I wanted to respond to Rachel’s post addressing familial relations in Cracking India, particularly the power struggle present between Lenny and Adi and between Godmother and Slavesister.
First, I think the idea of authenticity and where authentic art comes from is relevant here. Smythe, in his essay “Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination,” claims that “all that is ’authentic’ in the way of human art and culture emerges from the reality of dwelling” (3). I think this logic follows from Edward Relph’s definition of dwelling as a secure and safe space where relationships, and consequently individual identity, is developed-- “a base to set down Being and to realise our possibilities” (3). Without a secure home or dwelling, and therefore a secure identity, can humans produce authentic art?
Daiya, in her article “Postcolonial Masculinity: Partition Violence and Nationalism in the Indian Public Sphere,” implies that authentic art has certainly come from the victims of the 1947 partition of India. She mentions the irony that, in the creation of “nations” India and Pakistan, dwellings (or safe spaces) were sacrificed (3). Yet she seems to imply that, in the absence of a certain dwelling, artists seem to have created an imaginative safe space, an artistic sphere wherein collective and individual identity can be developed through art. “The collective memory and cultural effects of the 1947 violence and migration,” she says, “can be apprehended in their imaginative inscription in the literature and film that inhabit the public sphere” (4). Cracking India seems to be an example of such art.
One way to reconcile Relph’s definition of dwelling and Daiya’s belief that authentic art has come from displaced citizens of India is to allow the ‘dwelling’ concept to include familial relations, as I suggested in my post on The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Can a stable family take the place of a stable space? Can a stable family even exist without a certain home space?
Here I think is where the power structure of Cracking India comes in. How does Sidhwa create a stable enough family structure to allow a novel that readers like and trust to emerge from the uncertain national structures created by partition? So far (in the first 100 pages or so) the men of the novel seem to screw things up, and the women hold life together. This is exemplified at the dinner party held by Lenny’s parents where the men become volatile over an impassioned discussion of politics, and Mr. Singh literally attempts to stab Mr. Rodgers with a fork. The women protest loudly and bring order back to the table. Lenny’s mother gets her father to take the fork away from Mr. Singh, then persuades Mr. Rodgers to apologize to Mr. Singh, then changes the subject to the serving of dessert (72-3). Ayah uses her sexual influence to make things happen for Lenny’s household, and protects Lenny and Adi the best she can from the creepy men in their lives. The power these women wield is not ideally obtained; they are sexually objectified. Yet they exercise enormous influence over their men, and their families. Lenny even mentions jealously hoarding her mother’s influence: “Mother’s motherliness has a universal reach. Like her involuntary female magnetism it cannot be harnessed. She showers material delight on all and sundry. I resent this largesse. As Father does her unconscious and indiscriminate sex appeal” (51). Whether despite or because of their positions as sexual objects, the women in this novel create a protective family unit, and Lenny’s idea of home, out of which she creates an identity and artistic voice.
A further note on power relations: Lenny’s observations of a conversation between men in Imam Din’s village is illuminating. The villagers, Sikh and Muslim, cannot imagine violence erupting between them just because they have different religious beliefs. They distinguish the Hindu-Muslim and Muslim-Sikh violence that is happening in nearby towns from what will happen in their villages. “’Our villages come from the same racial stock,”’ says a Sikh leader in the village. “’Muslim or Sikh, we are basically Jats. We are brothers. How can we fight each other?”’ (64). The differences between people that matter initially are based on region and class, not race or religion. The “city folk can afford to fight,” but the villagers “are bound by [their] toil” (65). Perhaps the relationship between Godmother and Slavesister is an example of what Lenny observes to be the traditional power hierarchy (pre-Partition). The class relationship even supersedes any familial relation implied by the name Slave-sister. Slave comes first, literally and figuratively. To Lenny, people were separated by class (social standing) and not by religion, until, suddenly, she becomes aware of religious differences (101). It’s like this awareness happens overnight, a result of British occupation and division, and ensuing violence.
There’s a passage that intrigues me at the end of Chapter 10: when Lenny lowers her eyes before a man (Gandhi) for the first time. She then says, “It wasn’t until some years later--when I realized the full scope and dimension of the massacres--that I comprehended the concealed nature of the ice lurking deep beneath the hypnotic and dynamic femininity of Gandhi’s non-violent exterior. And then, when I raised my head again, the men lowered their eyes” (96). She implies a certain feminine power that she can access once she understands it, but that Gandhi attempts to access and fails. I wonder if somehow this feminine power defines what is authentic in this novel. Maybe a point for discussion…
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