Body of Woman As A Site For Battle: A Critical Study of Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man

Partitioning of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India is a mega event in the history of South Asia that haunts the minds of the inhabitants because of the untold destruction and the atrocities inflicted on the migrants. The later generations come to know of the havocs carved on women's bodies mostly through stories of the victims or who witnessed molestation of women. In this connection, this article aims to critically analyze the novel Ice-Candy Man by Sidhwa which delineates the defilement of women at the periphery. The views of different feminist critics constitute the theoretical framework while Fairclough’s social discourse model serves as a methodological framework. For analysis, the technique of Content Analysis has been employed. The findings reveal that Sidhwa has caricatured the predicament of the women whose bodies became sites for male aggression as icons of the ethnic groups during the communal strives. They undergo physical and sexual furiousness of men before, during, and after the partition. Men dehumanized them to disgrace the opponents/the other. The novel may, further, be studied from psychoanalytical, cultural, and Marxist perspectives.