Interviews | Articles | Critical Texts

Interviews

• Interview with Bill Olive of Houston Chronicle about the play American Brat
• Q&A with Francesco Mannoni about Water
• Interview with Dawn: Being Bapsi
• Q&A With Bapsi
• Monsoon Magazine Interview
• LiteNYC interview with Muneeza Shamsie
• Interview with Ahmed Hussain
• Interview with Jasbah
• Interview with Parsi Khabar
• Interview with Dawn
• Interview with The Times of India
• Interview with The Hindu
• Literary Encyclopedia
• Italian Interview
• Italian Interivew for 'Stylos'
• Bapsi\Deepa Connection - Water reading in NY
• Pakistan Paindabad Interview
• VG: Artist bio - Bapsi Sidhwa
• Emory U Bio, Zoroastrianism, Cracking India, American Brat
• Critical essays - to purchase?
• Jabberwok: Bapsi Sidhwa and the Lahore Anthology
• Conversation with Bapsi Sidhwa - Dec 2006
• Water novel Review in Houston Chronicle June 11,2006
• Indian Express review of Water novel
• Jussawala, Feroza and Reed Way Dasenbrock, eds. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.
• Rich, Adrienne Cecile. Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
• Futehally, Shama. "The Power's in the Telling." The Indian Review of Books August 1992: 19-20.
• "Passages." The India Magazine of Her People and Culture February 1998: 33-36.

Video Interview

An interview between novelist Bapsi Sidhwa and Dr. Amineh Hoti of Cambridge University in Bapsi's home in Houston, Texas.

PubPerspectives — November 12, 2009 — Bapsi Sidhwa

VOA Perspective (Urdu)

Articles

• Time Magazine, titled "New Neighbors"
• BBC Online article on Lahore
• Letter to Hindustan Times, defending Deepa Mehta
• Bapsi Sidhwa discusses Anosh Irani's novel, The Song of Khunsha on WGBH
• Bapsi Sidhwa writing for Tehelka
• Bapsi Sidhwa speaking at Weber State: A Puff of Air.

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:

Introduction

• R.K.Dhawan and Novy Kapadia. "Entree: The Fiction of Bapsi Sidhwa."
• Introduction of Cracking India by Sara Suleri Goodyear, Professor of English Yale University
• Introduction of The Pakistani Bride by Anita Desai

From the Writer's Desk

• Sidhwa, Bapsi. "Why Do I Write?"

Comparative Perspective

• Kapadia, Novy. "Bapsi Sidhwa, Attia Hosain and Amitav Ghosh."

Critical Studies

• Crane, Ralph J. "'A Passion for History and for Truth Telling': The Early Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa."
• Havely, Cicely. "Patterns of Migration in the Work of Bapsi Sidhwa."
• Ross, Robert L. "The Search for Community in Bapsi Sidhwa's Novels."
• Jussawalla, Feroza. "Navjote Ceremonies: The Location of Bapsi Sidhwa's Culture."
• Paranjape, Makarand. "The Early Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa."
• Zaman, Niaz. "Bapsi Sidhwa: 'I am Pakistani.'"
• Rani, K. Nirupa. "Gender and Imagination in Bapsi Sidhwa's Fiction."

The Crow Eaters

• Kapadia, Novy. "The Parsi Paradox in The Crow Eaters."
• Hashmi, Alamgir. "The Crow Eaters: A Noteworthy Novel."

The Pakistani Bride/The Bride

• Khan, Furrukh Khan. "Women, Identity and Dis-Location in The Bride."
• Bhatt, Indira. "The Pakistani Bride From Fantasy to Reality."
• Ross, Robert L. "The Bride: The Treatment of Women."

Ice-Candy-Man/Cracking India

• Singh, Jagdev. "Ice-Candy-Man: A Parsi Perception on the Partition of India."
• Chandra, Subhash. "Ice-Candy-Man: A Feminist Perspective."
• Ross, Robert L. "Cracking India: A Feminine View of Partition."

An American Brat

• Kapadia, Novy. "Expatriate Experience and Theme of Marriage in An American Brat."
• Zaman, Niaz. "Bapsi Sidhwa's American Brat."
• Bala, Suman. "The Theme of Migration: A Study of An American Brat."

Other Critical Texts

• 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
  
• A Text on Hindu-Muslim Relationship
  By Basudeb Chakraborti
  Published by ‘Papyrus’, 2007, Calcutta
  Indian Partition Fiction in English and in English Translation
• Sidhwa Omnibus Edition by our OUP (2001)
  Sara Suleri Goodyear, Professor of English, Yale University
  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.
  

  BAPSI SIDHWA, STORYTELLER: (from Introduction: Sidhwa OUP Omnibus © 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.)

“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.” ––Aamer Hussein

• A Passion for History and for Truth Telling” by Ralph J. Crane