Every thing in the description
atmed.oshia1414
earth1947_lecture4_3-21-2017.pptxBapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India
1947 Partition
Deepa Mehta’s earth (1998)
Characters
Aamir Khan - Dil Navaz, the Ice Candy Man
Nandita Das - Shanta, the Ayah
Rahul Khanna - Hassan, the Masseur
Maia Sethna - Lenny Sethna
Shabana Azmi - older Lenny, narrator
Kitu Gidwani - Bunty Sethna
Arif Zakaria - Rustom Sethna
Kulbhushan Kharbanda - Imam Din
Kumar Rajendra - Refugee Police
Pavan Malhotra - Butcher
IN Deepa Mehta’s words
I wanted desperately to make CRACKING INDIA into a film, a particular film, EARTH, which would be the second in my trilogy of the elements of Fire, Earth and Water.
Tracing Bapsi was no easy task but persevere we did and soon I was talking to Bapsi on the phone, hoping that the film rights to her book were still available. Two months later, thanks to David Hamilton's unwavering belief in the project, we owned the rights, had development funds, and I was sitting at my kitchen table, writing the screenplay of EARTH.
David and Anne Masson and I had worked together on FIRE and we re-assembled the team to begin the detailed planning of the production.
During this phase Bapsi became a friend and was exceedingly generous with information and old photographs. She would talk with me for hours about what it was like growing up in Lahore during those times. Lenny, after all, was based on Bapsi. In fact, Lenny was Bapsi.
The irony of our situation hasn't escaped Bapsi or myself. Bapsi is from Pakistan and now a US citizen. I'm from India and now living in Canada. If neither of us had moved from our respective homelands, the film just wouldn't have been possible. Pakistan and India, since the Partition of 1947, are sworn enemies. Not only have they fought three major wars against each other, but also, as I write this, both countries talk blithely about their nuclear capabilities and continue their militant aggression against each other across the still- disputed Kashmir border.
Fallen Women in the novel and film
Abducted women like Ayah and Hamdia, Lenny’s new nanny are viewed with suspicion from Lenny.
Page 226
“It isn’t a jail, Lenny baby…it’s a camp for fallen women.”
“What are fallen women?”
“Hai! The questions you ask! Your mother won’t like such talk…Now keep quiet”
“Are you a fallen woman?”
Fallen women – Abducted and raped women
In the aftermath of the 1947 declaration of Indian independence, the roughly drawn new state boundaries triggered what may have been the biggest migration in human history.
Historical consensus supports a figure of 12 million people displaced, although the BBC suggests figures as high as 14.5 million people. An undeclared civil war erupted as communities of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fought one another to establish their own identities in their redefined homelands. And, in the process, the Indian government estimates, 83,000 women were abused and abducted. Others put the number even higher.
“Rather than being raped and abandoned,” Yasmin Khan writes in The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, “tens of thousands of women were kept in the ‘other’ country, as permanent hostages, captives, or forced wives; they became simply known as ‘the abducted women.’” Why did men “keep the women they had attacked?” Khan asks. The underlying reason—whether men forced women into unpaid labor or took them as forced wives—was the “impulse to consume, transform, or eradicate the remnants of the other community,” she says.
Menon and Bashin
“the material, symbolic, and political significance of the abduction of women was not lost either on the women themselves and their families, on their communities, or on leaders and governments. As a retaliatory measure, it was simultaneously an assertion of identity and a humiliation of the rival community through the appropriation of its women. When accompanied by forcible conversion and marriage, it could be counted upon to outrage both, family and community honour and religious sentiments. The fear of abduction or falling into heads of the enemy compelled hundreds of women to take their own lives, equal numbers were killed by their own families and literally thousands of others to carry packets of poisons on their persons in the eventuality that they might be captured. Any many committed suicide after they were released by their captors for having been thus ‘used’ and polluted” (WS-3)
Official estimates
In 1950, Menon and Bhasin write, the “official estimate” for numbers of abducted women stood at 50,000 Muslims in India and 33,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. But rehabilitation workers place these figures higher. Mridula Sarabhai, they write, a director of rehabilitation projects for abducted women, believed that as many as 125,000 Hindu and Sikh women were abducted in Pakistan.
Fallen women
“Mummy and your aunt rescue kidnapped women. When they find them, they send them back to their families or to the Recovered Women’s amps. She arranged for Ayah to be sent to her relatives. She felt you had accepted her absence – you’d only start fretting again. (251)
252 – question of her current status but no answers
Is she a Christian? Is a prostitute? Is she married to the Ice Candy Man? (page 258-9) How does he downplay his marriage? How his community protects their women?
Where is her voice? Her narrative?
Theme of shame and Lenny’s guilt: page 266
Themes in the novel
Child narrator
Female sexuality
Masculinity – Ice Candy Man’s transformation
Critique of colonial power and fickleness of human nature
The metaphor of “cracking” – breaking of a country; division of communities
The novel creates space for the unraised voices of the females who had to go through the dual turmoil in the "cracking" of the nation and the young girl's "breaking" of the patriarchal nationalist code
