ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the defamiliarisation of the familiar and the unmaking of the self as an outcome of the human catastrophe of Partition, through a close reading of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel, The Ice-Candy Man. In its endeavour to do so, the chapter attempts to substantiate the novel as a failed bildungsroman and seeks to justify the failure as a deliberate authorial ploy to accommodate the surplus of tragedy that representation fails to translate. Interrogating closely on the epistemic violence that the politics of representation and its ‘formula of pathetic identification involves, the chapter argues that the dystopia of Lenny is the dystopia of Partition and the authorial reluctance to ensure a closure is an allegory on the impossibility of redemption from the nightmarish history of Partition.
