Kamala Markandaya
- Pseudonym of:
- Kamala Purnaiya
- Married name:
- Kamala Taylor
- Notable Works:
- “Nectar in a Sieve”
- “Some Inner Fury”
Kamala Markandaya (born 1924, Mysore [now Mysuru], India—died May 16, 2004, London, England) was an Indian novelist whose works concern the tension between Eastern traditions and Western modernity in which many contemporary Indians are shown to be grappling with conflicting values. Markandaya grew up in a time when India was under the British raj, and her works frequently address the impact of colonialism on Indian society, highlighting issues such as cultural alienation and the struggle for independence. As a diasporic writer settled in England, she often explored themes of rootlessness and identity through her characters who felt trapped between two worlds. On the subject, she wrote in a 1976 paper: “The Commonwealth writer abroad is lumbered with double vision. Double vision not in the sense of a flawed vision, but a vision that is slightly enlarged…and insists in perceiving two sides to every picture.”
A Brahmin, Markandaya studied history at the University of Madras, then worked for the Indian Army during World War II, taking on clerical and liaison roles, before working as a journalist. In 1948 she settled in England and later married Bertrand Taylor, an English journalist.
Did You Know?
Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve was recognized as an American Library Association Notable Book in 1955. The book’s title is adopted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Work Without Hope.”
Literary career
Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), an Indian farmer’s narrative of her difficult life, remains Markandaya’s most popular work. She transports her readers to a remote village in Tamil Nadu state, where life seems to be at a standstill for the protagonist, Rukmani, and her husband, Nathan. Industrialization in the form of a tannery appears in the village and redefines the nature of work for the villagers, echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lines:
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
Hand in hand with enterprise, overpopulation endangers resources in Rukmani’s village. Unable to battle impending death by hunger or poverty, Rukmani and Nathan move to the city to earn a living. An array of setbacks awaits her there, too; her husband confesses his infidelity, they lose their house of 30 years, and their daughter’s marriage breaks down. Despite the abject suffering of her protagonist, Markandaya retains an optimistic note just as Rukmani keeps churning the “muddied ocean of poverty and misery” in search of the nectar in the sieve.
Her next book, Some Inner Fury (1955), is set in 1942 during India’s struggle for independence. It portrays the troubled relationship between an educated Indian woman, whose brother is an anti-British revolutionary, and a British civil servant who loves her. Marriage provides the setting for a conflict of values in A Silence of Desire (1960), in which a religious middle-class woman seeks medical treatment, without her husband’s knowledge, from a Hindu faith healer rather than from a doctor.
In Markandaya’s fiction, Western values typically are viewed as modern and materialistic and Indian values as traditional and spiritual. She examined this dichotomy in Possession (1963), in which an Indian shepherd, Valmiki, is inspired by a swami (sage) to pursue his calling as an artist. Valmiki is taken to England by Caroline Bell, an aristocratic British woman, who views him as an exotic find. The novel has a tripartite theme. Firstly, it explores the essence of art, which demands a certain degree of surrender whether the painter is at work in unknown caves of South India or the plush, civilized country where he migrates. Adhering to elements of the Künstlerroman, the narrator notes the development and maturation of the artist’s work in these words:
There was, too, a change in his work, so subtle it might easily have been a flight of fancy: but to me there seemed to be a moving, extraordinary yearning in the human countenances he had depicted…a quality of compassion and profundity in his divine images, that had never been apparent before.
Secondly, it underlines the inherent folly of the possessive instinct. In the end, Valmiki loses all that he holds dear: Ellie, a survivor of war with whom he shares a deep emotional bond, and Annabel, a spirited young woman who represents the prospect of youthful love. Caroline, in turn, loses Valmiki when he returns to his country at the swami’s bidding. Finally, the sparring between the swami and Caroline over Valmiki seems to be Markandaya’s attempt at writing a chronicle of colonialism.
Later works by Markandaya include A Handful of Rice (1966), The Coffer Dams (1969), The Nowhere Man (1972), Two Virgins (1973), The Golden Honeycomb (1977), and Pleasure City (1982; also published as Shalimar).