Kamala Markandaya was born in 1924 in Mysore, in southern India. She attended
college at the University of Madras, where she studied history. Between 1940 and
1947, she worked as a journalist and published short stories in Indian newspapers.
She married an Englishman and immigrated to England in 1948, where she had one
daughter.
Markandaya published Nectar in a Sieve, her first novel, in
1954, to wide critical acclaim. In the United States, it was chosen as a Book of the
Month Club Main Selection, and in 1955, the American Library Association named it a
Notable Book. Remarkably, Markandaya was the only woman in a group of mid-century
Indians writing in English, a group that included Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan,
Raja Rao, and Khushwant Singh. Despite her success, Markandaya remained an intensely
private writer who revealed little about her personal influences. She was so
private, in fact, that she used a pen name—she was born Kamala Purnaiya. However, we
can gain insight into her work by evaluating the religious, political, and social
contexts in which she lived and wrote.
Raised in India as a Hindu-Brahmin, Markandaya addresses a fundamental
question of Hindu belief in her work: what does it mean to be human? To a Hindu,
dharma is a moral or virtuous way of living, characterized in
part by devotion to truth, the practice of forgiveness, inner and outer purity,
controlling anger, not coveting material goods, and reducing attachments to worldly
things. Karma means “deed” or “action,” and because all life is
interrelated, every deed has consequences. Human beings have free will and can
choose their own actions to produce joy or misery for themselves and others.
Suffering is a form of purification. The soul’s highest goal is liberation, and
truth transcends all other moral values. Such Hindu beliefs are central to
Nectar in a Sieve.
Hindu traditions are also important in Markandaya’s writing. Rukmani, the
main character in Nectar in a Sieve, worships the Mother Goddess,
the Earth incarnate, who embodies creative energy, passion, and power. Echoes of the
epic Ramayana, one of the best-loved Indian
stories, are clear in this novel. Ramayana recounts the adventures
of Prince Rama and his ideal Hindu wife, Sita, who must prove her faithfulness to
her husband after her abduction. Years later, gossips question her fidelity. In
despair, Sita cries out to her mother, the Earth Goddess, who opens the earth to
take Sita home. Critics of Markandaya’s work compare
Nectar’s Rukmani to the legendary Sita.
Markandaya shapes Rukmani’s story around the traditional life stages of the Brahmin
caste. Celibate studenthood is first, followed by the householder stage of marriage,
procreation, work, and duty. After the first grandson, the forest-dweller stage
begins, characterized by withdrawing from material concerns. The final stage,
wandering beggar, marks the end of wanting and fearing and of being at peace with
oneself and the gods. Rukmani passes through all of these traditional stages.
In addition to the beliefs and traditions of Hinduism, contemporary Indian
politics contribute to an understanding of Nectar in a Sieve. When
Markandaya was growing up and attending college, India was governed as a conquered
colony of Great Britain. British law transformed Indian zamindars, traditional
land-revenue collectors, into landowners and absentee landlords. British rule
brought the Industrial Revolution to India, changing traditional rural life. Young
men moved off the land to earn money in factories instead of by growing crops. The
British also introduced English education and ideals to India’s students, including
the literature of revolution and freedom. During World War II, Mahatma Gandhi, the
great figure of freedom and civil disobedience, began his “Quit India” campaign
against British rule. India earned its independence in 1947. Britain partitioned the
country into predominately Hindu India and predominately Muslim Pakistan. This
partition created millions of refugees, and in the chaos and terror that followed, a
million people died. In India’s first general election in 1952, Nehru won the
presidency with his goal of freedom from want for the masses. Two years later,
Markandaya published Nectar in a Sieve, which draws upon the
political concepts and turmoil of her age.
Markandaya was not yet twenty when the famine of 1943 in Bengal claimed over
three million lives, and her detailed, realistic portrayal of human starvation comes
from those desperate times. India’s conflicts between Hindus and Muslims often
erupted in violence during the years before independence, and she scrutinizes
religious intolerance in her novel as well. The status of women in Indian society
was a major issue of the day, and new laws regarding women’s rights were not enacted
until after independence. Traditionally, procreation was so important that if a
bride failed to conceive, her husband could take another wife. The birth of a
daughter was considered a liability, but the birth of a son was celebrated with
festivities, and these events appear in the novel. Gandhi believed that the whole
structure of urban, industrialized society was violent and repressive, crushing
human souls and destroying the beauty of nature. Nectar in a Sieve
captures the effects of such social upheaval on its characters.
Markandaya drew the title Nectar in a Sieve from a tragic
poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “Work Without Hope”: “Work without Hope draws
nectar in a sieve, / And Hope without an object cannot live.” She went on to publish
nine additional novels, and among these, Some Inner Fury (1958),
about a young Indian woman in love with an Englishman, is perhaps her most
autobiographical. She died in London in 2004.
