THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF BAPSI SIDHWA ON VICTIMISATION OF WOMEN

Abstract

This article examines the ideology of victimisation of women in the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa, with close attention to The Pakistani Bride (1983), Ice-Candy-Man (1988; US title Cracking India), An American Brat (1993), and Water (2006). Situating Sidhwa within Commonwealth feminist writing and South Asian Partition literature, the study argues that her fiction represents victimisation not as a naturalised feminine condition but as a historically constructed ideological formation sustained through patriarchy, nationalism, communal violence, religious orthodoxy, and diasporic modernity. Drawing upon feminist theory (Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), trauma studies (Cathy Caruth), and Partition historiography (Urvashi Butalia; Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin), this article demonstrates how Sidhwa exposes systemic gendered oppression while simultaneously foregrounding women’s resilience, testimony, and ethical witnessing. Through sustained close reading and textual quotation, the essay contends that Sidhwa dismantles simplistic binaries of victim and agent. Instead, she presents a continuum wherein women inhabit positions of vulnerability, resistance, negotiation, and survival. Her narrative strategies child focalisation, embodied depiction, irony, and dialogic plurality transform the literary representation of suffering into a site of historical accountability and feminist critique.