15 - Two Indian authors - a Different India

Both the short novel Nectar in a Sieve and the movie Water were created by expatriate Indian women, and they have some characteristics in common, but their mood, and consequently their reception by their intended audience, is very different.

Nectar was written in 1953 by Kamala Markandaya, an educated, upper class Indian who had moved to England.

 India had obtained independence from England in 1948, and it faced severe economic problems. Markandaya wanted to convince the British that Indians were ethical and industrious, and that aid such as education and employment could make a great difference in that country. 

She wanted to warn, however, that development with only profit as an aim can cause more misery than it cures; westerners and Indians must have a plan to help the people, otherwise exploitation by the British would simply be replaced by exploitation by the Indians.

Because she wants to convince the British to help, Markandaya makes sure that the story in Nectar is not too bleak, and that the British are not portrayed in a bad light. She achieves this by having the main character, Rukmani, an educated woman who marries a poor farmer, reassure us that she survived the hardships she is narrating, and that her survival is due in great part to an Englishman: Kenny, a British doctor who builds a clinic in the village and gives employment to Rukmani's son (Markandaya 3).

Markandaya shows the economic and moral disruption caused by laissez faire industrialization (a tannery built in the village causes price inflation and dislocates the villagers), but the western factory owners appear only briefly in the novel; the focus is on the harsh Muslim overseers employed by the British, and on their wives, “a queer lot,” with “a way of life quite different … from ours” (26 - 7).

The bad guys, the author implies, are really the Muslims. The West hopefully would follow Kenny's example and help the Indians, who, like the protagonist Rukmani, are hard working, don't make trouble, and are willing to critique their traditions if they see them as detrimental to society. 

Rukmani, showcases these virtues. She is hardworking: she learns to tend a vegetable garden, keeps house, and sells produce. She is not disruptive: she is loyal to her husband even though once he has been unfaithful, and she does not protest when the guards at the factory kill her starving son for stealing a calf skin (50). She is willing to question some of the Indian traditions: she sees that the pressure on women to produce too many sons results in starvation, and that the economic destitution of women causes prostitution and general moral debasement in the village. Rukmani, although a woman of her time, is broad minded: she teaches all her children, male and female, how to read and write (8). 

 

Markandaya succeeded in her objective of influencing the West positively toward India. The fact that she wrote the novel in English contributed to its success. 

Also, she used as a dedication a verse by Coleridge: “Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve.” This underlines that the sentiments of a peasant Indian woman are not different from those of an educated Western man, a poet. Both don't want to be alienated from nature, and both need hope that their work will not be in vain.

Nectar, Markandaya's first novel, had a very warm reception and was translated into several languages. She went on to a full career as a writer (Assisi). Despite persisting cultural differences, the West developed strong economic ties to India. 

However, to achieve this degree of sympathy towards Indian society, Markandaya had to sweep problems under the rug. In her novel there is no mention of violence towards women. Irawaddy, Rukmani's daughter, becomes a prostitute to feed her family and has a child out of wedlock, but she is still accepted by her family and village. We are not told her thoughts, but she seems to feel no resentment or humiliation. 

Also, unlike Muslim women, Indian women seem free to go everywhere they want and no one molests them, even in a large city. In the city an Indian woman is a doctor and employs servants on her own (84). We know from the news that reality in India is not as depicted in this novel. Even now India has a terrible problem with the gang raping of women (Gupta). Did this issue not exist in the 1930s? It is hard to believe.

If Markandaya downplays real problems, Deepa Mehta, the director of the film Water, does the opposite. The film, depicting the life of widows in an ashram (a religious community) in the 1930s, is very dramatic and caused incendiary reactions in India, both during production and when the movie was shown, in 2005 (Marquand). 

Mehta's message is that Indian mentality still has to change. The powerful castes use religion to oppress the powerless, invoking the ancient texts of Manu to relegate widows to ashrams, where they live in poverty, suffer from a tabu against remarrying, and often have to resort to prostitution. The male character in the movie, Narayan, a young lawyer who falls in love with the beautiful widow Kalyani, explains that in reality this is done for greed, to keep money in the family without having to support a woman.

