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The Criterion
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The “Invisible Environmentalist” in Kamala Markandaya:
An Eco Aesthetic Blend in Nectar in a Sieve
Indulekha.C
Research Scholar
PG & Research Department of English
Mercy College, Palakkad, Kerala.
Abstract:
Kamala Markandaya employs herself with the basic concern of an environmentalist or ecologist
by lamenting over the destruction of landscape with in her literary milieu. Eco criticism or eco
critics endeavor to speak for nature and thereby try to understand and address the problems of
human cohabitation with nature. It investigates how the artist utilizes nature literally and
metaphorically. Markandaya’s debut novel Nectar in a Sieve, recoup and retrieve the mislaid
connection between man and land. Her protagonist Rukmani like her, can be acknowledged as an
‘invisible environmentalist’ since both are skeptical to obdurate industrialization or urbanization
and raise voice to preserve nature even in their acute crisis. This paper attempts to analyze how
the novelist through her personae, reveals the growth of fanatic industrialization boosting the
marginalization of the subalterns by further ruining their landscape and livelihoods.
Keywords: Eco criticism, Nature, Human, Environment
Literature has always been the best medium that has explored the inseparable relationship
between man and nature. The youngest of movements, eco-criticism or eco critics endeavor to
speak for nature and thereby try to understand and address the problems of human cohabitation
with nature. It “takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies” (Glotfelty xix) and
investigates how the artist utilizes nature literally and metaphorically. An artist always
apprehends something mysterious in the world and to comprehend it he/she uses various signs in
his/her artistry. Kamala Markandaya employs herself with the basic concern of an
environmentalist or ecologist through her narrative by lamenting over the destruction of
landscape with in her literary milieu, which in turn acts as an extended signifier to the living
cosmos outside. Her debut 1954 novel, Nectar in a Sieve, retrieve and reclaim the mislaid
connection between man and land.
The novel branded under social realism, reflects the socioeconomic and political
backdrop of the era, and is characterized by the “poverty, hunger, and starvation…due to
communal and political disturbances” (Bhatnagar) in post independent India. Markandaya
renders the impact of ruthless industrialization from a subaltern point of view by divulging the
consequences of the so-called urbanization or modernization on the aboriginal destitute peasants
and those belonging to the members of the indigenous middle-class in the society. She in
particular portrays the after effects of the complete denial of the agrarian society, which leads to
the maltreatment of the land that fosters the economic threat of starvation, and forces people to
accept working conditions that they otherwise would not admit. She uses her artistic piece as an
avenue to correspond her vision of life during the tentative political climate in India after 1950s,
which forms the basis of the setting in Nectar in a Sieve.
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An International Journal in English
ISSN: 0976-8165
The narrator and protagonist of the novel Rukmani, is closely associated with mother
earth. She senses unison with her farmland or nature, and draws mystic vigor from its fertility
and beauty. She and her husband Nathan are landless farmers, working for the landowner Sivaji
who sells the land that they till to the tannery owners. Until then by interceding with the greenery
through their farming, their life was in harmony with nature. The terrain blends kinship with
Rukmani, creating an amicable communion with her own clan. She often found solace in the
land on which her husband built a home for her with his own hands and brought her as a bride
with pride. She recalls,
While the sun shines on you and the fields are green and beautiful to the eye, and your
husband sees beauty in you which no one has seen before, and you have a good store of
grain laid away for hard times, a roof over you and a sweet stirring in your body, what
more can a woman ask for? (Nectar in a Sieve 8)
Circumscribed within the eco-feministic views the land becomes her life, “I looked about
me at the land and it was life to my starving spirit. I felt the earth beneath my feet and wept for
happiness” (188). In addition, the novelist has artistically blended the harvesting of the land with
that of Rukmani’s mindscape and vicissitudes in her life. The tannery completely alters the
tenant’s way of life. Until then, they had lived a quiet existence dependent on land, but the
advent of the tannery introduces all the predicaments of urban living, literally transforming an
age-old aboriginal culture. The land once fostered life, morale, bliss, and family of the villagers,
later metamorphosed into an infertile arid ‘wasteland’.
The promotion of the tannery in Rukmani’s village marks a period of transition for her as
well as in the lives of many of the villagers who are primarily cultivators. The change it brings is
rapid, violent, and disorganizing. It relapse the village beyond recognition and this switching
from a farming commune to an industrialized materialistic community frightens Rugmani. For
her, the tannery that engulfs the maidan, an open field shared by all, is an intruder who violates
the decorum of a naïve rural serenity, “They had invaded our village with clatter and din, [and]
had taken from us the maidan where our children played…” (4).
