Humane and Satanic Survivals in Ice-Candy-Man

Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man is the most authentic expression of the partition of India. It makes alive the grotesque experiences of refugees, mass murders, and exploitation on both individual and collective level. Being a politically motivated novel, the whole story of the novel moves around the mega event of partition and its aftermath. It has been made into a film 1947-Earth by noted Canadian director Deepa Mehta. The shifting patterns of communal conflict in the novel present the humane as well as the Satanic survivals in the unsympathetic world. The survival in this novel is not confined to any individual Hindu or Muslim. It covers different communities and also the entire globe in terms of the theme of survival. This paper is a modest attempt to highlight the survivals. It will examine the survival critically on the personal and social level with reference to the major characters in terms of its socio-political-religious contexts of partition and the British Raj.