{"id":130659,"date":"2018-11-06T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T14:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130659"},"modified":"2018-11-06T11:29:22","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T16:29:22","slug":"feminize-your-canon-kamala-markandaya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/06\/feminize-your-canon-kamala-markandaya\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Kamala Markandaya"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

In 1956, the then-famous Indian novelist Kamala Markandaya was asked if she might set a book in England, where she lived with her British husband. \u201cNo,\u201d she responded, \u201cI don\u2019t know England well enough, and don\u2019t think a static society\u2014that is to say a society which has solved its problems in a mild and satisfactory way\u2014can prod me into writing about it. I regret to say I have to be infuriated about something before I write.\u201d A decade and a half later Markandaya\u2019s greater familiarity with English society, and its increasing volatility, resulted in her seventh novel, The Nowhere Man<\/em>. Her favorite of her own works, it belongs alongside such classics of diaspora disenchantment fiction as Sam Selvon\u2019s The Lonely Londoners<\/em>, Andrea Levy\u2019s Small Island<\/em>, and Linda Grant\u2019s The Clothes on Their Backs<\/em>. Yet The Nowhere Man<\/em> was all but ignored on its publication and, despite being reissued by Penguin India in 2012, remains little known today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Set in 1968, the year of Enoch Powell\u2019s infamous \u201cRivers of Blood\u201d speech, The Nowhere Man<\/em> is an intricate, perceptive tragedy of alienation centered around the violent racism sparked by Britain\u2019s post-war immigration drive. The hero is Srinivas, an elderly spice importer, native of India, and decades-long resident of a leafy South London suburb. Along with many newer arrivals from South Asia and the Caribbean, Srinivas realizes with horror that, at nearly seventy years old, he has been marked as a pariah, \u201ca convict on parole.\u201d At first, the danger signs don\u2019t quite penetrate his consciousness. He is by nature dreamy and peaceable, not given to assuming the worst of people. And he has always regarded England as a haven of tolerance and sanity. \u201cMy country,\u201d he calls it. \u201cI feel at home in it, more so than I would in my own.\u201d But eventually, the ambient threat turns palpable, and he begins to hear of \u201ca new gospel,\u201d<\/p>\n

a gospel he had not heard since those echoes from Germany before the war. He recalled them now, almost phrase by phrase, presenting hate as a permissible emotion for decent German people. Not only permissible but laudable, and more than that, an obligatory emotion, which they summoned up subtly and starkly from a reading of a checklist, or charge sheet, of the differences between men, their customs and observances, their sexual, religious and pecuniary habits, sparing nothing as they peeped and probed, neither bed nor bathroom nor tabernacle, citing in the end, without shame, the shape and size of their noses, lips, balls, skulls, and the pigment of their skin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his now hostile neighborhood, which is smeared with \u201chang the blacks\u201d and \u201cblacks go home,\u201d Srinivas had once envisioned a serene future unfolding with his wife, Vasantha, and their sons, Laxman and Seshu. As we learn via flashbacks, the newlywed Srinivases left India for England in 1919 and rented \u201ca succession of rooms and flats,\u201d before deciding to buy \u201ca gaunt old building\u201d large enough to welcome their sons\u2019 future wives. But Srinivas\u2019s name, which means \u201cabode of good fortune,\u201d turns out to be ironic. Seshu, at age nineteen, is killed by a German bomb while driving an ambulance during the Blitz. Soon after, Vasantha dies of tuberculosis. Laxman, who has moved away from London and absorbed himself in his own family and career, barely keeps in touch. Isolated and bereft, Srinivas is afflicted with a depression bordering on catatonia. He neglects his business, his appearance, and his house, which sinks into squalor:<\/p>\n

Bluebottles buzzed around the dustbins, and litter from the unswept yard swirled over other people\u2019s tidy properties, severely trying the patience of housewives. A few\u2014those most affected, like Nos. 3 and 7\u2014made sharp wounding comments, but generally people were charitable, knowing the history of the widower at No. 5.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those earlier post-war days, remarks the omniscient narrator, were \u201cdecent\u201d and kindness was still the norm. Laxman, however, is less than kind. A fully English young man who measures human worth according to financial success and \u201cpotential,\u201d he cannot comprehend his father\u2019s passivity. He tells Srinivas to pull himself together, \u201cand felt indeed that this aptly described what had to be done, as if his father were some slack old bag whose strings must be pulled tight before the entire contents fell out.\u201d Srinivas is painfully aware of the unbridgeable gulf between himself and his son, compounded by both generational and cultural differences. He \u201csaw himself as his son did and as his son\u2019s children would\u2026an ill-dressed ancient Indian, deficient in good living and small talk, with whom they would have nothing in common.\u201d Thirty years later, in Zadie Smith\u2019s White Teeth<\/em> and Jhumpa Lahiri\u2019s The Namesake,<\/em> the conflict and sense of separation that can arise between first and second immigrant generations would be explored to great effect.<\/em> But at the time Markandaya was writing, it was a subject few novelists had confronted.<\/p>\n

