Bapsi Sidhwa
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Sidhwa was born to Parsi Zoroastrian parents Peshotan and Tehmina Bhandara in Karachi. Her parents to the Parsee community which she has described with such warmth and humour in her novels. Soon after Sidhwa was born her family moved to Lahore. The city is central to her four novels, including The Bride. In Lahore, however, there were few Parsees and the Bhandara family was cut off from mainstream Parsee life.She was two when she contracted polio (which has affected her throughout her life) and nine in 1947 at the time of Partition (facts which would shape the character Lenny in her novel Ice Candy Man as well as the background for her novel).She received her BA from Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore in 1957.
She married at the age of 19 and moved to Bombay for five years. After her first husband died, she married Noshir R. businessman, in 1963, with whom she has three children. In 1975 Sidhwa served as Pakistan‘s delegate to the Asian Women’s Congress. She immigrated to the United States in 1983, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1993. After receiving countless rejections for her first and second novels, The Bride and The Crow Eaters, she decided to publish The Crow Eaters in Pakistan privately. Though the experience was one she says, “I would not wish on anyone”. It marks the beginning of her literary fame. Since moving to the United States, Sidhwa has taught, lectured, and presented workshops in creative writing at several colleges and universities, including Columbia University, St. Thomas University, the University of Houston, and Mount Holyoke College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She held a Bunting fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard in 1986 and was a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1991. Sidhwa also served on the advisory committee on women’s development for former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. In 1991 she was awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan‘s highest national honor in the arts. Her third novel, Cracking India was awarded the German Literaturepreis and a nomination for Notable Book of the Year from the American Library Association, and was mentioned as a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” all in 1991. A Bunting Fellowship from Harvard and a National Endowment of the Arts grant in 1986 and 1987 supported the completion of Cracking India. She was awarded a $100,000 grant as the recipient of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award in 1993. Her works have now been translated into Russian, French and German. She has also taught college-level English courses at St. Thomas University, Rice University, Mt. Holyoke and The University of Texas as well as at the graduate level at Columbia University, NY. Sidhwa has a strong creative partnership with Indian/Canadian director, Deepa Mehta, with Sidhwa involved in two of the three films in Mehta’s film trilogy, Fire, Earth and Water. (Wikipedia, NeoEnglish Blog, Postcolonial Studies @ Emory)
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