A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Without analyzing the Ice-Candy-Man, all endeavors to interpret Sidhwa’s messages are futile.
His act of transformation is the core to unlocking Sidhwa’s magical world.
Why did Sidhwa characterize him in such a specific and dynamic manner? His gestures, speech and even his transition stages and his every next footstep are the symbols and metaphors of the changing society during the traumatic events of Partition-they denote how an individual turns his course of life.
The Ice-Candy-Man appears with a different disguise each time. Sidhwa, the original mark and a victim of the Partition in 1947, had sensed the brutal incidents which impaled her heart with pathos and enforced her to pen it down by presenting vivacious, colorful characters with autobiographical touches. The most arousing, poignant, efficacious figure Ice-Candy-Man of Bapsi Sidhwa’s magnum opus Cracking India traps the mind of the readers.
This article aims to unveil the capricious transformation of the key figure, Ice-Candy-Man (named Dilnawaz) and the riotous traumatic impact of the Partition of India on his personality in Cracking India.
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