Kamala Markandaya

In majority of Kamala Marakandaya " s novels, women narrate the story through feminine consciousness. Her depiction of feminine consciousness is reflected in her objective account of women " s emotions; passions and assessment of Indian Womanhood " s confrontation with male reality some of the circumstances reported in her fiction reveal her intense awareness of her identity and her concern of women " s problems. Her novels unveil social and emotional bonds that humiliate women folk. Women in her novels represent internalization of set of ideologies propagated by tradition oriented male dominated society. If in " Some Inner Fury " she refers to the silent barriers against women, in " Two Virgin " s, she pictures moving the nature of woman " s condition through " Bat Butterfly " image. In " Nectar in a Sieve " she presents the legendry archetype of an ideal house wife hoists a flag of revolt against the social forces confronting her, remaining, still within the sanctity of her home. " A Silence of Desire " deals more explicitly with the problems of marriage and man-woman relationship. Novels of Kamal Markandaya express her feministic moral concern through the detailed examination of sexual and familial relationships. She uploaded the moral superiority of woman in maintaining sanctity of the family. Kamala Markandaya " s novels are " metaphorical elongations of the basic fact of awakening feminine consciousness " Analysis of her novels reveals the fact that there is an awareness of fulfillment of feminine identities on social emotional and spiritual contexts which many of her major characters represent realistically. Though traditional, her female characters display inclination for modernity and radical decisions. The most discussed animal in the universe is woman, exclaimed a staunch feminist writer Virginia Woolf. All through centuries male writers wrote tirelessly about her virtues and graces of her being. Musicians in varied tones and tunes mused in praise of her. Architects carved their images in subtle shades and hues. Artists painted the contours of person in alluring colors and strength of her character the beauty of her living were eulogized sky high. But unfortunately none of these good souls allow woman to give a wordy expression to what she

This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in The Oxford History of the Novel, Vol 10,  The Novel in South and South-East Asia since 1945. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press

The chapter examines three key strands of ecology in novels from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, showing how symbolic economies of water, waste, and land mediate political questions around land ownership, agriculture, urbanization, and resource extractivism. The subcontinent has functioned as a testing-ground for large-scale environmental engineering, from the tea plantations, cash crop monocultures, and mass hydraulic schemes and river diversions of the colonial period, to the modernization schemes and Green Revolution in the twentieth-century, to transnational extractivism and bio-piracy in the neoliberal era.  As Roy writes in her searing indictment of the privatization of resources in twenty-first century ‘Shining India’, Indian nature has been relentlessly plundered to fill the bank accounts of national oligarchs and foreign corporations in a deeply asymmetrical exchange: “By caving into this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries’ economies with our ecology” (2011, 26).  Environment, as a web of relations between both human and non-human agents, is not only a prominent thematic presence in the content of  South Asian fiction, but ‘a formal and stylistic presence’ mediating uneven development, ecological imperialism, and environmental degradation (Mukherjee 2010, 11). This chapter analyses the distinctiveness of place and environment in the South Asian novel and broaches  related political questions about land trusteeship and resource insurgency. The rural emphasis on the green fields of rice agriculture in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1955), Sri Lankan tea country in Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge (2002), Himalayan foothills in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), or the mangrove-forests of the Sundarbans in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), is counterbalanced by fictions representing the mass expansion of South Asian megacities, as dispossessed peasantries and evicted tribals are driven off the land by large-scale agri-business, mining, and mega-dams. Urban environments are inextricably bound up with the production of nature in the countryside, and the reduction of certain populations to ‘disposable people’ (Bale 2004) and ‘ecorefugees’ (Guha 2006), stripped of basic environmental rights to water, food, or land. Agricultural modernization and mining have resulted in desertification and pollution, produced severe asymmetries in distribution of and access to water.  Thus, in addition to representations of land, this chapter will analyze representations of hydrological crisis, dams, and water privatization in and Arundhati Roy’s  The God of Small Things (1997), Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2002), I will conclude by exploring the representation of the Bhopal chemical disaster in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), showing how it criticizes the toxification of environments and contests notions of devalued populations and natures as waste or surplus.

