| Tuesday, March 18, 2008 New York, NY: Indo American Arts Council hosted reading and signing of "The Pakistani Bride" written by Bapsi Sidhwa. A classic work of feminist literature in South Asia, Bapsi Sidhwa's first novel The Pakistani Bride offers a prescient, provocative portrayal of the plight of Pakistani women in tribal society. Originally published in 1983, The Pakistani Bride is a timely reissue of a story about the clash of cultures on the Indian subcontinent. Since late December 2007, the sudden death of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been mourned as a major setback for women's rights in Muslim societies. Despite the legacy Bhutto left for women, it remains that Pakistani law is so deeply entrenched with tribal and religious mores that Pakistan has one of the highest illiteracy rates for women in the world. Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place, especially for women. Traveling alone from the isolated village where he was born, a tribal man takes an orphaned girl for his daughter and brings her to the glittering city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, he makes his fortune and sets up a home for the two of them. Yet, as the years pass, he grows nostalgic for life in the mountains. Impulsively, the man promises his daughter in marriage to a man of his tribe, but once she arrives in the mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate impossible. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this story of the conflict between adherence to tradition and the indomitable force of a woman's spirit can now resume its rightful place as one of Bapsi Sidhwa's most urgent and contemporary works of fiction.
About the Author
Born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa has been widely celebrated as the finest novelist produced by her country. She is the author of several novels, including The Crow Eaters, An American Brat, Cracking India, and, most recently, Water, which received the 2007 Premio Mondello in Italy. Among her many honors, Sidhwa has received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest honor in the arts. She lives in Houston.
About the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC)
The Indo-American Arts Council is a registered 501(c)3 not-for-profit, secular service and resource arts organization charged with the mission of promoting and building the awareness, creation, production, exhibition, publication and performance of Indian and cross-cultural art forms in North America. The IAAC supports all artistic disciplines in the classical, fusion, folk and innovative forms influenced by the arts of India. They work with colleagues around the United States to broaden collective audiences and to create a network for shared information, resources and funding. The focus is to work with artists and arts organizations in North America as well as to facilitate artists and arts organizations from India in their endeavors to exhibit, perform and produce their works here. For further information, please visit www. iaac. us |
