MARKANDAYA’S
LATER NOVELS
SHYAM
M. ASNANI
East-West
encounter forms an important area of concern in Kamala Markandaya’s
works. In almost all the eight novels written up to 1974, she has tried to
present the East juxtaposed with the West, or in serious conflict with it. In
presenting this theme, her major pre-occupation appears to be the exploration
of such factors that come in clash with diverse races and cultures. The
conflict finds its expression mainly in three dimensions–social, political and
cultural. Nectar in a Sieve (1954) captures the dichotomy as a conflict
between the tradition and change, and the village life versus urbanity. Some
Inner Fury (1955) reveals the relationship against the backdrop of
Like
its two predecessors–Some Inner fury and Possession - The
Coffer Dams seeks to depict an uneasy relationship between
The
Coffer Dams marks an intriguing shift in focus. While in all
her earlier novels the point of view stressed is Indian, including Possession,
which has London for its “locale”; the principal characters in
The Coffer Dams are all British, and the point of view is more British
than Indian. Whether the reported change in her nationality is
responsible for this shift of emphasis, it is, perhaps, difficult to speculate.
But whatever it be, Markandaya’s
race knowledge and instincts (like those of Bashiam,
a character in the novel) are unequivocally Indian, and the integrity of her
artistic vision remains unimpaired.
The
Coffer Dams depicts the scientific and technical know-how
superiority of the West. The story revolves round a dam to be constructed over
a “turbulent hilly river’” in
The
“prestige project” brings in the usual retinue of foreign experts, among
Helen
has no such blocks. Is it, he wonders, because she is half his age? She tells
him smilingly that it has nothing to do with age. “You’ve got to get beyond
their skins, darling. It’s a bit of a hurdle, but it is an essential one”.
2
Clinton
and his wife are thus portrayed with diametrically opposed attitudes of life.
They represent two extremes, the former absolutely incapable of communicating
with the natives, the latter achieving almost total identification with them.
Helen’s fascination for the “tribal wilderness” irritates
Helen
is made of altogether different clay. She loves the archetypal World. Even
nature appears to her “inviting, hospitable and goading.” The
primal world and its rarefied surroundings “delight her, open up new
acceptance, fill a want that is in her quiescent but ready to flare. Something
in
Parallel
to
Helen
is thus presented to stand for the West’s desire to understand the East, and Bashiam with his obsession with the machine and
technological progress, cut off from his traditional moorings, is supposed to
represent the predicament of the modern youth of
The
feeling of authenticity and immediacy imparted to the novel enables the
novelist to deploy her considerable skill in portraying the dichotomy from a
vantage point. The racial conflict becomes poignant when the problem of the
dead bodies of two Indian labourers killed in an
accident agitates
Markandaya exhibits her
competent skill in the delineation of the minor characters as well. She paints
them with effortless ease because they are selected from the circle she knows
very well. Most of them are “British sahibs and memsahibs
of vintage and newly-brewed varieties”.4
Mackendrick, Clinton’s partner, is
portrayed as a man with the widest sympathies for India. He understands the
complex of the Indian engineer, Krishnan, and tries to view the racial tension
and discord from historical perspective: “In a way he understood...the pulsing
jealousy and pride that a Poor nation could feel and transmit to its nationals:
the pride of an ancient civilization limping behind in the modern race”.5
Then we have Clinton’s chief assistant, Rawlings, and his wife, Millie, “whose:
African experience coupled with the ghostly memories of the late lamented
British Raj”, 6 prompt them to uphold the
myth of racial superiority, thereby precipitating a series of painful
incidents. Among the Indian counterparts, Krishnan has been portrayed as
“mistrustful and always on guard, moves swiftly to counter the Western
techniques of seduction, persuasion and coercion” that have replaced “piety,
gunboats and the way of Christ.”
The
dams that stand for man’s conquest of nature, are built with “international
co-operation. They thus acquire great symbolic significance”7 taming
as they do violent emotions and racial discord along with the “turbulent waters
of the mountain river”.8 harnessing with the alleviation of poverty
and want.
The
Nowhere Man (1972) projects the East-West dichotomy in still
another way. Probing deeper into human motivations, the novelist tries to
depict the problem of “dismayed encounter” and “unhappy
incomprehension” on the racial plane through Srinivas,
an elderly Indian Brahmin, settled in England for the last fifty years with Vasantha, his Indian wife and two sons. With typical Indian
habits, temperament, dress and opinions, they form a micro India around
themselves in an alien country. As a human being, Srinivas
longs to belong to a “wider citizenship”, but Vasantha,
a typical Indian woman, refuses to assimilate the culture of her adopted land.
A handful of Indian soil and a bottle of the holy water of Ganga
that Vasantha keeps and uses assume symbolic
significance, and suggest effectively that Vasantha’s
faith in the Indian values and way of life is unflinching. The sprinkling of
the drops of Ganga on her ashes after her death is
again both realistic as well as symbolic.
