Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

First published: 1954

Type of work: Realism

Time of work: The early 1950’s

Locale: A tenant farm, a village, and a city somewhere in India

Principal Characters:

• Rukmani, the narrator, the literate wife of a farmer
• Nathan, her quiet husband
• Kenny, the humane foreign doctor who is frustrated by Indian passivity
• Kali, a plump gossip, garrulous and opinionated, later worn out by misfortune

The Novel

It is not surprising, given the importance of village life in India, that Kamala Markandaya should have set her first novel in a primitive village, with peasants as her main characters. The admirable thing is that she crafted an international best-seller out of the story of a simple woman who never loses her faith in life or her love for her husband and children—despite her long, unceasing battle against nature, changing times, and dire poverty. The elemental plot is simple to follow and deeply moving.

The narrator is Rukmani, a literate widow, who tells in flashback the major events of her life. Given in marriage to Nathan, a tenant farmer she has never seen before, she is taken to a small thatched hut, set near a paddy field, which is to become her home. A garland of mango leaves in the doorway, symbol of happiness and good fortune, hangs dry in the breeze and presages the barren periods that will often plague her and her family. Nathan patiently allows her time to adjust to life with him, but Rukmani’s education always places her a cut above her fellow women—particularly Kali, Janaki, and Kunthi, the three gossips.

After the birth of a daughter, Irawaddy (named after one of the great rivers of Asia), Rukmani becomes anxious about her failure to have sons. She is treated by Kenny, a foreign doctor, who is forthright and critical of Indian superstitions, even as he is compassionate to poor people. In due course, she bears several sons—Arjun, Thumbi, Murugan, Raja, Selvam, and Kuti—and arranges the marriage of Irawaddy, who is barely out of puberty. Old Granny, a vegetable vendor, serves as a go-between, but the arrangement ends in failure when Irawaddy proves to be barren and is returned to her family by her husband.

Other problems abound. The tyrannically exploitative landowner sends Sivaji to collect his dues from Rukmani and her people. Sivaji is humane, but he cannot afford to ignore his master’s bidding. Besides this oppression and the savagery of nature, the villagers have to contend with a new tannery, a symbol of modernization. Rukmani, alone among her group, opposes the tannery for its disturbance of the pace and quality of village life. Her viewpoint is validated by the voracious expansion of the industry, which results in the loss of farmland and the appearance of a little colony of elite tannery officials, many of whom are‘Muslim and, hence, uncongenial to the Hindu villagers. Rukmani’s antagonism is sharpened when two of her sons desert the paddy fields to work in the tannery, and the “slow, calm beauty” of natural village life wilts in the blast from town. Rukmani finds herself rebellious, protesting, and restless.

Nature follows its relentlessly whimsical course, blighting the land with drought. Rukmani sells her best clothes to Biswas, the oily merchant, who casts aspersions on her friendship with Kenny. To compound her misery, Nathan is blackmailed by Kunthi and is forced to confess that he fathered two of her sons illegitimately years ago. Then Raja is killed by tannery watchmen in ambiguous circumstances, but the tannery evades legal censure. Life becomes a sequence of disasters and tribulations for Rukmani. Irawaddy, disgraced by her failed marriage, sells sexual favors and is brutally attacked. Rukmani’s youngest son dies of hunger; ironically, his death is followed by a period of bountiful harvest.

The novel has two disproportionate sections—the first being approximately seventy percent of the whole. By the end of the first part, the lives of Rukmani’s family have been altered irreversibly. Irawaddy falls pregnant out of wedlock and gives birth to an albino; Selvam leaves the village to train at a hospital; Murugan marries a girl from the town where he works as a servant; and Nathan and Rukmani are evicted when the tannery officials decide on expansion.

The second part of the novel opens with Rukmani and Nathan’s journey to the town where Murugan lives. Once again, the emphasis is on suffering, counterpointed by hope. The couple become temple-beggars who require the assistance of Puli, a leper boy, to find Murugan’s home. There, they discover that their son has deserted his wife and boy. Their courageous forbearance put to its fullest test, they reach a point of total exhaustion. Broken in both body and spirit, Nathan dies, and Rukmani returns to the village with Puli, whom she and Nathan adopted. The bittersweet ending sentimentalizes her courage.

The Characters

Rukmani and Kenny are the novel’s most memorable characters, because they are poles apart in their fundamental attitudes to life. Rukmani, in one sense, defies credibility as a character, for she uses a diction that is overwhelmingly Western and far too sophisticated for her background. Markandaya obviously needed an articulate voice for the description of conflicts, and Rukmani’s eloquence highlights the gallantry of her struggle. At heart, however, she is a peasant, for she never loses her appreciation of the land or village life; nor does she make an attempt to repudiate nature. A knowing victim of the vagaries of nature, she exhibits a characteristically Indian acceptance of custom, duty, and fate. In this, she is bolstered by Nathan’s patience and persistence and by an innate pastoral sense that is drawn to “the sweet quiet of village life,” untampered by modern technology. Although there are periods when her composure cracks and she becomes restlessly rebellious, she is not an adversary of tradition. She is bound to the very land that claims her husband and sons, and although her optimism is her grace, it is also her constraint. Where every agony is borne with the implicit conviction that nothing can really change, the hope in survival is simply a weak bargain with fate. Certainly, she endures. Certainly, her spirit is strong—but does her poignant suffering redeem the tyranny of nature or lessen its sting?

