muslim League in 1913. The league had formed a few years earlier to represent the interests of Indian Muslims in a predominantly Hindu country, and by 1916 he was elected its president.
During Jinnah’s visits to the House of Commons, he had developed a growing interest in politics, deeming it a more glamorous field than law. Now in Bombay, Jinnah began his foray into politics as a liberal nationalist.
As a member of Congress, Jinnah at first collaborated with Hindu leaders as their Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity, while working with the Muslim League simultaneously. Gradually, Jinnah realized that the Hindu leaders of Congress held a political agenda that was incongruent with his own. Earlier he had been aligned with their opposition to separate electorates meant to guarantee a fixed percentage of legislative representation for Muslims and Hindus. But in 1926, Jinnah shifted to the opposite view and began supporting separate electorates. Still, overall, he retained the belief that the rights of Muslims could be protected in a united India. At that stage of his political career, Jinnah left Congress and dedicated himself more fully to the Muslim League.
The Queen’s Park– Gathering place & Brotherhood
The Queen’s Park is packed. Groups of men and women sit in circles on the grass and children run about them. Ice candy man, lean as his popsicles and as affable, swarming with children, is going from group to group doing good business. Masseur, too, is going from group to group: handsome, reserved, competent, assured, massaging balding heads, kneading knotty shoulders and soothing aching limbs. (97)
What was your impression of Ice Candy Man and Massuer?
Cracking India
Page 118 – The Gurkas versus The Refugees
Page 125 – “One man’s religion is another man’s poison”
Page 128 – Ayah and Masseur
Page 131-2- Ayah and Lenny witness a riot themselves
Page 134 – Conflict rises between Ice Candy Man and Masseur
Page 140 – Religion versus politics – Masseur’s take – significant passages
Page 144 – the violence errupts
Page 145 – dismemberment of the Hindu men – Lenny witnesses the trauma
Page 146-7 – mob mentality, the idea of tamasha or spectacle
One man’s religion is another man’s poison
“Our shadow glides over a Brahmin Pandit. Sitting cross-legged on the grass he is eating out of a leafbowl. He looks at Yousaf and at me- and his face expresses a full range of terror, passion, and pain expected of a violated virgin. Our shadow has violated his virtue. The Pandit (priest) cringes. His features shrivel into arid little shrimps and his body retracts…I am a diseased maggot. I look at Yousaf. His face is drained of joy, bleak, furious. I know he too feels himself composed of shit, crawling with maggots.
Now I know surely. One man’s religion is another man’s poison. (125)
Cracking India
“Gandhi, Nehru, Patel…they have so much influence even in London.” says the garderner.
The bastards!” says Masseur with histronic fury that conceals a genuine bitterness. “So they sack Wavell Sahib, a fair man! And send for a new Lal Sahib will favour the Hindus”
“With all due respect, malijee.” says Ice Candy man, surveying the gardener through a blue mist of exhaled smoke, “but aren’t you Hindus expert at just this kind of thing? Twisting tails behind the scene...and getting someone else to slaughter your goats?” (99)
Cracking India
“Just the English?” asks Butcher. “Haven’t the Hindus connived with the Angrez to ignore the Muslim league, and support a party that win a single seat in the Punjab? It’s just the kind of a thing we fear. They manipulate one or two Muslims against the interests of the larger community. And now they have manipulated Master Tara Singh and his bleating herd of Sikhs!” (100)
Cracking India – can a country be ‘broken’?
There is much disturbing talk. India is going to be broken. Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is? Or crack it further up on Warris Road? How will I ever get to Godmother’s then?
I ask Ayah. “They’ll dig a canal…”she ventures. “This side for Hindustan and this side for Pakistan. If they want two countries, that s what they’ll have to do-crack India with a long, long canal.” (101)
Lenny Position:
The Sikh women pull me to their laps and asks my name and the name of my religion. “I’m Parsee.” I say
“O kee? What’s that? They ask: scandalized to discover a religion they’ve never heard of.
That’s when I realized times have changed. The Sikhs, only their rowdy little boys running about with their hair piled in topknots, are keeping mostly to themselves.
Only the group around Ayah remains unchanged. Hindu, Muslims, Sikh, Parsee, are always unified around her. (105)
Riots and violence in Lahore
“He glances at Yah. Since Ayah appears content to have me stay, he says: “Well Sher Singh, his brothers Prem and Pratab, and one or two cousins – all strapping fellows…and I. Armed with hockey sticks, we went ot their tenants’ house while the men were at work. We made a bit of hulla-golla (commotion) outside the building. Waved our hockey sticks and shouted: ’Come to your widows, pretty ladies: don’t hide. We have something to you.” (131)
”
Cracking India – The burning of lahore and the mob
”The terror the mob generates is palpable – like an evil paralyzing spell…The processionists are milling about two jeeps back to back. They come to a halt: the men in front of the procession pulling ahead and the mob behind banked close ip. There is a quickening in the activity about the jeeps. Mey eyes focus on an emancipated Banya wearing a white Gandhi cap. The man is knocked down. His lips are drawn away from rotting, paan-stained teeth in a scream. The men move back and in the small clearing I see his legs sticking out of his dhoti right up to the groin – each thin, brown leg tied to a jeep. Ayeah, holdign her hands over mey eyes, collapses on to the floor, pulling me down with her. There is a roar of a hundred throats: “Allah-o-Akbar” and beneath it the growl of revving motors.” (145)
Discussion Questions
On page 125, Lenny says, "Now I know surely. One man’s religion is another man’s poison.” Given the violence that breaks out and the fact that India is “cracked” along religious lines, explain Lenny, Ayah, and the other significant characters who experienced the trauma. What were their psychological, emotional, and physical repercussions , which were generated by religious conflict between various groups? How would you relate it to today?
Chapter 21 takes the reader back into Lenny’s family world, characterized by humor, joy, and a "regular life." Why do you think the author shows us Lenny’s family here?
How does Lenny use her handicap? How does she feel about it? Find examples of her taking advantage of her disabled status as a polio victim.
Describe the hyper masculine tensions in the novel. Think of Ice-Candy Man, Masseur, and the other men who linger around the Ayah? How are they different from the other group of men in Iman Din’s village?
Focusing on pages 144-5, what were your impressions of the Hindu man being dismembered violently and Ice Candy Man’s reaction to his death. How is civilian life impacted by political decisions? It is the desensitization of the violence but also how violence is responsible for fragmenting the body and the nation. How would you explain this phenomena? What other countries have experienced a similar kind of trauma? How can we reconcile this notion?
