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A Handful of Rice

A Handful of Rice

Author(s): Kamala Markandaya

Location(s): India

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1950s

Location

Content

“Hey you!” he wanted to shout, but he could not: you had to get in the habit of it first, he thought, and you didn’t acquire the habit until you were on the up-and-up, not down and out like himself. The shouting came after the summit. Ah, the summit! It was almost a physical sensation, the craving to be there.”

In her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve, Kamala Markandaya explored the rural world of the Indian peasants of the post-war era, with their fatalistic acceptance of their precarious existence. In A Handful of Rice, originally published in 1966, she creates for the reader the world of that generation’s children who have moved to the city in search of a better life. Rebellious, utterly rejecting the hand-to-mouth poverty in which they grew up, keen to grab a share of life’s riches that they see around them, they are barred from these riches not by inability but by absence of opportunity and a total lack of resources.

The rage of the protagonist, Ravi, prefigures the rage of Aravind Adiga’s “White Tiger”. “The cost of just one of those motor cars that purred along the Marina, he felt, would keep him and his family over half a lifetime. How, he wondered with a burning curiosity, did anyone ever earn so much? He never would, not if he sewed a dozen shirts in a dozen hours every day of the week for a dozen years! No wonder then that young men like himself felt the itch, as he himself had done, to get into those same cars and drive away…”

Markandaya’s completely convincing characters are drawn with understanding and sympathy. The bright, sparky Ravi is brilliantly contrasted with his cold father-in-law, the shrivelled, shrewd Apu: his hostile mother-in-law, the aggressive, uncontrolled Jayamma: and the minor characters, such as Ravi’s lazy, envious brother-in-law, Puttanna.

A novel to read to understand where the thrusting, dynamic India of today, with its towering economic success, has come from.

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Lead Review

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...

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