Lead Review
- Book: A Handful of Rice
- Location: India
- Author: Kamala Markandaya
Kamala Markandaya was born in India in 1924, and moved to London in 1948. Her first novel, “Nectar in a Sieve”, which made her name, is set in an Indian village and depicts the lives of some of India’s poorest people, the peasants of the countryside. In “A Handful of Rice”, originally published in 1966, she shows us city life at the bottom of the heap. Of the ten novels written by Markandaya, who was my mother, it is my favourite, partly because of the city setting (I was born and grew up in London), and partly because of the lively, courageous hero, Ravi.
The unnamed city in “A Handful of Rice” is presumably Mumbai (formerly Bombay). In 1947 the population of Bombay was 4 million. In the next three decades it increased to about 12 million – an increase of more than 8 million people, almost all from internal migration, with more than half of that increase occurring between 1960 and 1970. Ravi is one of those migrants. Markandaya shows us the Bombay of the 1960s as people start to flood there from their villages, just as the country people of England began to move to the cities during the period of the Industrial Revolution.
Like all these multitudes, Ravi has come to the city in search of work and a better life, not just for himself, but, explicitly, for the children he will have. The anger which lay under the surface of “Nectar in a Sieve” at the appalling conditions of village life is a boiling rage in Ravi. He utterly rejects his mother’s and father’s opinion that they have provided him with “a decent home”. His fury and repudiation of the past is fully articulated in Chapter 2:
“Decent? When had he last been decent? Not since he had left that arid dump in the village which his mother, and indeed their neighbours, lyingly labelled ‘a decent home’. What had been decent about it? … As far back as he could see they had all lived between bouts of genteel and acute poverty – the kind in which the weakest went to the wall, the old ones and the babies, dying of tuberculosis, dysentery, the ‘falling fever‘, ‘recurrent fever‘, and any other names for what was basically, simply, nothing but starvation … A leaven must have been at work, a restlessness, a discontent in the towns whose spores had spread even as far as the villages so that suddenly it was not good enough and first one home and then another began to lose its sons, young men like him who felt, obscurely, that it was not right for them and – this with conviction – that it would be utterly wrong for their children.”
Ravi is bright, quick, intelligent, resourceful, and hard-working; he wants to get on in the world and make something of himself and his life. Around him he sees riches; how can he be immune from wanting them? He is full of wants and hopes, like any eighteen-year-old. Yet he is without education, contacts, or help. The only work he can find is an occasional stint in a coffee shop, to earn the few pence he needs to get through the day. At night, he sleeps on the pavement outside the coffee shop. His prospects are zero. What is he to do?
Through a comic-tragic episode involving drunkenness, desperation, chance, and violence, Ravi comes to know a tailor’s family. He falls in love with the tailor’s daughter, and becomes his apprentice and then son-in-law, seizing this step up into the respectable world. He works hard and does everything he can; and yet he feels that he is still being denied the chance of actually arriving, because it is all so small-time. The only chance of making some worthwhile money, he thinks, must be through crime – which is exactly how his shady erstwhile best friend, Damodar, is making himself wealthy, and Ravi is often tempted to join him. Ravi’s rage prefigures the rage of Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, who resorts to murder. The White Tiger’s family pay a terrible price for his crime; and it is Ravi’s love for his wife and children, and his clinging to his toehold on respectability for their sakes, that holds him back.
Markandaya shows brilliantly how Ravi’s frustration at the pauperdom of his village translates to an urban setting and becomes the frustration of poverty faced with inequity. At least in the village people were honest; “They did not lie, they did not cheat, they did not steal”. Well, what was there to steal? thinks Ravi; but in the city, with its riches on display, what makes him angry is the inequality, the unfairness. A turning-point is when he sees one of the embroidered coats made in their workshop on sale for a stunning amount of money. Why are they not charging more for their own work? demands Ravi; and his anger mounts. The grinding defeat of Ravi and his young family, by one thing alone, poverty, is tragic to read.
There are two things in particular that I find extraordinary and admirable about this novel. One, that Markandaya, a female writer, could so convincingly create the persona of an angry young man. She describes his inner feelings with plausibility, especially in the freely-written passages about desire and sexual experience, even sexual violence.
Secondly, that Markandaya could so insightfully, so in advance of her time, analyse the rage of the young, at poverty, at inequality, and at being expected to put up with it. The rioters she depicts at the end of the novel, marching on the grain warehouses and then going on from there, could be the rioters and looters in London, August 2011, smashing the windows of Hugo Boss in Sloane Square:
“They had come to the end of their road now. To Nabobs’ Row, to the gilt and glass, and the sensuous sumptuous unthinking display of wealth for the unthinkably wealthy. /…‘But there’s nothing here,’ he cried bewildered as the first stones began to fall. ‘No rice, no grain, only what the nobs want.’ / ‘What difference does that make, you fool,’ a rough voice answered. ‘We want what the nobs want!’”
“A Handful of Rice” is a wonderful novel and a great read.
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