Kenny, the foreign doctor, embodies a challenge to Rukmani’s philosophy of acceptance. Although he is not given the sort of dramatic force he deserves, he is the outsider cast in the role of critical witness. His love for children and his chosen vocation draw him into village suffering and soften his personality, which would otherwise be brittle and taciturn. With children, he is a kind of Pied Piper without music; with adults, he is more withdrawn. He comes and goes when he likes, and he resists the usual encumbrances that men have—wife, children, home. His strange nature is not a cold one; it is simply that his sensitivity to suffering is counterpointed by his anger at the victims’ passive acceptance of custom, history, and fate. He tires of the villagers’ follies and stupidities, their “eternal, shameful poverty.” He can, he confesses, take Indians only in small doses.

What is striking about Kenny, besides his passionate indictment of Indian docility and acceptance, is his privacy. It is only more than halfway through the story that his private life is revealed in any measure—and that only through laconic revelations that his wife has left him and that his son has been taught to forget him.

Were he less vulnerable himself, Kenny would not have as much appeal as he does in the novel. When he sounds bitter and weary, his forlorn spirit touches that of Rukmani. The fact that he has his own miseries and doubts puts his aloofness in perspective and makes him seem credibly realistic. There is an aching poignancy about his earnest desire to alleviate the suffering of a people who, to him, simply condemn themselves to perpetual affliction by their meekness and simplistic view of life.

The third major character is Nathan—the honest, patient laborer, illiterate but eloquent in his acts of love, sacrifice, and hope. It is he who incarnates the idea of hope, for in the midst of the most calamitous upheavals of nature or man, he points to the joys and comforts that sustain him. A man of few words, his example is all, and it teaches Rukmani an important lesson of life. When he suffers from nightmares, he has only to turn to his beloved wife to allay his fears. Nature often shows blind indifference to his fate, and he is often relegated to the background in the plot, but Nathan’s role is to be the beloved, the one who wins pity for his trials and admiration for his strength of purpose.

The other characters, while not without their interesting qualities, are rather automatically presented as foils to the three major characters and serve only to further the plot or dramatize the conflict between hope and fear.

Critical Context

Nectar in a Sieve was named a Notable Book of 1955 by the American Library Association. It won very favorable reviews. The New York Times praised its “wonderful, quiet authority” and lack of excess. Saturday Review identified its greatest appeal in its answers to real questions: “What is the day-to-day life of the villager like? How does a village woman really think of herself? What goes through the minds of people who are starving?”

Certainly, there is no denying the peasant ethos—probably a defining quality of Indo-English novels, as in the cases of R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and Bhabani Bhattacharya—or the problems of encroaching modernization, but the social issues of the story are ultimately transcended by spiritual values. It is no accident that Markandaya usually avoids naming her settings. This evasion, her critics contend, fits in with her general refusal to face life directly. The misfortunes are real enough in the plot. There is real hunger or real vice or real death. Rukmani’s attitude of hopeful resignation, however, is hardly the stuff of Social Realism. The pattern of final reintegration—where Rukmani returns to the village—conforms to the Indian preference for an almost scriptural composure.

The problem of the novel, quite apart from the underlying philosophical attitude of acceptance, is a literary style which—as noted above—often seems far too Western in diction for either the narrator or the pattern of the story. In striving to glorify the human spirit, Markandaya often uses a heightened language (with words such as “assuagements,” “decorous,” “garrulous,” or “dissembling”) and a syntax that is far too eloquent for any villager, though she may be descended from a headman. This style puts the novel outside the realm of primary English as used so effectively by Narayan, for example, and it works against the physical simplicity of the setting and characters.

Perhaps, however, this flaw can be attributed to the fact that the novel was the first in Markandaya’s career, and the author had not as yet learned how to adapt a colonial language to indigenous characters and conflicts.

On the positive side, it can be said that Western readers seem not to have minded this defect, for Nectar in a Sieve continues to attract readers and praise for its affecting heroine, poetic beauty, and controlled sentiment.

Bibliography

Chandrashekhar, K. R. “East and West in the Novels of Kamala Markandaya.” In Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English, edited by M. K. Naik et al. Dharwar, India: Karnatak University, 1968. A thirty-page essay that examines Markandaya’s philosophy of negotiation between British and Indian cultural contexts.

Harrex, S. C. “A Sense of Identity: The Novels of Kamala Markandaya.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 1, no. 3 (1965): 44-56. Argues that Markandaya resists the depiction of a single Indian nationalist identity, because in her work rural and urban India appear as two completely different environments.

Jha, Rekha. The Novels of Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Jhabvala. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1990. Examines Markandaya’s depiction of Hindu philosophy and value systems. Includes an extensive bibliography for material on Hindu society and culture, as well as criticism on Markandaya.

Joseph, Margaret. Kamala Markandaya. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980. Characterizes Markandaya as a deeply pessimistic writer who prophesizes the end of all Indian culture following British colonial rule.

Parameswaran, Uma. “India for the Western Reader: A Study of Kamala Markandaya’s Novels.” Texas Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Summer, 1968): 82-104. Gives a historical account of Markandaya’s expatriate situation, the reception of her works, and context of her writings.

Rao, Vimala. “Indian Expatriates.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 10, no. 3 (1975): 45-62. Argues that Markandaya’s exile makes her less perceptive of Indian economic and social realities. Essentially a critique of Markandaya’s efforts at depicting rural women.