Mehta, like Markandaya, is an educated, upper class Indian woman who moved to the English speaking West - in her case, Canada (Marli). 

Like Markandaya, she portrays the plight of the poor in India. However, she stresses that women of the upper caste are victimized as much as ordinary women. One of the destitute widows in the ashram, Shakuntala, belongs to the Brahmin caste, as does Narayan's mother, who suffers is silence as her husband brings widow prostitutes into their house and rapes Chuyia, a child widow. 

 

The main target audience of Metha's film are her Indian con-nationals. In fact, she makes many references to Gandhi and to the Indian independence movement from the British, but there are no British characters in the movie. The movie is in the Hindi language, it employs an emotional and beautiful soundtrack, and its protagonists are very good looking Indian superstars, similar to the actors in Bollywood love stories. These features would appeal to an Indian audience. 

 

Mehta explained the significance of the water symbol in her movie. In an interview, she said: "Water can flow or water can be stagnant. I set the film in the 1930s but the people in the film live their lives as it was prescribed by a religious text more than 2,000 years old. Even today, people follow these texts, which is one reason why there continue to be millions of widows. To me, that is a kind of stagnant water. I think traditions shouldn't be that rigid. They should flow like the replenishing kind of water" (ctd Brussat). She means that old traditions such as that of persecuting widows can be like stagnant water and cause disease in a culture.

 Mehta has been accused by Indian groups of being melodramatic and of giving a distorted, exotic view of India, and, especially, of washing dirty laundry in public (Chaudhuri).

 I think she was justified in choosing appealing characters such as a child or the handsome doomed lovers. She was not trying to make a documentary. She wanted educated people from India and the West to identify with the victims, be outraged, and seek change. The practices toward women and widows are so entrenched in Indian society that Mehta felt she had to shock people into seeing reality. 

There are forty million widows in India, and eleven million are living in ashrams. Unmarried women, easily identifiable because they don't wear the vermillion makeup typical of married women, are not safe in the street (Barrera). The reason Mehta encountered vehement opposition is that the issue she depicts is real.

I believe both authors succeeded in their goal. Markandaya obtained respect from the West, both for herself as an artist and for India as a nation. Mehta succeeded in shaming Indians into realizing that they have to address human rights abuses if they want respect from other nations. 

Markandaya chose persuasion while Mehta chose denunciation. 

 

The drawback of Markandaya's strategy is that Indians might be tempted to deny their social problems because they don't want to mar their image with the West. The drawback of Mehta's strategy is that it might cause a backlash: Indians might feel they have been unjustly portrayed, and would be less willing to change, because it would mean admitting to the existence of a problem. 

  

In any case, both authors should be commended for their willingness to tackle social issues and for their caring about their country of origin. This is remarkable because, since they belonged to the upper class and lived in the West, they did not personally suffer from the injustices they highlighted. They could have acquiesced to the status quo and avoided trouble; instead, they chose to side with the less fortunate women in India. 

This took courage.

Works Cited

Assisi, Francis c. “Homage to Kamala Markandaya.” 21 May 2004. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. www.beilharz.com/autores/markandaya

Barrera, Sarah and Eva Corbacho. “The Ongoing Tragedy of Indian Widows.” Women's Media Center. N.p. 22 June 2012. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Brussat, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. “Film Review. Water.” Spirituality and Practice. N.p. N.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. 
 

Chaudhuri, Shoshini. “Snake Charmers and Child Brides: Deepa Mehta's 'Water'.” South Asian Popular Culture 7.1 (2009): 7-20. Print.

Desai, Morli and Cathleen Hanggi. “Mehta, Deepa Biography.” Postcolonial Studies @Emory. Emory University. 2001 and 2010. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Gupta, Ruchira. “Victims Blamed in India's Rape Culture.” CNN. 28 Aug. 2013. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. San Bernardino: Stellar Classics, 2013. Print.

Marquand, Robert. “Film Stirs Hindu Radical Rage.” The Christian Science Monitor. 14 Feb. 2000. Print.

Mehta, Deepa, dir. Water. Mongrel Media, 2005. Film.