Critical Texts
 
Dhawan, R.K. and Novy Kapadia, eds. The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1996.

This book includes the most comprehensive collection of critical essays so far available on Bapsi Sidhwa's novels.
Essays include:
The Parsis, Madyan to Sanjan: An Appraisal of Ethnic Anxieties Reflected in Literature
Edited by Khan, A. G., and Novy Kapadia
Published by Creative Books, 1997, New Delhi

A History of Pakistani Literature in English
By Rahman, Tariq.
Published by Vanguard Books, 1991. Lahore

Indian Partition Fiction
in English and in English Translation
A Text on Hindu-Muslim Relationship
By Basudeb Chakraborti
Published by ‘Papyrus’, 2007, Calcutta

SIDHWA OMNIBUS EDITION BY OUP (2001)
Sara Suleri Goodyear
This welcome and significant collection brings together for the first time four novels by one of Pakistan’s most distinguished authors, Bapsi Sidhwa. On a sociological level, Sidhwa’s work is crucial to an understanding of the cultural complexities of post-Independence Pakistani cultures, and the diaspora they have occasioned. On a literary level, Sidhwa’s novels are constructed with grace and written with an exquisite sense of humour, so that the subtleties of their irony totally dispenses with bombast or grandiloquent claims about “postcolonial history.” Instead, their characters are wrought with an understated delicacy, so that the reader is entranced by the writer’s ability to convey, for example, the appeal of Ayah in Ice Candy Man or the comic warmth of Freddy Junglewalla in The Crow Eaters. No writer has equaled Sidhwa’s capacity to address grim historical realities with both precision and affection: the compassion of her prose remains its most startling and original quality. Sidhwa is certainly one of the finest Anglophone novelists of South Asia; the brilliance of her writing deserves to be honored by the widest possible readership.
Sara Suleri-Goodyear, Professor of English, Yale University

BAPSI SIDHWA, STORYTELLER: (from Introduction: Sidhwa OUP Omnibus Ð 2001)
Bapsi Sidhwa wrote The Crow Eaters, (1978) little realizing, one assumes, that she was starting trends: in comic realism, in Parsi fiction (this has been called the first Parsi novel to be internationally published), and, quite simply, in South Asian fiction; we must remember that the Pakistani publication of this novel predates Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children by three years and its British publication by one year. Many critics have said that the appearance of Sidhwa’s work signals, even before Rushdie’s, the belated coming-of-age of South Asian fiction in English, paving the way for the blend of magic and fantasy with history that was to become the trademark of subcontinental fiction in the eighties and nineties. (The novel’s influence on Parsi writers is probably the subject of an academic thesis. Rohinton Mistry, for one, though a very different writer, probably wouldn’t have found his way into print as easily as he did if it hadn’t been for (Sidhwa’s) pioneering work.)
Read the entire “Bapsi Sidhwa, Storyteller” by Aamer Hussein © 2000
“Through her various marginalized marrators and through the experiences of the many marginalized characters in her first three novels, Sidhwa gives voice to hitherto silenced groups of (India and) Pakistan and in so doing tells other versions of her country's history.”
Read the entire “A Passion for History and for Truth Telling” by Ralph J. Crane

Interviews with Bapsi Sidhwa
copyright BapsiSidhwa.com 2008