Kamala markandaya

Kamala Markandaya (01 January 1924 – 16 May 2004) was a pseudonym used
by Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, an Indian novelist and journalist. A native of Mysore,
India, Markandaya was a graduate of Madras University, and afterwards
published several short stories in Indian newspapers. After India declared its
independence, Markandaya moved to Britain, though she still labelled herself
an Indian expatriate long afterwards.
A Brahman, Markandaya studied at the University of Madras, then worked as a
journalist. In 1948 she settled in England and later married an Englishman. Her
first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), an Indian peasant’s narrative of her difficult
life, remains Markandaya’s most popular work. Her next book, Some Inner Fury
(1955), is set in 1942 during the Indian struggle for independence. It portrays
the troubled relationship between an educated Indian woman, whose brother
is an anti-British terrorist, 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.
Like most writers of the Indian diaspora, Markandaya is preoccupied with the
conflict between East and West, or that between tradition and modernity. She
also ruminates on the contemporary Indian scene, both rural and urban, and in
her fiction, she explores its economic, sociocultural, and spiritual aspects. Nectar
in a Sieve is a moving saga of peasant life in India presented in a reminiscent
mood by Rukmani, the narrator and female protagonist. The wife of a poor
tenant farmer, she has been the helpless witness to the destruction of the
pristine beauty of her quiet village and of the old way of life when a tannery is
set up near the village. With great faith and a capacity for both love and
suffering, this simple, courageous woman survives the calamities of nature and
industrialism as well as personal sorrows. Based on the author’s knowledge of
Indian village life, the novel received wide critical acclaim and became a best-
seller. Kamala Markandaya was asked if she might set a book in England, where
she lived with her British husband. “No,” she responded, “I don’t know England
well enough, and don’t think a static society—that is to say a society which has
solved its problems in a mild and satisfactory way—can prod me into writing
about it. I regret to say I have to be infuriated about something before I write.”
A decade and a half later Markandaya’s greater familiarity with English society,
and its increasing volatility, resulted in her seventh novel, The Nowhere Man.
Her favourite of her own works, it belongs alongside such classics of diaspora
disenchantment fiction as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Andrea Levy’s
 Kamala markandaya

Small Island, and Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs. Yet The Nowhere
Man was all but ignored on its publication and, despite being reissued by
Penguin India in 2012, remains little known today.
Markandaya, understandably, disliked the patronizing way in which she was
called a female author, and the “Indian novelist” label felt similarly restrictive. “I
would prefer,” she said, “to be called just a writer, not a nationality. No critic has
ever actually said ‘she writes surprisingly good English for an Indian’—but the
subliminal message was there, and duly received.” Twenty years before her
death in 2004 at age seventy-nine, she permanently disappeared from public
view. Yet she is still remembered by some as the pioneer who, the author Manu
S. Pillai wrote recently, “told India’s tales to the world beyond, and brought a
young, new nation into the global literary conversation.” With The Nowhere
Man, Markandaya wrote a British state of the nation novel whose acuteness and
depth of understanding, unsung at the time, resounds eerily today.