Disability as Narrative Power: Lenny’s Polio -Stricken Body in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man

Abstract

Ice-Candy Man, a novel by Bapsi Sidhwa, published in 1988, presents a unique reinterpretation of the history of Partition through the consciousness of Lenny, a polio-afflicted Parsi child narrator. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how Lenny has disabled body functions not as a symbol of weakness but as a source of narrative authority and ethical perception. The theoretical frameworks provided by both Disability Studies and postcolonial studies. Based on Disability Studies and postcolonial thought, the work contends that Lenny’s disability gives her a marginal yet privileged observational position, allowing for a critique of violence, nationalism, and the power of the patriarchy in the Partition of India. Contrary to the dominant paradigm in the representation of the Partition of India in existing scholarship that highlights the powerful masculine ideals of heroism, Sidhwa's novel focuses on vulnerability, immobility, and innocence in exploring the human aspect of partition. The relevance of the article will illustrate on how the experience of disability is actually a strategy in the telling of the tale that interrupts the linearly ordered history and the assumptions inherent in the colonial and nationalist construct of able. Finally, Ice-Candy Man retrieves disability as the strength of narrative, replacing the notion of physical difference with the perspective of morality.