Themes of "Ice Candy Man"

 A Parsi novelist named Bapsi Sidhwa. In the 1970s, she first began to write fiction. The best-known book by Bapsi Sidhwa is Ice-Candy-Man. It was published in 1991 by American publishers Milkweed Editions under the name Cracking India. It is an important political book. In the novel's storyline, Sidhwa employs the child-narrator approach. The novel has three main strands: the political, the narrative, and the young narrator.

The 1947 Subcontinental divide is depicted in Ice Candy Man along with the appalling living circumstances. The author Bapsi Sidhwa describes in detail how the political shifts and political circumstances of those times affected the people of India through Lenny's eyes.  The novel's theme is primarily concerned with human nature, partition of Subcontinent, religious intolerance, intercommunity marriage, and the exploitation and oppression of women.

i)                   Religious Intolerance

The ambition for political power that drives religious intolerance is mirrored by characters' desires for power or influence over others throughout the entire book. Different religious and ethnic groups are pitted against one another as a result of violent religious intolerance. Lenny finds Masseur, Ayah's beloved, dead in a sack on the sidewalk, among other acts of killing, maiming, and death.

The Hindus and Sikhs are expelled from Lahore as the city transforms into a center for refugees and the gateway to Pakistan, which is now a country with a mainly Muslim population.

Men use religious bigotry as a tool to oppress women. For instance, after Ayah rejected Masseur in favor of the Ice-candy-man, he imprisons her and sells her as a "dancing girl" to other men. Under the cover of religious intolerance, women suffer from serious sexual violence, including as rape and sex slavery.

ii)                   Partition of Subcontinent

Sidhwa, like other novels on Partition, conveys the hideous and terrible side of Partition by thinking back on the painful recollections of those times. Additionally, Sidhwa has attempted to portray historical events with emotion. The narrative begins with the rumblings of Partition, and as time goes on, the atmosphere appropriate for the genre of a tale develops. The mood gets gloomier and more amazing as the tension rises. The worst form of genocide committed in human history can be found here. Readers are transported back in time by stories like Ice Candy Man. The readers are surprised and unable to believe how man responded after experiencing being thrust back into the distant past. As multitudes wait for another gift from Amritsar, one observes the horrifying and heartbreaking scenes of trains full of murdered Muslims rumbling into the platform. Man has been reduced to a rabid, bloodthirsty brute. He is torn apart and dissected, showing his animal form. Lahore's vibrant streets have an extremely foreboding, desolate appearance. Hindus are still apprehensive about leaving their ancestral home, where their predecessors have thrived. They can now picture a world without any hope. These excruciating feelings are comparable to the agonizing stages of childbirth. Remembering those horrifying and traumatizing events that converted the honorable into animals still hurts. In fact, history's greatest agonizing experience is still the partition of India. Many authors who wrote on Partition get right to the heart of the issue to ensure that such mistakes are never made by "wise leaders." As Jagdev Singh notes,

“The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 is one of the great tragedies, the magnitude, ambit and savagery of which compels one to search for the larger meaning of events, and to come to terms with the lethal energies that set off such vast conflagrations.”

These remarks effectively shed light on the main idea of the book Ice Candy Man.

At the conclusion of Ice Candy Man, she has the Partition extremist hero, Ice Candy Man, travel to India in search of Shanta, a Hindu woman, and plays Judas on his country, raising a number of questions about the rationale and underlying assumptions behind Partition. Because the people being slain by the Sikhs are Punjabi Muslims rather than his mountain ancestors, Sidhwa challenges the fundamental assumptions underlying Partition in The Bride and turns Qasim into a disinterested spectator to a railway massacre. In this way, Qasim sees the massacre as in a movie, but despite being alarmed by the butcher, he has no need to endanger his own life. This is Sidhwa's own, independent perspective on Partition, not the official Pakistani position. Standard Pakistanis don't view the Partition as Sidhwa portrays it in The Bride and Ice Candy Man, first and foremost.

iii)                   Human Nature

The struggle between good and evil in human nature is one of Ice Candy Man's key themes. The main characters in Ice-Candy-Man are Ice-Candy Man and the Parsi family's maid servant, "Ayah." A gorgeous and wildly popular young man, Ice-Candy-Man. He is a kind man who is far from being a religious zealot. But one event upends his entire existence, shattering his faith in human kindness. As a result of seeing Muslims' bodies being brutally dismembered by Hindus, he swears to exact revenge on his Muslim brothers and sisters. The darkest aspect of his nature gets yanked out by this unpleasant encounter. A person who was once gentle and caring becomes hostile and irrational as a result of this life-altering shock. He asks the Ayah at a pivotal point in the story:

 "there is an animal inside me straining to break free. Marry me and perhaps it will be contained."

Here Aradhika observes 

"The ultimate betrayal is not by the innocent trusting little girl but by the devil of hatred that cannot be contained."

The ice-candy man now holds a crucial role as a raffish type of man. Sidhwa demonstrated via his persona how man is a slave to his psychology or nature.

 

iv)                Inter-community Marriage

The central theme of Sidhwa's novels, including Ice-Candy-Man, An American Brat, and the Crow Eaters, is inter-community marriage. Her treatment of the subject of intercommunity marriages is timely and up to date. There are heated discussions about this delicate topic in the Parsi community. According to the Parsi faith, a person might only be Parsi by birth. Children from mixed marriages are no longer eligible to join the Parsi community. The society of the Parsis is patriarchal. Sidhwa keeps a balance while addressing the subject of marriage without rebelling against strict social norms. Sidhwa thoroughly examines the subject of interfaith marriage in her book An American Brat. The book's main character, Feroza, immigrates to America with the intention of marrying David Press, a Jew. Despite having to back out of the marriage because of opposition from her Parsi community, Feroza states her determination that she will only ever marry a boy of her choosing, regardless of religion.

The love affair between the Ice-Candy-Man and the Hindu Ayah serves as the vehicle through which Sidhwa explores the issue of interfaith marriage in Ice-Candy-Man. After seeing the slaughter of his fellow Muslims, the Ice-Candy guy loses all control of himself and keeps his beloved Ayah in the brothels of Lahore's Hira Mandi neighborhood. He marries the Hindu Ayah after realizing his error, but love is now powerless. The Ayah is saved and brought to an Amritsar camp for recovering women. Thus, the story of Ice-Candy-man successfully incorporates a lot of themes.