The paper, keeping in its backdrop the popular and critical readings of Kamala Markandaya’s debut novel Nectar in a Sieve (1954) as a vindication of the fortitude of rural Indian way of life, in the face of displacement through aggressive western industrialization, anatomizes the role played by an European character Kenny in the novel in its representative aspect. The reason for introducing Kenny is shown to be the endorsement of an elite private westerner to live and work in rural India without sharing in either the identity of the rural self or the power the tannery represents in the novel. The paper also goes on to show how Kenny’s inability to fully understand the rural Indian way of life makes him a representative of the Western reader, and thus, ease out the process of the depiction of the East as a distant and mysterious other. The stance thereby seeks to reimburse the lack of verisimilitude, and that of a distinct ethno- geographic specificity that the Western readers and critics may find in this novel. In conclusion, the paper examines the resultant idea that if, on the collective scale, the novel questions the idea of industrial development in a way that is commonly associated with the representation of the West in Indian English fiction of its time, on the personal level; the West provides a kind of authorization and empowerment for the writer herself. It also gives her a paradoxically privileged status of an outsider to the order she apparently authenticates.

In majority of Kamala Marakandaya " s novels, women narrate the story through feminine consciousness. Her depiction of feminine consciousness is reflected in her objective account of women " s emotions; passions and assessment of Indian Womanhood " s confrontation with male reality some of the circumstances reported in her fiction reveal her intense awareness of her identity and her concern of women " s problems. Her novels unveil social and emotional bonds that humiliate women folk. Women in her novels represent internalization of set of ideologies propagated by tradition oriented male dominated society. If in " Some Inner Fury " she refers to the silent barriers against women, in " Two Virgin " s, she pictures moving the nature of woman " s condition through " Bat Butterfly " image. In " Nectar in a Sieve " she presents the legendry archetype of an ideal house wife hoists a flag of revolt against the social forces confronting her, remaining, still within the sanctity of her home. " A Silence of Desire " deals more explicitly with the problems of marriage and man-woman relationship. Novels of Kamal Markandaya express her feministic moral concern through the detailed examination of sexual and familial relationships. She uploaded the moral superiority of woman in maintaining sanctity of the family. Kamala Markandaya " s novels are " metaphorical elongations of the basic fact of awakening feminine consciousness " Analysis of her novels reveals the fact that there is an awareness of fulfillment of feminine identities on social emotional and spiritual contexts which many of her major characters represent realistically. Though traditional, her female characters display inclination for modernity and radical decisions. The most discussed animal in the universe is woman, exclaimed a staunch feminist writer Virginia Woolf. All through centuries male writers wrote tirelessly about her virtues and graces of her being. Musicians in varied tones and tunes mused in praise of her. Architects carved their images in subtle shades and hues. Artists painted the contours of person in alluring colors and strength of her character the beauty of her living were eulogized sky high. But unfortunately none of these good souls allow woman to give a wordy expression to what she

India is the amalgamation of various customs, religions, rituals, lifestyles, languages and people. The literature of the country also emphasizes this aspect of diversity and struggles of the survival of all these classes of people. The struggles of such people will be impractical if the actually marginalized people-the tribal-will not get their survival rights. Due to the interference of the outer society, the primitive tribal ways of these people are changing. The aim of the present paper is to comparatively present the quintessence of the tribal life and its devastation with the intervention of the non-tribal and the outer system as presented in the novel Paraja by Gopinath Mohanty-the winner of the first ever Sahitya Akademi award-and The Coffer Dams by Kamala Markandaya. Introduction:

The affinity between Kamala Markandaya and Bharati Mukherjee goes much beyond the fact that both are Indian-born, who went abroad, and married to foreigners. While the former has earned the label of race fidelity, the latter is blamed for race treachery. This is ostensibly because Bharati Mukherjee does not map India as her home in her mind.
Bharati Mukherjee left India for the United States in 1961 where she experienced and observed the troubles of immigrants. After their “lunch-break wedding” when she went to Canada–the home country of her husband Clark Blaise–she herself felt a racial discrimination that left an abysmal impact on her mind and later found its way in her creative writings.

