Invitation
About the Book
Bapsi Sidhwa
Press Release
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| Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride: Book Launch - March 18, 2008 |
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 Bapsi Sidhwa (b. 1938) has been a figure on the South Asian literary scene for many years and is recognized internationally as Pakistan's finest English-language novelist. Her novels provide windows onto life on the Indian subcontinent from the era of British colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth-century (The Crow Eaters), through the horrific partition that accompanied independence in 1947 (Cracking India), to the immigration of a Pakistani girl to America at the end of the century (An American Brat).
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, and raised in post-partition Lahore, where she graduated from Kinnaird College for Women, Sidhwa experienced first-hand many of the horrors of the Partition of India and Pakistan depicted in her novel, Cracking India. Her novels reflect her Parsee heritage and express her abiding concern for women's lives on the sub-continent.
Like Lenny in Cracking India, Sidhwa contracted polio as a very young child. She had no formal schooling until her teenage years (when the effects of the disease were cured by surgery) and read voraciously throughout her childhood. In an interview, Sidhwa said, "I was given my first novel, Little Women, as a kid by my private tutor. It introduced me to a world of fantasy and reading-I mean extraordinary amounts of reading because that was the only life that I had." (www.monsoonmag.com/interviews/i3inter_sidhwa.html). Sidhwa's first marriage was an arranged marriage. She lived in Bombay for a time until, after her divorce, she returned to Lahore and remarried. She moved to the United States in the 1980s and now lives in Houston, Texas.
Sidhwa began writing in her twenties after the birth of two children. Her novels have been published in India, Pakistan, North America, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Greece, and Russia. Her first book, The Bride, was based the true story of a woman living in a remote mountain town who ran away from her husband and was tracked down and murdered as a result. In her second novel, The Crow Eaters, Sidhwa changed setting and tone to tell the hilarious story of the battles between a man and his mother-in-law in colonial-era Lahore. The Crow Eaters was self-published in Pakistan in 1978 and acquired in 1980 by the British publisher Jonathan Cape and by St. Martins Press in the United States in 1982 (and reissued by Milkweed Editions in 1991). Cracking India, (published in 1988 in Europe as The Ice-Candy Man) brought Sidhwa wide acclaim. Released in North America in 1991 by Milkweed Editions, it was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, received the Liberature Prize in Germany, and was nominated by the American Library Association as a Notable Book the same year. Salman Rushdie, writing in the New Yorker, called Cracking India "one of the finest responses made to the horror of the division of the subcontinent." Cracking India was made into a movie, Earth, directed by Deepa Mehta. An American Brat, was published by Milkweed in North America in 1993. In 2001 Oxford University Press published an omnibus edition of Sidhwa's novels in Pakistan. In 2005, Sidhwa edited City of Sin and Splendor: Writings about Lahore, published by Penguin India.
Sidhwa received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest national honor in the arts in 1991 and the National Award for English Literature by the Pakistan Academy of Letters in 1992. She was voluntary secretary in the Destitute Women's and Children's Home in Lahore for several years and worked on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Women's Development.
An active social worker among Asian women, she represented Pakistan at the Asian Women's Congress in 1975. She worked to create an awareness of women's rights and protested -using street-power, the platform, and the media - against repressive measures aimed at women and the minority communities in Pakistan. She also has written editorials about the tension between Pakistan and India over the region of Kashmir.
Sidhwa has taught at Columbia University, University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College, and South Hampton University in England. She was the Fanny Hurst writer-in-residence at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and serves on the Board of Directors of INPRINT in Houston. Sidhwa held a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard in 1986, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center, Bellagio, Italy, in 1991. She received the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award in 1994. |
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