Perhaps, the most outstanding novelist

Her second name means eternity and she lived upto it through her novels.
S RAMASWAMY pays tribute to the priceless contribution of Kamala Markandaya to Indian literature.

A few years ago when I was browsing through the books in the British Library in Bangalore, I noticed an exceedingly lovely lady with a striking appearance at the same shelf. I had a feeling that I had seen her somewhere but a moment later I realised that I had seen her photograph. I suspended good manners and I had the temerity to ask her “Madam, are you the novelist, Kamala Markandaya?” In her characteristic demure charming manner she said “Yes. I am Kamala.” I can never erase that first meeting with her from my memory and I have always believed that instinct is more important than reason.

For a person who was as famous as she as a novelist, she was disarmingly simple. Behind that kindly look and charm there was the background of aristocracy as she was from the famous family of Diwan Poornaiya. Old Mysore in those days, when Poornaiya was a Diwan was proverbially known for its beauty and grace, politeness and good manners and she seemed to be the personification of Mysore of the good-old days. With this brief biographical introduction a look at her novels is warranted.

As early as 1959, Professor K R Srinivasa Iyengar made Indian writing in English a serious subject for study in the departments of English not only in India but abroad where he introduced the subject to the University students at Leeds in England. It has now been a part of the syllabus of almost all Indian universities and even decades ago he named Kamala Markandaya as “Perhaps the most outstanding novelist.” Her first novel Nectar in a Sieve was compared to Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. It is not surprising that her novels are studied in the American schools and colleges, helping them to understand the real India and its spirit.

There are two things that are striking in her writing which make her different from most other Indian writers in English. First, in spite of her having lived in England for fifty-five years and married to an Englishman, her India is as authentic as the writing of any Indian who has not left the boundaries of his/her own village.

Secondly, she was so completely dedicated to her writing that she refused to come under any of the fashionable ‘isms’ and theories to which many writers in India seem to have fallen prey to because it is the ‘in thing’. She was totally exempt from any hang ups. There is hardly any aspect of India or England that she has not touched upon in her novels. Her first novel Nectar in a Sieve (1954) was a bestseller in the United States. This was followed by A Handful of Rice (1966), The Nowhere Man (1972), Two Virgins (1975) and The Golden Honeycomb (1977).

Kamala Markandaya was a very exceptional individual who shunned all publicity and as Professor Charles Lawson from the Department of Literature from the American University describes, she was a very private person who granted very few interviews. She married Bertrand Taylor shortly after emigrating to England in 1948.

In Nectar in a Sieve, Kamala Markandaya takes us to the heart of a South Indian village where life has not changed for about a thousand years. Rukmini the protagonist of the novel is a model Indian woman who suffers everything without complaining.

Kamala Markandaya’s A Silence of Desire leaves economics and politics behind and invades the realm of spiritual realities. The scene is an obscure town ten years after Independence following the ‘Quit India’ Movement, Partition and Independence. There is an intriguing character of Swamy who is both condemned and praised as charlatan or a saint. However, an attempt to bridge the chasm between matter and spirit, doubt and faith are held in balance.

The main novels of Kamala Markandaya are Nectar in a Sieve, (Putnam, London, 1954,) Some Inner Fury (1955), A Silence of Desire (John Day & Co. New York, 1960). Possession (John Day & Co. New York, 1963), A Hand Full of Rice (John Day & Co. New York, 1966), The Coffer Dams (Oriental Paperbacks, Delhi, 1970) and Two Virgins (Vikas Publishing House, Delhi, 1975).

Long before a subject like the East West encounter in Indian Writing in English was taken up for PhD dissertations in India, this juxtaposition rather than ‘encounter’ was dealt with by Markandaya. Though Nectar in a Sieve is primarily a tale of rural life in South India, one of the principle characters is the English missionary Kenny. In A Silence of Desire the heroine is a typical middle class Indian whose attitude towards life is illustrative of the Western influence.

In Some Inner Fury she depicts the struggle for independence and the terrorism which sometimes accompanied it. The same theme is taken up with major variations in Possession. That the author is aware of the Indian condition is evident from her treatment of the landless farmer, the beggar menace in India, and in the sociological context the novelist is not interested in a person’s caste and she does not emphasise regional characteristics.

Her India is a United India with a cultural soul of her own. She deals with problems like the dowry system, the contempt with which a childless woman is regarded in certain sections of Indian society, prostitution as a way out of sheer poverty and starvation.

There are certain types of Indians like the well-placed Indian administrator who has been educated in England, the England-returned modern Indian girl, the unsophisticated blunt Indian nationalist etc. Her Some Inner Fury is politically a war-cry against Britain. The boycott of foreign goods and Civil Disobedience are taken into account. Certain positive aspect of Indian culture, philosophy and religion also figure in her work like the feeding of the poor at the temple, relegation of the body to a subordinate place and her faith in Indian genuine holy men like Swamy who represents all the virtues of Indian sainthood living a simple, austere life and silently ministering to the hungry and the sick.

The most positive aspect that Markandaya finds in the Indian character is the paradoxical compassion for those who suffer and helped by other poor people rather than the rich. The last words of her Nectar in a Sieve would perhaps serve as her epitaph. “It was a gentle passing... O Death, where is thy sting? Where is thy victory, O Grave?”