Traces of Phallocentrism, Trauma and Holocaust Imagery in What the Body Remembers and Ice Candy Man

Abstract

Apart from wars, the Partition of India and Pakistan was one of the most horrific events in human history. Massacres, rapes, and sexual torture were used to promote racial hate, and women suffered a great deal more than males. Many people lost their lives, their homes, and even their identities. Therefore, this essay explores how the horrific Partition era affected the lives of women by turning them into silent victims of phallocentric or male supremacy through the Partition novels from which Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers and Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man have been taken. Women were kidnapped, raped, forced into prostitution, and died during Partition. In the Rawalpindi area, where Muslim mobs preyed on women, systematic violence against women first appeared in March 1947. Before further attacks, many Sikh women committed suicide by jumping into water wells to save honour and avoid conversion. Due to phallocentric society's rules, the time of Partition was a traumatic experience for women on physical, emotional, political, social, and sexual levels. These female writers wrote about these experiences through a female perspective, which demonstrated resistance and retaliation against phallocentrism or the male point of view. Because of this, the present dissertation will add new aspects to the established canon of women, trauma, and phallocentrism.