Reading Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man through the Lens of Biopolitics and Sexuality

Abstract

Bapsi Sidhwa re-examines the political upheaval where she highlights events after the Partition in the life of Lenny as witnessed by her as a child narrator to an adult narrator. The current paper studies Sidhwa’s work in the light of biopolitics, investigating through a Foucauldian lens. Kamala Bhasin and Ritu Menon will be critically analysed in studying women as ‘bodies symbolising conquered lands’ from the margins of politics.  The paper reads the work as interrogating the biopolitical discourse in Sidhwa’s work as an overwhelming response to body politics. In doing so, the paper will analyse sexuality as an essential element through a psychoanalytical approach and how biopolitics situates the self in the process. The register of anxiety in the individual due to partition is more to the underprivileged person, and Sidhwa’s work is archival, which positions subjects accordingly. The study will investigate Lenny’s predicament and her neurotic experience with the repercussions of Partition and how she, as a child, holds on to her disability. The paper will further study Foucauldian discourse at length to form further arguments and investigate politics, sexuality and biopolitics.