Divided Bodies: Nation Formation and the Literary Marketplace in Salman Rushdie's Shame and Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India

Abstract

Nearly 70 years later, the 1947 Partition of India remains relevant, continues to be written about, and demonstrates the lasting corollaries of such violence. This study examines the disabled, gendered, and violated postcolonial body in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991), originally published in India as Ice-Candy Man (1988). Shame and Cracking India remain entryways into exploring the political, cultural, and economic dynamics of the preceding and subsequent violence of the 1947 Partition of India. Rushdie and Sidhwa’s literary renderings of Partition and Pakistani/Indian politics utilize disability as a method to demonstrate the severing of a nation and Indian and Pakistani identities. Additionally, Rushdie and Sidhwa reveal the interconnected nature of gender, honor, shame, and violence. Writing within political and economic complexities that extend far beyond 1947, Rushdie and Sidhwa demonstrate how literature remains a cultural production tangled in capitalistic mechanisms that propel the global literary marketplace.