Child as Narrator in Cracking India

Abstract

Abstract

paper explores the use of a specific narrative device, that of, using child narrator or the privileging of child’s point of view in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India to see how the novelists historicize the loss of innocence by reconstructing the past through memory. Working through the larger backdrop of socio-historical and political happenings, Sidhwa has assigned her girl child narrator the task to look at the adult world. The novelist’s use of the frame of childhood relocates the historical event of partition, the period of national turmoil and transformation, in the private world of the home and thus creating an intimate intervention into official historical narratives. I want to explore how child perspective is used to negotiate the binaries that Sidhwa’s text set up between the national and personal. My argument is that child- perspective functions as a bridge, as an interpretative filter, informing and educating the readers. The children become apparently universal mediators who in their own innocent ways unlace an alien and complex world knowable.