Politics, Power, Domination and Differences: Nation Building in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India

Abstract

Cracking India, the third novel of Bapsi Sidhwa, published in 1988, is an oral testimony of
memory, storytelling, gossip and rumor, recalling the traumatic experiences of the Partition
violence. The novel includes a style of narrative amalgamation of storytelling and autobiography
that delineates the rigidity between social and political strands. The political aspects of the novel
includes: the Pakistani view and identifies the issues of nationality, it confers how Pakistani view
proffers the means of victimization through the communal riots; the Parsi community, the minority
within a minority state, dispenses its trepidation over the genesis of the country and the probability
of its survival in a newly erected country and the women who are the victims of Partition.Cracking
Indiais a juxtaposition of both utopia and heterotopia. There are various ideological
representations of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians in the undivided India. But, each
place became a target of violence burning the cities in the eternal fire symbolizing heteropia