Lead Review

• Book: Nectar in a Sieve
• Location: India
• Author: Kamala Markandaya

“Nectar in a Sieve” was the first novel written by my mother, the Indian novelist Kamala Markandaya. It was originally published in 1954 in London, the city my mother had moved to in 1948, and it received instant acclaim. It was swiftly bought by the American publisher, John Day, and was then selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, a prestigious honour guaranteeing sales – and fame. Her book was translated into seventeen languages. It is still taught in schools and colleges in India and the USA – a remarkable achievement after fifty years.

Reviews at the time were ecstatic. “A novel to retain in your heart”, sighed the Milwaukee Journal. The New York Times thought that “‘Nectar in a Sieve’ has a wonderful quiet authority”. And they are quite right. To quote the Penguin Modern Classics edition recently brought out by Penguin India: “Few novels ever published have celebrated the human spirit, its sheer resilience, with greater success.” Again, quite true. The central love story of the novel, the love of Rukmani and Nathan, which survives many tests and endures to the end of life, is deeply moving. Yet there is something else of extreme importance at its heart.

“Nectar in a Sieve” was published in 1954, only seven years after India gained independence. If you are young, you may not even know what the independence was gained from. Thinking of the soaring economic giant that is India today, this theme of a subjugated, subservient nation seems very far in the past. But to my mother’s generation the struggle was at the centre of their lives.

India had been a British colony for three hundred years. It was ruled by a British administration with puppet kings, maharajahs who appeared to be concerned with enriching themselves and not worrying about their people. It was in the interests of both lots of rulers to have a weak, sick, overworked population whose villages had no running water, no sewers, no resources of food to tide them over difficult times; that way, nobody rose up and cried out against the conditions, since simply surviving occupied their entire time, while the wealth of their country drained away to Britain. The religious establishment supported the “status quo” with their doctrines of acceptance of the caste system (people’s immutable place in society), and of reincarnation (thinking of the next life or atoning for your past life, at the expense of this one). Central to 20th century history was Mahatma Gandhi who rose up against this oppressive situation. He had the support of the people, and in 1947 the long British occupation came to an end. This is the background to “Nectar in a Sieve”, but it is never spelt out. It simply informs it. The novel is not a treatise, but a beautiful, powerful work of art.

It was acknowledged among the leading writers of the time that what they should depict in their work was the lives of India’s poorest people. Markandaya tackled this head-on, basing her book on her close observations of rural life in the country where she had grown up. She gives a voice, not just to a peasant, but to a peasant woman – among the lowest of India’s low. She shows Rukmani happy in her own life, loving her husband and children and responsible towards them; sensitive to the rich natural environment around her as she tends her crops; spirited and not in the least downtrodden; and yet vulnerable, so vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life, because she is completely dependent on the forces of nature, and other human beings, perhaps hostile. If the harvest is bad, she will starve, because she has no spare resources and no help. If her land is repossessed, she will have nowhere to grow food and no source of income.

Markandaya writes with a fluid, polished, gentle style that disguises her hard-punching message. Not that the message is telegraphed as such (a gifted writer such as Markandaya would scarcely do so); but you cannot help receiving it. Part of the enigmatic seductiveness of the book is that you end up understanding more than you realised you had been told.

I think that is my mother’s triumph in this novel. In the background is the knowledge that India is on the cusp of change. A lifestyle of poverty and acceptance that has gone on for centuries, with just enough sweetness to make it bearable, is about to be invaded by the modern world bringing with it the onslaught of capitalism. And Rukmani’s children are angry… The novel is such a page-turner, you can’t stop reading it, for the bittersweet story, the beautiful descriptions of the Indian countryside, and the remarkable evocation of life in an Indian village sixty years ago.(Kim Oliver)

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