The first immediate effect with the onset of the tannery is felt on the natural environment
of the village. Rukmani bewails that,
At one time, there had been kingfishers here, flashing between the young shoots for our
fish; and paddy birds; and sometimes, in the shallower reaches of the river, flamingos,
striding with ungainly precision among the water reeds, with plumage of a glory not of
this earth. Now birds came no more, for the tannery lay close. (69)
Also the “slow, calm beauty of [the] village [had wilted] in the blast from town” (69). Through
these words, the novelist pinpoints the need for a cordial poise between the animate and
inanimate beings within the cosmos.
Not a month went by but somebody’s land was swallowed up, another building appeared.
Day and night the tanning went on. A never-ending line of carts brought the raw material
in—thousands of skins, goat, calf, lizard and snake skins—and took them away again
tanned, dyed and finished. It seemed impossible that markets could be found for such
quantities—or that so many animals existed—but so it was, incredibly. (47)
The second subdued effect of the establishment of the tannery in the village examined by
Rukmani is that the prices of goods in the local market rise substantially, increasing the fissure
between different classes of people—the landowners, moneylenders and the peasants.
Moneylenders such as Biswas impound greater control of the trade of buying and selling
vegetables and other goods extensively from the farmers, and market it for huge profits shunning
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An International Journal in English
ISSN: 0976-8165
them amid eternal poverty. Although Rukmani does eventually sell her goods to Biswas, she
gains little in return, “[they] had made the bazaar prices too high for us” (4). The inflation of the
bazaar prices intensifies the condition of deprivation and hunger among the village folk, “No
sugar or dhal or ghee have we tasted since they came, and should have none so long as they
remain” (28).
This in turn nourishes certain social evils similar to that, which thrived in the filth and
squalor peculiar to the ‘Dickensian industrial milieu’. The tannery becomes an agent to the
commodification of women’s bodies as it gives rise to activities such as prostitution. Irawaddy,
the only daughter of Rukmani, ultimately resorts to immorality to feed her family and to save her
brother Kuti from dying of starvation. Her decision to become a slut stems from the changes
happening “under the impact of modernity and industrialism [where] she thinks the preservation
of life more pious than the observations of so-called moral values, which fail to feed her family”
(Bhatnagar).
Rukmani, the mouthpiece of the novelist, raises voice to preserve nature even in her acute
poverty. Nevertheless, in her quest for dignity, hunger is a persuasive enemy. Fear of famine
torments the peace of the agricultural society, who subsists by the mercy of the wind and rain. In
Nectar in a Sieve, hunger breeds thieves, prostitutes, murderers, and subhuman beasts. Her
children cry for food, “their faces faded; the two younger ones began crying listlessly from
hunger and disappointment. I had no words to comfort them” (42). Drained of constant
starvation, her elder sons Arjun and Thambi, break up the family to seek out new lives in a new
land. They are forced to leave their paternal profession of tilling the land for better financial
prospects, and start working at the tannery. Murugan her another son, leaves the land and goes to
the city to work as a servant; Raja is killed by the tannery officials when he is caught stealing a
calfskin. Her daughter chooses the degradation of prostitution over the deprivation of starvation
in order to feed her younger brother Kuti who ultimately succumbs to death by famine. Rukmani
nearly becomes a murderer, thinking Kunthi her neighbour has come to steal the leftover of their
rice.
Later in the novel, their rationale for not tilling the land is explained by Thambi to
Nathan, “If it were your land, or mine, I would work with you gladly” (107). Not only nature’s
whims but also the choices of an unjust society produce the shameful misery of starvation. On
the surface, this is a story about the struggle between life and death for the very poor in an unjust
society. But the novel’s stimulating struggle between the forces of good and evil in a human life,
is characterized by an eco aesthetic blend by the novelist. Rukmani accuses both the
industrialization of the villages, represented by the tannery, and the laws of land ownership that
impoverish and displace growers like her and Nathan.
The novel is also a nod towards the clash between the Gandhian and Nehruvian models
of development that India had to choose from where India’s new Prime Minister in the 1950’s,
Jawaharlal Nehru, believed strongly in economic planning. Gandhi’s principles concerning an
aggressive or repressive metropolitan and industrialized society that shattered both the innocence
engraved within the human souls and the beauty of nature were gradually becoming obsolete.
