Markandaya, Kamala

▪ 2005

Kamala Purnaiya Taylor 

      Indian-born novelist (b. 1924, Chimakurti, Mysore, India—d. May 16, 2004, London, Eng.), pioneered in examining the issues facing postcolonial Indians as one of the first Indian novelists to write for an English-language audience. Though her characters were ordinary people, she conveyed through them acutely felt stories—told quietly and skillfully—of human endurance in a changing world. Taylor was born into a Brahman family and studied history at the University of Madras. From 1940 to 1947 she wrote short fiction and worked as a journalist. She left India for London in 1948 and made her home there, marrying an Englishman. She returned often to India, however, and her works retained their authenticity. Nectar in a Sieve (1954), the first of her 10 novels to be published, presented the realities of life for a suffering but resolute woman in rural India. It was an immediate best seller in the U.S., and many regarded it as the book that introduced Americans to life in India. Of her later novels, A Handful of Rice (1966) and The Nowhere Man (1972) were often included in the curriculum of literature courses across the U.S. Her final novel, Pleasure City (1982; U.S. title Shalimar), told in her trademark lyrical but realistic style, was somewhat overshadowed by the publication one year earlier of Salman Rushdie's allegorical novel Midnight's Children, which signaled a change in the taste of the reading public.

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▪ Indian author

pseudonym of  Kamala Purnaiya,  married name  Kamala Taylor 

born 1924, Chimakurti, India

died May 16, 2004, London, England

      Indian novelist whose works concern the struggles of contemporary Indians with conflicting Eastern and Western values.

      A Brahman, Markandaya studied at the University of Madras, then worked as a journalist. In 1948 she settled in England and later married an Englishman. Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), an Indian peasant's narrative of her difficult life, remains Markandaya's most popular work. Her next book, Some Inner Fury (1955), is set in 1942 during the Indian struggle for independence. It portrays the troubled relationship between an educated Indian woman, whose brother is an anti-British terrorist, and a British civil servant who loves her. Marriage provides the setting for a conflict of values in A Silence of Desire (1960), in which a religious middle-class woman seeks medical treatment, without her husband's knowledge, from a Hindu faith healer rather than from a doctor.

      In Markandaya's fiction Western values typically are viewed as modern and materialistic and Indian values as traditional and spiritual. She examined this dichotomy in Possession (1963), in which an Indian shepherd-turned-artist is sent to England, where he is nearly destroyed by an aristocratic British woman. Later works by Markandaya include A Handful of Rice (1966), The Coffer Dams (1969), The Nowhere Man (1972), Two Virgins (1973), The Golden Honeycomb (1977), and Pleasure City (1982; also published as Shalimar).

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