*Eugenic Feminism* traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. Through readings of novels, poetry, utopian fiction, policy documents, political speeches, and popular media forms, it uses the concept of “eugenic feminism” to signal a historical and rhetorical logic whereby national feminists in each site leverage eugenic discourse to obtain a privileged position for modern feminist subjects within the nation.

*Eugenic Feminism* traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. Through readings of novels, poetry, utopian fiction, policy documents, political speeches, and popular media forms, it uses the concept of “eugenic feminism” to signal a historical and rhetorical logic whereby national feminists in each site leverage eugenic discourse to obtain a privileged position for modern feminist subjects within the nation.

It is an exploration of Indian Sensibility, East West Conflict, Cultural clash, Multiculturalism and drift from materialism to spiritualism, and from sheer rationality to absolute faith in order to be better human beings in the novels of Kamala Markandaya.

"My paper addresses the concept of Diaspora of the South East Asian communities in London, and it is focused on both its central areas and its peripheries as they are portrayed in the literary and essayist texts of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani writers. The common thread linking writers of such different cultures seems to me the attempt to search for, find and produce different modalities of what Homi Bhabha calls “The third space of enunciation,” that is a brand new possibility of integration and co-existence between the former imperial subject and the people coming from its colonies and territories.
The paper researches both the literary and the sociological fields. Starting from writers such as Sam Selvon, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushde and Hanif Kureishi (to quote just the outstanding names), I am analysing the artistic renderings of the concepts of “hybridisation” and “multi-culturalism” as they appear to emerge from the writings of first, second and third generation diasporic writers. In this sense, observing London from the early fifties till the end of the century, the writers of the Diaspora seem to have codified different reactions of the city and of British culture to the progressive penetration of alien and heterogeneous cultures.
Historically examined, these texts show more than one connection with the social context which contributed to their creation. And the life and interaction of different communities emerge as deeply linked with the urban structure of the city and with the political and administrative establishment which run it."

My paper addresses the concept of Diaspora of the South East Asian communities in London, and it is focused on both its central areas and its peripheries as they are portrayed in the literary and essayist texts of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani writers. The common thread linking writers of such different cultures seems to me the attempt to search for, find and produce different modalities of what Homi Bhabha calls “The third space of enunciation,” that is a brand new possibility of integration and co-existence between the former imperial subject and the people coming from its colonies and territories.
The paper researches both the literary and the sociological fields. Starting from writers such as Sam Selvon, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushde and Hanif Kureishi (to quote just the outstanding names), I am analysing the artistic renderings of the concepts of “hybridisation” and “multi-culturalism” as they appear to emerge from the writings of first, second and third generation diasporic writers. In this sense, observing London from the early fifties till the end of the century, the writers of the Diaspora seem to have codified different reactions of the city and of British culture to the progressive penetration of alien and heterogeneous cultures.
Historically examined, these texts show more than one connection with the social context which contributed to their creation. And the life and interaction of different communities emerge as deeply linked with the urban structure of the city and with the political and administrative establishment which run it.

The paper was published in the proceedings. See my "Papers section".

Kamala Markandaya is unquestionably one of the most outstanding women novelists in Indian English fiction. Her novels in comparison with those of the contemporary women writers seem to be more fully reflective of the awakened feminine sensibility in modern India as she attempts to project the image of the changing traditional society. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to explore the social values of the changing Indian society as projected in her novels. It also explored the major themes of her novels like the social cultural and economic clash between the western and the eastern value systems.

This chapter decodes the novels of Kamala Markandaya from the angle of sex. Kamala Markandaya enters the forbidden erotic land and from there she offers the eastern dishes to the Western readers for their pleasure and contentment. Her novels have become saleable in the Western gallery due to these erotic landscapes.

This paper analyses Kamala Markandaya’s novel Pleasure City which provides an environment to the natives and the foreigners who come together and reciprocate the best. The friendship of Rikki and Tully is its best instance. The novel becomes the Bible of assimilation of the orient and the occident on the basis of co-operation and mutual understanding without the loss of anyone’s identity. Kamala Markandaya succeeds in her attempt of bringing the east and the west together in Pleasure City to a great extent.