Bapsi Sidhwa

by Editorial Team | Jan 10, 2010 in Authors | Leave A Comment

A Punjabi, Pakistani, Parsi woman. A weaving of cultures which represents the richness of Bapsi Sidhwa, a great writer brought up in Lahore when it was still India. A serious illness during childhood brought her to read a lot, mainly English literature. A liberating marriage moved her to Bombay where most of the members of the little socio-religious Parsi community, about 120,000 individuals, live.
There she wrote her first books. In 1978 “The Crow Eaters”, a portrait of her people so cleverly ironical that somebody foiled an attack against her. There she started to fight for the rights of women, whose difficult condition is at the heart of “The Bride” and of her latest novel “Water”. In “Cracking India” she told the tragedy of the ferocious partition of 1947 between India and Pakistan. A book on which Deepa Metha in 1999 based the movie “Earth-47”. In 1983 she moved to the States and another kind of freedom. Never stopping to go home. In a writing which is softly carved in flesh and colours, in a limpid, essential voice that barely conceals a subdued laugh, Bapsi Sidhwa tickles our courage to taste the world, to reconsider those certainties that so often kill our ideas.