These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. These included mass communal rioting and widespread acts of violence, and the text engages particularly with the experiences of women, including Shanta, Lenny’s Ayah (nursemaid), who were abducted, raped, prostituted and disabled as symbols of national or religious honour. Partway through the novel its focus shifts, conspicuously, from recounting Lenny’s personal narrative of disabled embodiment and corrective surgery to the cultural history of Partition and the social consequences of subcontinental politics. Just as Netsai’s amputated leg surfaces compulsively throughout The Book of Not as a signifier of the trauma of chimurenga, Cracking India’s Partition narrative is haunted by recurring images of corporeal dismemberment - tearing, cracking, bleeding, pain - that emerge from the protagonist Lenny’s childhood experiences of disability (she is lame as a result of polio). Echoing a problematic conflation of individual and national bodies that was apparent in nationalist discourses in this period, the text performs a discomfiting oscillation between materialist constructions of disability as a social presence and the deployment of disability as a prosthesis standing in for colonial disablement and the mutilated - partitioned - body politic. Of all the texts analysed in this book, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991), 1 a child-narrated account of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, offers the most conflicted negotiation between material and metaphorical modes of representation.
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