The
sudden death of his younger son first and Vasantha
later, makes Srinivas’s life empty of meaning. He
feels lost in the new loneliness. A “nowhere-man” belonging nowhere, Srinivas has the acute, painful feeling of being an
immigrant with his roots attenuated in the alien country. He even actively
contemplates getting back to India his native land, but the rigorous
formalities of leaving and the glamorous life in the West, are too forbidding
for him to take such a decision. The small, unspoken grievances and quiet rejections,
both imaginary and real, that an expatriate has to face in a country that is
not his own are brought out artistically though the experiences of Srinivas. Into his desolate and lonely existence
comes Mrs. Pickering, a
middle-aged divorced woman, who relinquishes his “loneliness”, although
temporarily. In her company, Srinivas
feels that new vistas of life have opened to him He once again responds to the
beauty of the English rivers, appreciates the crisp winter misty mornings and
even celebrates Christmas and other festivals–all “alien occasions.” But
unfortunately, the monster of racial hatred and violent colour discrimination
of 1960s rears its ugly head and begins to devour its victims. Srinivas becomes the target of the hostility. His leprosy
is symptomatic of his physical and emotional isolation. Thrown into the rule of
a “stranger”, he is condemned as an “unwanted man”, an “intruder”, an “alien”
and liable, as a leper, to be “ostracized further”.9 He, who once
proclaimed his Englishness with obdurate pride, now cries in despair:
…It
was my mistake to imagine (that I am in England)....The people will not allow
it, except physically, which is indisputable, have me enter. I am to be driven
outside, which is the way they want it. An outsider in England. In actual fact
I am, of course, an Indian...I cannot pretend...why should I? My wife never
did? (She) had gone about, in fact, uncompromised to
the day of her death in nine yards of sari and sandals irredeemably Indian in
style and cut. 10
The
fact that Fred Fletcher and Srinivas – the British
hater and the Indian hated – are burnt alive underline the moral that conflict
and violence spares none. It kills both the hater and the hated. This racial
and colour conflict reiterates the communal fanaticism that had victimized and
pulled Mira and Richard apart in Some Inner Fury. Whether this cultural
tension can be ironed out or whether such a stand is good from the point of
view of “nationalistic feelings”, the novelist refuses to indicate her
preferences. She only makes it amply clear that these conflicts do exist among
the individuals as welt as nations.
The
characters like Dr. Radcliffe, Srinivas’s
medical adviser’ Marjorie his wife, and Constable Kent do raise a hope that
despite the racial hatred and rancour that open
“whole new hells of corresponding fear and desolation”, personal relationship
can still be sustained. The relationship
between Mrs. Pickering and Srinivas can
be read as an allegory of the cordial relationship between the best of England
and the best of India.
But
the more vital issue that the novelist raises through Laxman,
Srinivas’s son, is: What will happen to the progeny
of the immigrants? This is a new dimension in the novelist’s understanding of
the East-West twain clashing and meeting alternately. Laxman,
unlike his parents, seeks total integration with the British society as
“adjunct and essential to his living.” His is a precarious case. “The Nowhere
Man”, a rootless creature, “a product of the meeting of the East and the West,”
he tenaciously wishes to belong “to the country in which he was born and lived
and laboured, not in some reservation rustled up
within it.” 11 Laxman’s determination
raises a hope of his survival. How will this happen? The novelist again
carefully refuses to comment. She leaves the young man to encounter this
existential problem and sort it out for himself. Feelings of resentment and
revenge seethe within him and agitate his mind now and then. But the author has
no answer to the developing tragedy:
A
speech.
An
explosion.
Lethal
dust from the deliberate detonation, sly little ugly globules, hung suspended
in the atmosphere. 12
The
Nowhere Man, thus adds a new dimension to the theme. It is
marked by seriousness of intention. It may not be one of her outstanding
creations, yet it can be said to have succeeded in portraying a grim current
actuality and future possibility.
Two
Virgins (1973) portrays the East-West conflict in the
form of a parable about India after independence. It seeks to translate into
fiction a sense of transition -the slow, cruel break-up of a whole way of life
rooted in ancient, traditional certainties and the inevitable drift toward
bewildering, chaotic urban existence. Two village sisters, Latitha
and Saroja –one a child of grace and the other a
child of soil–are made to stand for the city and the country respectively. Lalitha, the elder sister and pretty “like a butterfly
bursting out of a chrysalis” is sent to a missionary school and learns not only
English but also dance and music, and develops a vague longing for the “modern
cosmopolitan” life. Appa, her father, backs her up.
He likes “Indians to be westernized, which advances them into the big world
instead of remaining static in a backwater”.13 for “urbane
intercourse”, he believes, “between men and women is a mark of civilization.” Lalitha’s dream of becoming a film star seem to be
fructifying when Mr. Gupta, the film director, comes to make a
documentary film of the village. Having danced gracefully in the
film, she, in her jubilant mood, feels like a dove on the wing, a golden eagle
soaring to the topmost peak of the sacred mountain. The lure of the city life
makes her leave her home and desert her community and village. She returns a
few months later, still hopeful, still full of illusions and moreover seduced.
After the abortion Lalitha leaves her parents the
second time, for she cannot face going back to the village which stifles her,
her talents, her ambitions. She disappears into the city’s darkness where she
belongs.
