Literature review
(Seton, 2006) States in the article “Honoring the abandoned Bapsi Sidhwa's novel about an exiled child-widow evokes Gandhi's crusade to modernize Indian life” that water was set in 1938, when the traditions of colonial India were being threatened by the modern ideas of Mahatma Gandhi. Sidhwa paints the street scenes of India like Brueghel might have. She vividly represents the gray, destitute widow-ashram, the Ghats (bathing areas along a river), and the chaotic crowds attending Gandhi's appearance. Moreover, Sidhwa expects some intellectual muscle from her readers. Although her stories are simple, their subtexts are richly instructive. Her lively characters thrash out personal and political issues. In Cracking India, for
The novel depicts the story of a girl Chuiya who is the victim of inhuman traditions and practices of the society during the period of independence. At the age of eight, Chuiya embraces widowhood. Chuiya hardly remembers being married to the 41 years old man. According to the demand of traditions, she has to accompany his dead body to Varanasi where he will be cremated and she is expected to live in a widow’s ashram on the banks of the Ganga. The plot of the novel is woven around Chuiya and her friend young, beautiful Kalyani, a widow who is exploited as a prostitute. Chuiya also is raped but at last she escapes from the hell. The life of the widows at ashram is presented effectively. The female protagonist is the product of the society but when their rights are crushed under the heels of the society, they break the so called norms and live with dignity. In the novel, Water is used metaphorically. The water of the Ganges is considered as sacred water. People believe that by taking a dip into the water of the river Ganges, all the sins will be washed off and an individual would be purified. In this novel, the bank of the Ganges is shown as a place where the purity of the innocent Chuiya is seen spoiled. The cry of the Ganga for polluting the purity of the water by the people and the cry of Chuiya
This piece of literature deals with its focus on recovery of the unnatural silences of women voice. Postcolonial emphasis on difference also needs to grasp the differences that exist within same cultural community of homogenous sisters as well. The analysis aims to explore Sidhwa’s presentation of ‘others’ in her work “Water” who exist not on the other side of racial/cultural/gender binary, rather focuses on the ‘others’ who belong to the same race, the same sisterly group. Sidhwa therefore inculcates the emotion of envy into Postcolonial feminism’s discourses. The notion that only women recover and protect each other’s voice stands exposed when it is intersected with the Postcolonial notion of ‘others’ who exist within the same community. Bapsi Sidhwa marks separation from the Western hegemonic notion of universal sisterhood and constructs her own notion of sisterhood that revers differences among