Mapping cityscapes interrogating the cultural spaces in the select novels of bapsi sidhwa

Abstract

Bapsi Sidhwa (1939) a well-known Pakistani Zoroastrian novelist in English offers the cityscapes of Lahore that provide the settings for her fictional works. The select newlinenovels for the study include The Crow Eaters (1978), The Pakistani Bride (1983), IceCandy Man (1988) and An American Brat (1993). Fascinated by the cityscapes of Lahore, the novelist personalizes the cityscapes and the personalized cityscapes are fictionalized. The novelist is aided by imagination. However, the imagined cityscapes in the select novels become illegible with a growing sense of alienation from the city. The cityscapes are cityspaces that are shape shifting. The metaphorical cityscapes in newlinethe select novels are woven with imagination, memory and nostalgia. The thesis examines the fictional representation of the cityscapes of Lahore and the relationship between the novelist and the imagined cityscapes. The study adopts the method of qualitative textual analysis in an attempt to examine the cityscapes. This illumines the in-between status of the cityscapes connecting the factual and fictional images of the city. The study unveils a layered construction of heterogeneous cityscapes which are selective and subjective. The urban cultural spaces are interrogated through the fictional characters who experience the city like flâneurs and contribute to the making of the spatial stories. The acts of walking in the city offer knowledge of the city which enables the fictional characters to attain self-awareness. The awareness helps in achieving autonomy in the movements of the fictional characters. However, only a few fictional characters are perfect flâneurs and the others view the city as voyeurs. Since the imagined cityscapes of Lahore are guided by the sense of place, the legibility of the cityscapes declines with the acts of alienation from the city. However, the novelist attempts to recover the palimpsest cityscapes from memory through cognitive mapping.