As
opposed to her, Saroja, her simple sister, also
experiences the big city, but she gets back utterly disillusioned with the
“stifling, bewildering, terrible streets of this hideous maze.” The city
arouses hatred in her:
She
didn’t belong to it, she wanted to go away and never came back.
She
wanted to go home. At home there were fields to rest your eyes on, colours that changed with the seasons. The tender green of
new crops, the tawny shades of harvest, the tints of freshly turned earth, you
could have told the week and the month of the year by these alone. You knew
each grove, each acre, each homestead on it, who owned them ... you knew every
pathway. No one could ever be lost not by trying ... you always knew where you
were. You knew who you were.
The
city took it all away from you. You were one in a hundred, in a thousand, you
were no longer you, you might have been an amoeba ... 15
The
opposed worlds of city and village are relayed to us through the consciousness
of the sensitive Saroja who, at the end, achieves
some kind of bitter maturity. The theme is ambitious but has not been fully
realized. The realistic and symbolic planes on which the fictional parable is
conducted do no interlock. Because of the insufficiency of concrete detail,
neither city nor village (both nameless) are rendered authentically. The
evocation of traditional life in the village, the portrayal of conflict between
the two ways of life and the encroachment of Western material values on the
rural scene are not compelling enough. The characters lack urgency and
vitality. The ones with symbolic overtones–film director Gupta, an incarnation
of the city sophistication, and sweet-vendor Chingleput,
Saroja’s choric adviser, remain either abstractions
or mere puppets manufactured for the entertainment of those who know nothing
about India. Lalitha’s contamination by the West,
under the impact of her Christian teacher, Miss Meadoza,
is unconvincing. And Saroja herself (unlike Rukmani in Nectar in a Sieve) is an inadequate
medium to communicate the insights the theme demands. Two Virgins,
therefore, hardly seems to make a significant contribution to the artistic
realization of the theme.
In
the depiction of the personal, social and cultural life of India, and that of
the West, Markandaya has tried to create characters
that are both individuals as well as types – representing the social and
cultural attitudes of their respective races. If her peasants, rustics,
derelicts, lepers and aborigins stand for economic
and technological backwardness and other weaknesses of the East such as,
superstition, fatalism, irrationalism, etc., her Swamis are the spokesmen of
all that is good and cherishable in ancient cultural
values. If Kenny, Hickey and Clinton symbolise the
Western concept of dynamism, technological progress, materialism and individualism,
Caroline is sought to represent imperialism, serious living, possessive
instincts, exploitation and racial superiority of the West. With the exception
of, perhaps, Kenny and Helen (who truly devotes himself to the welfare of the superstion-ridden Indian society), almost all the British
characters are depicted to be sharing racial superiority and contempt for
India. In Nectar in a Sieve, and The Coffer Dams, all white men,
though in India, remain aloof from the natives, creating barriers of a material, spiritual and emotional nature. On
the contrary Indians, like Kit, feel proud of imitating the British way of
life. The native engineers suffer humiliation, and are conscious of the feeling
that the English “despise us because they are experts and we are just
beginning”. 16 In Possession Markandaya
not only establishes the triumph of Indian cultural heritage, she also displays
unambiguously the spiritual dross of the Western living.
In
dealing with the theme of East-West clash, Markandaya’s
attitude is balanced. She neither extols the Indian traditional ways of life,
nor condemns the Western technocracy. Carefully refusing to side with any
culture, she lays bare the strength and weaknesses of each of the two cultures,
and this accounts for her artistic excellence as a novelist. Through each of
her novels, she urges the East to discard the outdated values and obsolete
attitudes, to cast off the old attitude of submission to the hardships of life,
and the habit of suffering stoically. To the West, her message is: understand
the “undilute East” (Possession). The lifting
of this barrier alone, could help bring the twain together. She voices her
feeling so forcefully in Possession.
…The
East was too strident, too dissonant, too austere, too raw; it had to be muted,
toned down, tarted up–its music larded with familiar
rhythms, its literature wrenched into shapes recognized by Western tradition,
its dances made palatable by an infusion of known idioms, its people taught to
genuflect before understatement–before a measure of acceptance came. Undilute East had always been too much for the West, and
soulful East always came lapdog fashion to the West, mutely asking to be not
too little and not too much, but right. 17
1 The
coffer Dams, Orient Paperbacks Edn.
p. 8.
2 Ibid.
p. 12.
3 Ibid.
p. 42.
4 Parmeswaran, Uma. A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists,
New Delhi, Vikas Publishers. 1976. p. 108.
5 The
Coffer Dams, p. 18.
6 Nambiar, K. C., Osmania
Journal of English Studies, 1969.
7 Ibid.
8 The
Coffer Dams. P. 222.
9 The
Nowhere Man, Orient Paperbacks Edn.
p. 193.
10 Ibid.
p. 231-232.
11 Ibid.
p. 293.
12
Ibid. p. 272.
13 Ibid.
p. 57.
14 Ibid.
p. 243.
15 Ibid.
p. 243.
16 The
Coffer Dams p. 7.
17 Possession.
Jaico Paperbacks Edn. Pp.
109-110.