Salvation comes to Srinivas in the unexpected form of Mrs. Pickering, an indigent divorc\u00e9e, older than him and almost as down-at-heel. Chance encounters in the street lead to walks in the park. Their bond is founded upon a mutual, delicately observed tact. \u201cI hate people who pry,\u201d says Mrs. Pickering, \u201cand force themselves on you for their benefit and pretend it\u2019s for yours.\u201d A partnership is forged, at first platonic yet no less committed and affectionate for that. Mrs. Pickering\u2014we never discover her given name\u2014moves into No. 5, and soon the house is as clean and tidy as when Vasantha was alive. The neighbors, relieved to see the \u201cshine on the doorstep,\u201d confer respectability on the odd couple by referring, fastidiously, to \u201cMr. Srinivas, the landlord, and Mrs. Pickering, his tenant.\u201d<\/p>\n

When racist hatred shatters their hard-won tranquility, Srinivas and Mrs. Pickering\u2019s divergent reactions dramatize a common theme in Markandaya\u2019s fiction: the clash of Eastern and Western sensibilities, and the persistence of cultural values despite deracination. Though he is \u201ccut off from his roots\u201d of Indian Hinduism, Srinivas\u2019s ahimsa\u2014<\/em>his honoring of all living beings\u2014endures. A stamped-on mouse dropped on his doorstep by Fred, the local racist lout, causes deep distress: Srinivas feels responsible for the creature\u2019s needless death. That tiny gray mouse, he thinks, \u201chas entitlements no less than a man.\u201d The same philosophy was held by Markandaya, who detested cruelty to animals and treated it, in her writing, as an auspice of general brutality. But to Mrs. Pickering, Srivinas\u2019s anguish is ridiculous. \u201cReally, some people,\u201d she thinks, \u201cthe way they tore themselves to pieces over nothing.\u201d While her priority is to resist and fight back against the mindless prejudice, which she does doggedly, Srivinas simply says \u201cPeople will believe what they want to.\u201d It is a measure of Markandaya\u2019s mastery of character and voice that neither approach to life seems less noble.<\/p>\n

When Markandaya wrote The Nowhere Man<\/em>, she may well have imagined that the racist dysfunction she portrayed would, half a century on, be a bygone aspect of less enlightened times. But to the contemporary reader, the novel is full of conspicuous parallels to today, not least the Trumpian\/Brexitish attribution of economic woes to the presence of an alien outgroup. \u201cThey came in hordes,\u201d is the spiel seized upon by down-on-his-luck Fred, \u201coccupied all the houses, filled the hospital beds and their offspring took all the places in the schools.\u201d Mrs. Pickering, intercepting the mail to shield Srinivas from abusive missives (though they receive equal amounts), finds that the neater the writing, \u201cthe worse the contents: the more innocent the envelope, the more vicious the enclosure.\u201d Now it would be emails\/DMs, and in place of neat writing and plain envelopes the curious phenomenon, experienced particularly by women in public life, of the politest and most grammatical introductions presaging the vilest attacks. And when Srinivas\u2019s doctor reads a published letter about immigrant staff in the NHS, the sentiments precisely echo those often aired in English newspapers in 2018:<\/p>\n

