Globalization and Gender: Bapsi Sidhwa (concluded) and Arundhuti Roy (begun)

The story reaches its tragic climax when Muslims headed by the Ice Candy Man come to look for Ayah because she is Hindu and Lenny gives out that she is hiding in the house. Lenny’s mother had informed the mob that ayah had gone back to India, but Lenny submitted to Ice Candy Man’s cajoling of her to tell the truth and his assurance that he would never hurt ayah. The result of the truth telling is that   Ice Candy Man then drags ayah out of the room and the mob then take her away on a cart.

In spite of the fact that the narrator of this novel is a child and the events focalized through a child’s consciousness, Sidhwa’s novel is political in the way that Morrison says all great art must be. I don’t know if Sidhwa writes a great book, but perhaps reflecting the opinion of the more mature Lenny who reconstructs her experience over time, bad press is given to the Indian leaders Gandhi and Nehru, while Jinnah is praised. Regarding the relationship of this book to “globalization” which is the topic of today’s paper, I would say that Sidhwa puts in the map of English literature, the specific history of the partition of India and indigenizes English in her own way by using words like   “badmash”( naughty,) “choorails” (witches), “khutputti” (puppets).

The next author or writer Arundhati Roy is an activist of sorts who speaks out  against rampant technologisation and globalization  in India  as well as U.S. imperialism. In The God of Small Things she   weaves a tragic story of a pair of two-egg twins caught and destroyed  in the fatal net created when their beautiful thirty-one year old divorced  mother has an affair with a so called Untouchable man, and the affair is discovered by her family. The story set in rural Kerala in the 1960’s achieves tragic intensity as the inseparable twins who thought of themselves as “WE” and “US” are separated and the boy Estha sent away to his father, after which he permanently stops talking .This is how Roy describes Estha’s quietness and descent into silence. Her language I feel, can rival the best of English writing done by anyone, achieving a  density,  and visual intensity that  is reminiscent of Keats:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of  his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip  of his tongue (13)