too much descriptive violence

5***** and a ❤

This is an extraordinary book. The novel deals with the struggles to form Pakistan, when Muslims fought Sikhs and Hindus, and with the traditional culture vs the modern expectations. It is also a tale of woman and her place in the world. Roop is just 16 when she becomes the second wife of Sandaji (needed because 1st wife Satya is still barren after 20 years). How Roop grows and matures, how Satya descends to madness with jealousy and hatred are themes that mirror the division of India and Pakistan.

Our book club had chosen it months in advance, but our discussion took place one week after Sept 11, 2001. Couldn't have been more timely.

UPDATE April 2005
I read it again for a different book club, and got even more out of it. ( )

I just could not get into this book. We had to read it as a class project in grade 12. Somehow managed to still pass without reading the whole book. At one point I want to try and read it all the way through.

It is India in the years leading up to independence from England and Partition, when the country will be divided into India and Pakistan. Roop has no mother, but has a father who is poor. When she is 16, out of desperation, her father arranges a marriage to a 40 year old man for her. Unfortunately, she is to be the second wife to this man. Though Roop hopes to be like sisters with his first wife, Satya, Satya doesn't see things that way.

I thought it took a long time for the story to really get going. I wasn't all that interested in Roop's story as a child. I found myself skimming a lot of the book. It got to be a little more interesting after she got married, but the political parts of the book lost my interest, except near the end, the day before partition. Overall, I thought it was simply ok. ( )

Satya, a strong willed women with the misfortune to be born as a woman in 1895 in India, opens the novel. She is forced to live with the intrusion of Roop, a second wife. She struggles with this constant reminder that no how good a partner she’s been to Sardarji, producing a son is the only thing women are for, and she’s failed at that. She wants to hate Sardarji but instead she hates Roop, a woman trapped like her. What is a women who won’t bend to do?

In contrast Roop, a young woman who is sold by her impoverished father to Sardarji, doesn’t hate anyone. She’s been listening to the lessons that Satya ignored, and she has tried to find her place as an obedient second wife. However the simplistic world of jewelry and esteem exchanged for producing children is shattered as Satya steals her children. Roop has done everything that was asked of her, why is the world still so unfair?

I have to say, the characters in this book were just fantastic. I felt a great deal of kinship with Satya, and so I bowed my head in solidarity with her during the prologue and epilogue. I was ashamed of a lot of the things she did, but I could understand why she did them. Roop was a little tougher for me to love, because her personality is really different from mine. However she grew immensely as the story progressed, and she learned some hard lessons and came through resilient.The only sticking point for me was Sardarji, even though Baldwin went to great lengths to show his own struggles with British Imperialism. I think even though this story purposefully told during a tumultuous time in Indian history, it pays to remember it’s story about women.

I found the style easy to read, with some beginner references to new cultural information. This book expects you to just understand a lot of vocab without footnotes or contextual clues, which can be overwhelming. For a casual read, I was a little frustrated that I either had to pull up wikipedia every couple of pages or just cruise through a lot of the terminology and religious references. On the other hand, Sikh cultural norms are detailed very well, and Baldwin made an effort to help newbies like myself understand what was going on.

Over all, this is a strongly feminist book with a historical context that was new to me and presented in a way that pulled me in because it didn’t assume I was incapable of understanding it. Satya and Roop, the main characters, were polar opposites, but I was completely supportive of the way both of them navigated the pitfalls of being a woman in India. If you also come to care for either woman, this book will be a tragedy, but you’ll owe it to both of these excellent women witness their lives. ( )