INFORMATION
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 nameshe 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.
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.
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