It concerned itself with the welfare of the sick, who might fall into foreign hands. On their behalf it inquired into the qualifications of those who tended them, their medical skills, their command of English. It hazarded\u2014for facts were facts, and must be faced\u2014that these might not, perhaps, come quite up to the standards of Britain which the world envied.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps this unerring diagnosis of English society\u2019s fault lines from a perceived outsider\u2014a woman and a foreigner\u2014felt disconcerting or even impertinent to readers at the time. Could that explain The Nowhere Man<\/em>\u2019s commercial and critical failure? Markandaya, a rarity in the mid-twentieth century as an internationally read Indian novelist, was previously known for finely-drawn portraits of her homeland. Her debut, Nectar in a Sieve<\/em>, published in 1954 when she was thirty, is a cri de coeur<\/em> on behalf of South Indian tenant farmers whose fates, in Hardyesque fashion, are buffeted by forces outside their control: industrialism, colonialism, heartless landlords, droughts and floods. The title is from a Coleridge sonnet: \u201cWork without hope draws nectar in a sieve,\/And hope without an object cannot live.\u201d An international bestseller, an American Library Association Notable Book, and a Book of the Month Club main selection (worth $100,000), Nectar in a Sieve<\/em> also appeared on the curriculum at many schools and colleges. \u201cMost Americans\u2019 perception of India,\u201d maintained the literature scholar Charles Larson, \u201ccame through Kamala Markandaya.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of Markandaya\u2019s subsequent nine novels, published over the course of three decades (plus one, discovered posthumously, and published in 2008), matched the sensational success of her debut. Her name gradually faded from literary prominence. Not that she ever sought the limelight, even in her heyday. She wrote under a pseudonym (she was born Kamala Purnaiya and became Kamala Taylor when she married her journalist husband.) She rarely granted interviews, and brushed aside suggestions that her novels contained autobiographical details. For example, she claimed that unlike Srinivas, \u00a0she had not personally experienced any racism in Britain, although the subject preoccupied her. She was especially irritated by the Western coding of Christian as virtuous. \u201cBritons condemn bad behavior as un-Christian,\u201d she said \u201cand it is unconsciously offensive. Barbarity strikes as barbarous to anyone, not just to Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her most autobiographical novel is her second, Some Inner Fury<\/em>, set amid India\u2019s turbulent campaign for self-rule in the 1940s. Like its heroine, Mira, Markandaya came from a prosperous high-caste family, worked as a journalist, agitated against British imperialism, and fell in love with an Englishman. But whereas Markandaya\u2019s cross-cultural relationship led to marriage and a child, Some Inner Fury<\/em> has no such happy ending. Mira\u2019s romance with Richard, an Oxford-educated civil servant, cannot in her opinion withstand his being \u201cof the ruling nation\u201d and her own passionate nationalism. \u201cThere is no in between,\u201d she thinks ruefully. \u201cYou have shown your badge, you have taken your stance, you on the left, you on the right, there is no middle standing. You hadn\u2019t a badge?\u2014but it was there in your face, the color of your skin, in the clothes on your back.\u201d Some Inner Fury<\/em> drew comparisons to E.M. Forster\u2019s A Passage to India<\/em>, and one US critic called it \u201cactually a more valuable study of Indian upper-class life and problems than Forster\u2019s great novel.\u201d Another review characterized the story as \u201cessentially a woman\u2019s viewpoint, and the expression of that viewpoint in very moving terms is Miss Markandaya\u2019s forte.\u201d<\/p>\n

Markandaya, understandably, disliked the patronizing way in which she was called a female author, and the \u201cIndian novelist\u201d label felt similarly restrictive. \u201cI would prefer,\u201d she said, \u201cto be called just a writer, not a nationality. No critic has ever actually said \u2018she writes surprisingly good English for an Indian\u2019\u2014but the subliminal message was there, and duly received.\u201d How galling, then, to be in effect forced into retirement for being the wrong kind of Indian novelist. In the 1980s, the magical realist innovations of writers like Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh gave Indian literature an exciting and lucrative new image, and Markandaya was deemed pass\u00e9. Publishers, seeking the next Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>, offered her no more book deals. Twenty years before her death in 2004 at age seventy-nine, she permanently disappeared from public view. Yet she is still remembered by some as the pioneer who, the author Manu S. Pillai wrote recently, \u201ctold India\u2019s tales to the world beyond, and brought a young, new nation into the global literary conversation.\u201d With The Nowhere Man<\/em>, Markandaya wrote a British state of the nation novel whose acuteness and depth of understanding, unsung at the time, resounds eerily today.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0Read her previous\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0columns, about\u00a0Violette Leduc<\/a>,\u00a0Dorothy West<\/a>, Rosario Castellanos<\/a>, Violet Trefusis<\/a>, and\u00a0Olivia Manning<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Markandaya’s debut novel, set in India, was an international best seller. But when she turned her attention to England, and to its disenchantments, her name gradually faded from literary prominence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34367],"tags":[2635,5498,40249,40248,40254,40257,40256,40255,40253,40251,40252,40250],"class_list":["post-130659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminize-your-canon","tag-andrea-levy","tag-diaspora","tag-enoch-powell","tag-kamala-markandaya","tag-linda-grant","tag-literature-of-the-diaspora","tag-manu-s-pillai","tag-nectar-in-a-sieve","tag-sam-selvon","tag-small-island","tag-the-clothes-on-their-backs","tag-the-lonely-londoners"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminize Your Canon: Kamala Markandaya by Emma Garman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 6, 2018 \u2013 Markandaya's debut novel, set in India, was an international best seller. 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