LAHORE: The International Centre of Pakistani Writing in English (ICPWE) of the Kinnaird College celebrated Bapsi Sidhwa, an alumna of the institute, in a conference on Thursday.

Speaking at a panel discussion, writer, teacher and actor Navid Shahzad said Bapsi was rooted in Lahore. She added that Bapsi was irreverent at places in her novels, especially The Crow Eaters, and that’s what Bapsi was all about. “And it was due to this trait that she created characters that lived beyond their age and had a life of their own.”

She said she created the character of Lenny in Ice Candy Man because children don’t lie about what they see. She said the young writers could learn a lot from Bapsi in whose works there were so many voices and each voice was a noticeable voice.

Ms Shahzad said that long before the idea of post-colonial feminism became the subject that all feminists started to write about, Bapsi had introduced it in her works. She suggested that Bapsi had to be seen in the context of post-colonial theory and a writer with post-colonial expectations as well as ambitions. “She was way ahead of her times,” she declared.

Navid Shahzad pointed out that the late novelist’s Parsi identity was important because being a Parsi she was at a neutral point between two opposing of binaries of Hindus and Muslims, which was why she created a seven-year-old child Lenny who was privileged child of a privileged Parsi family and placed her in a well-guarded home from where she looked at the characters. She called The Ice Candy Man a quasi-historical novel because it did talk about history.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan said Bapsi Sidhwa paid a great deal of attention, not to the rulers but to the people living on ground. She wrote beautifully crafted novels and her short stories came from the heart, which did not mean that she was not writing at a certain intellectual level. “The way of communication of her ideas on the written page gathered wider readership for her, which was a hallmark of a truly great writer.”

Ms Khan said she got to know about Bapsi’s works at the end of her PhD and she was sad that she did not know about this great writer earlier to incorporate her works in her dissertation.

Ms Khan said Bapsi used to stay at her home and she inspired her to become a political activist.

Earlier, in his welcome address, Dr Waseem Anwar, the director of the ICPWE, said Bapsi was an unforgettable alumna for the Kinnaird. He said she was a South Asian in the regional sense and worldwide in a global context. He said one of the reasons for celebrating Bapsi was that she was a Pakka Lahori, starting from her house on Waris Road. He mentioned the wide spectrum of her works from Partition to The Pakistani Bride and An American Brat.

Video messages of Waqas Khwaja, Feroza Jussawala, Parizad Sethna and others were played on screen on the occasion.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2025