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EAST AND WEST ENCOUNTER IN KAMALA

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 drop of India’s struggle for independence. Naturally, therefore, the relation between India and Britain is of central significance in this novel. A Silence of Desire (1960), though not directly notable for the East-West theme, does project the conflict between the variegated aspects representative of East and West–such as faith versus reason, mysticism versus science, spirituality versus materialism, etc. Possession (1963) seeks to portray the conflict in a most compelling manner, which is no longer on a social or political plane, but on the artistic and cultural planes. The same theme is taken up with variations in The Coffer Dams (1969), The Nowhere Man (1973) and Two Virgins (1974). This paper seeks to study and examine how the problem is portrayed in the later three novels, and to what degree the novelist has succeeded in the artistic realization of the problem.

Like its two predecessors�Some Inner fury and Possession - The Coffer Dams seeks to depict an uneasy relationship between India and Britain. As usual the central character is a woman, but this time the action takes place against a ground which is unusual for Markandaya, a world of gigantic construction work of a dam and huge machinery.

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’â€� in India. Clinton, a middle-aged British engineer, is a partner of a dam-building firm in England whose ramifications have become international, People of his native land see him as a man of wealth and property, and worship him as a successful man in accordance with the “Current cult.â€� All this, however, is meaningless to Clinton who sees himself only as a builder, a man whose “conceptions of concrete and steel, his highly sophisticated and perfected technical skillâ€�¹ can translate into reality.

The “prestige project� brings in the usual retinue of foreign experts, among Clinton and his much younger, vivacious wife, Helen. While Clinton concentrates on the challenging assignment, his young wife looks around for a few moments of relief in the “tribal wilderness.� The tragedy with Clinton is that the tribal people for whom he has been building the dam, are too insignificant and barbarous ones to be reckoned with. To him they all look the same. Once he attempts to follow them but has been stopped by the blank wall of masks that turn to face him. The machine governs his attitude so much that “the black, depthless eyes� of the tribal people reveal nothing to him. There is “simply no communication.�

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 oneâ€�. 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 Clinton and causes undue strain to his already burdened mind. The tribal peope with whom Helen identifies herself, in Clinton’s view, is “characteristic of the severe retardation of its civilization�; they are the people who present to him “only the blank opacities of their total incomprehension.�

Helen is made of altogether different clay. She loves the archetypal World. Even nature appears to her “inviting, hospitable and goading.â€� 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 England had starved her. ³

Parallel to Clinton’s character we have Bashiam, an aborigine crane-operator. He has rejected the older traditional way of life for the modern technological existence. His is a precarious position. For his education and modern scientific outlook his own tribal men disown him and be is looked down upon by the British personnel as a native “jungli�. It is in Bashiam that Helen finds a guide to the heart of the tribal world. And it is again because of their understanding for each other, not neglect or isolation, that they eventually develop a deeper kinship. Helen herself puts it: “We’re alike, we’re freaks only to the caste we come from, not to each other.�

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 India. The tribal-cum-rural world and elaborate description of India’s rural culture not only fits in the setting of the plot, but also enriches the significance of the theme.

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 Clinton’s mind. The bodies are lying under a boulder in the flooded river, and in order to save time Clinton ruthlessly decides not to take the bodies out but to incorporate them in the structure of the dam. The Indian workers, however, insist that the bodies be recovered. Under their leader, Krishnan, they threaten to strike. They quote the precedence when the bodies of two English workers had been similarly recovered from the river and the work was suspended for two whole days so that the dead could be given a decent Christian burial. Krishnan reminds Rawlings and other English officers of the difference in the treatment, and tells them that it should be “a simple matter of equality, the same done to us as to you.� The point has been made effectively, and the episode displays the novelist’s perfect understanding of the race-relationship. She has been able to communicate this in creative terms.

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 varietiesâ€�.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 raceâ€�.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 Rajâ€�, 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 coercionâ€� that have replaced “piety, gunboats and the way of Christ.â€�

The dams that stand for man’s conquest of nature, are built with “international co-operation. They thus acquire great symbolic significanceâ€�⁷ taming as they do violent emotions and racial discord along with the “turbulent waters of the mountain riverâ€�.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-manâ€� 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 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 “lonelinessâ€�, 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.â€� 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 “strangerâ€�, he is condemned as an “unwanted manâ€�, an “intruderâ€�, an “alienâ€� and liable, as a leper, to be “ostracized furtherâ€�.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.â€� His is a precarious case. “The Nowhere Manâ€�, a rootless creature, “a product of the meeting of the East and the West,â€� 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.â€� 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 chrysalisâ€� is sent to a missionary school and learns not only English but also dance and music, and develops a vague longing for the “modern cosmopolitanâ€� life. Appa, her father, s her up. He likes “Indians to be westernized, which advances them into the big world instead of remaining static in a waterâ€�.¹³ for “urbane intercourseâ€�, he believes, “between men and women is a mark of civilization.â€� 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 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 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 .

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 â€� representing the social and cultural attitudes of their respective races. If her peasants, rustics, derelicts, lepers and aborigins stand for economic and technological wardness 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 beginningâ€�. 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

References

¹ The coffer Dams, Orient Papers 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 Papers 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 Papers Edn. Pp. 109-110.