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Kamala Markandaya’s “Nectar in a Sieveâ€�, Raja ¸é²¹´Ç’s
“Kanthapura� and Mulk Raj Anand’s “The Village�

Many Indian novels in English have used for their setting the village and its life, which reflect the Indian ethos in all its multifacetedness needed for the conveying of the Indian sensibility. Apart from the fact that the majority of India’s population lives in villages, the Indian village spells a presence and a mood characteristic of the Indian scene of life. Further, it represents a kind of stable society in which the non-fulfilment of predictable expectations leads to tensions and even crises affecting the lives of the characters concerned. Furthermore, it resists, though often unsuccessfully, any change that socio-economic or ideological forces from outside seek to bring about in its life.

The village in Indian fiction in English is depicted in terms of documentary or romantic realism often expressive of a distinctive personal vision.

More often than not, it is the changing aspect of the village, as against its changeless one, that is projected by the Indian writers in English, who are interested in imaging the impact of industrialism and commercialism, general social awakening and social reform, as also of democratic and socialist ideologies on the Indian masses.

The three novels, viz., Nectar in a Sieve, Kanthapura and The Village focus on different facets of the Indian village and the changeless yet changing spectrum that is Indian rural life.

In the novel, Nectar in a Sieve Rukmani, the narrator-heroine, stands for the traditional Indian rural value system and views with concern the setting up of a tannery in her village:

â€�...The tannery that pollutes the vernal atmosphere of the village with its smells and glamour, and corrodes the values of the people, is the main target of Rukmani’s attack. She concedes that it brings in more money; but there are counter-balancing evils. Greater commercialisation, an alien population, labour unrest and the death of a son, are some of its consequencesâ€�.¹

Significantly, the village is unnamed which suggests that the image of it projected in the novel is typical of what would be true of any other Indian village, since it brings out the epipheno­mena of psychopathology of the average villager, as also the convulsions to which it is subjected as a result of the advent of industrialisation. Indeed,

“One gets the impression that Kamala Markandaya is not reacting to a specific village in India but to the Western audience’s image of an Indian village. The poverty of the villagers, along with their ignorance of modern agricultural techniques, is stressed in the long talk Rukmani, the village woman who is the narrator of the novel, has with Kenny, the English doctor, about the use and misuse of cow-dung, Rukmani details the various uses the cow-dung is put to in the village (which precludes its being used as a fertiliser, as Kenny wants) and one feels that Markandaya is play­ing the tourist guideâ€�.²

Raja ¸é²¹´Ç’s novel, Kanthapura, unlike Nectar in a Sieve, focuses not on the clash of Eastern and Western value systems but on that of castes and other socio-cultural structures considered in the ground of the freedom movement. People of different castes are segregated in such a way that lanes are known by their castes. There is a Brahmin street, a potter’s quarter, a weaver’s quarter, a Sudra quarter and a parish quarter. The novel opens with a graphic description of the village, which brings out its distinctive features related to the drama of existence projected in the novel:

“High on the Ghats is it high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian Seas up the Malabar coast is it up Mangalore and Puthur and many a centre of cardamom and coffee, rice and sugarcane, roads, narrow, dusty, rut covered roads, wind through the forests of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellow­ing gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambe and Champa and Mena and Kola passed into the great granaries of trade. There, on the blue waters, they say, our carted cardamoms and coffee gets into the ships the Red men bring and so they say they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers liveâ€�. ³

The focus of the life led in the village is the shrine of the goddess of Kanthapura, Kenchemma. And it is to her that they look up for protection and relief from pain and distress which contrasts with what is proposed by Gandhiji’s socio-political and economic reforms. The story is unfold through the nar­ration of an old woman, who has lived through Kanthapura’s troubled history.

“The narrative is hardly very straightforward; there are involutions and digressions. There are meaningful ­ward glances, there are rhythmic chains of proper names (Rachanna and Chandranna and Madanna; Sampanna and Vaidyanna; Satamma and Rangamma and Puttamma and Seethamma) there are poetic iridescencesâ€�. ⁴

The protagonist of the novel is Moorthy, a staunch fol­lower of Gandhiji, who goes through life, as

“A noble, low, quiet, generous, serene, different and brahmanic, a very princeâ€�. ⁵

and whose attempts at implementing Gandhian reforms pro­gramme create a crisis with which he is unable to cope.

Beyond the village lies the Skeffington Coffee Estate symbolising            industrialisation of Kanthapura, which is sought to be resisted by the villagers.

While Raja ¸é²¹´Ç’s Kanthapura and the unnamed village in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve are South Indian villages, that figuring as a setting in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Village is North Indian, which, though manifesting the typical features of rural ethos, have each been used to project a different theme. The village, one of the Trilogy, the other two being Across the Black Writers and The Sword and the Sickle, which is fashioned as a chronicle of Indian peasant life, traces the revolt of Lal Singh, the youngest son of a peasant, Nihal Singh, of Nandpur against the injustices and social repression, which define the forces of tradition and with which the peasants have to contend. In defying the unjust social order, which characterises his ancestral village as it does many an Indian village, Lal Singh is virtually hounded out of the village. His career symbolises the struggle for the realisation of values, which makes man human, although he is unaware of his heroic role in it experiencing only the ritualistic fears of his community, which, filling him with grave forebodings about his future, make him desperate enough to decide to leave his village for good. Indeed, his action inscapes the incipient rebellion against those aspects of rural ethos in India, which have become suffocating for sensitive youth like Lal Singh, who fight a losing battle against their legacy of a repressive immemorial order sustained by superstition, feudalism and petrified social structures.

Mulk Raj Anand evokes the typical atmosphere of an Indian village through a distillation of the experience of his protagonist, who, witnessing the prevalence of ignorance and deceit in his village, becomes rebellious. His simmering anger drives him to do what is forbidden � eat in a Muslim shop and have his hair shorn at a hair-cutting saloon in defiance of his faith (Sikhism) for which act of sacrilege he gets his face blackened as a prelude to his being paraded in the streets on a donkey’s , which is the typical rural way of branding a heretic and rebel. His fascination for Maya, infuriates her father, the landlord of the village who falsely accusing him of stealing three bundles of fodder from his farm calls the police. Lalu (Lal Singh), however, manages to escape leaving the village for good and enlisting in the army. Anand’s novel, The Village stands out among the Indian rural novels in English on account of its emphasis on the pastoral tie binding man and land, as brought out by Lalu’s distress at having to leave his village.

Thus, it may be seen that while Kamala Markandaya and Raja Rao convey the rural ethos refracted through the aesthetics of critical realism, Mulk Raj Anand does so through that of humanism.

REFERENCES

¹ Margaret P. Joseph, Kamala Markandaya (New Delhi: Hiremann, 1980), Pp. 15-16
² Shyamala Venkateswaran:      “The Language of Kamala Markandaya’s Novelsâ€� The Literary Criterion, No. 3 (Writer 1970), p. 59
³ Raja Rao, Kanthapura (Oxford University Press, Amen House, London) p. 1
⁴ K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English
⁵ Raja Rao, Kanthapura (Oxford University Press, Amen House, London) p. 6