Technology is inevitable for the progress of humanity. Nevertheless, the common tendency seen
in such hustled urbanization is the complete exhaustion of the natural resources without
considering its impact on the environment. Rukmani is shown throughout the novel to be
strongly opposed to the construction of the tannery and everything that it stands for. In a somber
mood, Rukmani says that “[s]omehow I had always felt that the tannery would eventually be our
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The Criterion
An International Journal in English
ISSN: 0976-8165
undoing [for] it had spread like weeds … strangling whatever life grew in its way” (18) and we
see her apocalyptic foreboding to be true to a certain extent.
In addition, Rukmani’s passionate bemoan against the encroachment on nature and the
self-destructive development can be envisioned in the light of Vandana Shiva’s assertion of
‘maldevelopment’. Shiva in her Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival in India
communicates a predominant detrimental and anti-developmental view of the application of
scientific technology imported from the West and the resultant exploitation of nature by
transforming it to an arid zone. Here, the construction of the tannery in a remote agrarian village
has confiscated the inhabitants of their livelihood and homeland, making them alienated in their
own soil.
Even after countless mishaps in the life of various personae within the novel,
Markandaya ends her artistic piece with a note of hope. Rukmani, after lots of misfortunes
returns to her own land after a sojourn from the city along with her ‘newly adopted son’ Puli, to
start a renewed life, “life to [her] starving spirit” (186). This homecoming is viewed optimistic
and can be taken as the novelist’s response to the environmental issues mentioned within the
novel, “with each passing day my longing for the land grew” (166). “This is one of the truths of
our existence as those who live by the land know that sometimes we eat and sometimes we
starve. … Still, while there was land there was hope” (132).
Return to the nature or a shift from anthropocentric ego centrism to eco centrism is the
solution forefingured by Markandaya for the increasing human intrusion in nature. Markandaya,
who shares the same view with her heroine Rukmani, can be termed an conservationist since
both are skeptical to industrialization and urbanization that devastate the natural ecology. The
protagonist is posited as a bucolic Indian ‘everywoman’ because the novelist never mentions a
specific time or place in the novel, thereby giving the story a semblance of universality.
Even though India is an agrarian country, these rustics are perceived as not making any
valuable contribution either to the state or to the economy. The tannery in the novel, does
however, open up new opportunities for alternative employment and occupation. Therefore,
while it is shown that industrialization is not without its evils, it still presents some form of
upliftment of the rural poor. However the words of Thambi, “But what profit to labour for
another and get so little in return?” (107) foreshadows the evils of capitalism, that is always
glued with industrialization.
Nectar in a Sieve reveals the writer’s implicit ideas on environmentalism. Markandaya
expresses her ardent preservationist views against stark industrialization and its harmful bearing
on nature. Even though human intervention in nature is inevitable, the novel is critically relevant
and instructive in the context of the deliberate violence committed on nature in the name of
achieving rapid economic and social advancement. It also insists on the unremitting attempts to
redesign the contours of natural environment displaying the insensitiveness of human disposition
to the aesthetics of nature and how irrevocably their lives have disoriented. Our common attitude
of estimating a nation’s progress in terms of the increasing number of Shopping Malls or IT
Companies is put to question here.
“Nectar in a Sieve is therefore a silent but sharp protest against the demoralizing impact
of industrialization and is quite edifying from the perspective of maintaining and preserving the
harmony between the nature and human nature” (Rajakrishnan 154). As suggested by Glotfelty
again ecocriticism “seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness
as responses to environmental crisis” (Glotfelty 5). Reading in the above said perspective,
Markandaya too can be branded under the “eco-warriors” (Rajakrishnan 147) along with Medha
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An International Journal in English
ISSN: 0976-8165
Patkar, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva or C. K. Janu and further can be labeled an “invisible
environmentalist” (Rajakrishnan 152). Even now, after sixty years of the publication of the
novel, the premise of this eco aesthetic blend seems relevant, as we are in the verge of acute
ecological crisis where the survival of humanity depends on the sensitive and harmonious
treatment of nature.
Works Cited:
1. Bhatnagar, Anil Kumar. Kamala Markandaya: A Thematic Study. New Delhi: Sarup and
Sons. 1995. Print.
2. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
3. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Print.
4. Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. 1954. New York: Signet Classic, 1982. Print.
5. Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival in India. New Delhi: Zed P,
1998. Print.
6. V, Rajakrishnan, Ujjwaj Jana, ed. The Green Symphony. New Delhi: Sarup, 2011. Print.
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