‘Nectar in a Sieve’—Kamala Markandaya. Putnam. 1954.

Te Ao Hou, August 1957, Page 53

‘Nectar in a Sieve’—Kamala Markandaya. Putnam. 1954. Miss Markandaya, a young Indian journalist and writer, was born in Southern India, and travelled extensively in Europe as well as her own country before going to England. This is her first book. Rukmani leaves her parents to marry a farmer in a distant village. The young couple make their home and rear a family in a two-roomed mud hut, and grow rice and vegetables on rented land. When the harvest is good there is enough food for themselves and the children and the rent collector, and perhaps a little money for something special like the Festival of the Lights. But when the rains come too soon or do not come at all, and the paddy will not grow, only the strongest or the most unscrupulous survive. A tannery is opened in the village. It is noisy and smelly and bad for those who work in it. It takes the market place, then the young people, even the land of the small farmers. Rukmani and her husband go to the city, but life is no easier there among the beggars in the temple or the workers in the stone quarry, and they are too old to adapt themselves to new hardships. This story and the way it is told is strikingly similar to the West Indian novel, but where Samuel Selvon writes of poverty and hard work and lack of education and opportunity, Miss Markandaya shows us starvation, and work without hope (like nectar in a sieve), and people living without things we consider the barest necessities of life. She is not concerned with the interactions between different racial groups, but with the sole inheritance of the small Indian farmer—the problem of how to keep alive.