Customer Reviews

Nectar in a Sieve

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Set in some village in India, Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve is a gripping story of one indefatigable woman's survival of a checkered life, one that had no margin for misfortune. Neither does the book have surprises nor twist, but readers will find a determined, unrelinquished fighter in a woman who bears an unfailing faith and rams through impregnable clamor that invades her life.

Rukmani married Nathan, a tenant farmer whom she had never met, as a child bride. Even though Rukmani was ignorant of the simplest of tasks, Nathan never uttered a single cross word and gave an impatient look. He looked at her as if nobody had discovered her beauty. He never asserted his rights to forbid her reading and writing, a talent that placed Rukmani above her illiterate husband.

Misfortune seemed to have a tight foothold in Rukmani and Nathan. The monsoon inundated the rice paddies where Rukmani worked side by side with Nathan to wrest a living for a household of eight. No sooner had the monsoon tapered off than a drought ravaged the harvest. Hope and fear acted like twin forces that tugged at them in one direction and another.

Poverty-stricken Rukmani saw her daughter Ira become a prostitute, her 4-year-old son Kuti died from hunger, her teenage son Raja caught stealing and beaten to death, her oldest sons Thambi and Arjun set off to Ceylon to work in a tea plantation. The opening of a tannery, of which Rukmani was only skeptical, had spread like weeds and strangled whatever life grew in its way, changed the village beyond recognition.

And yet, Rukmani survived. The interminable poverty and impregnable fate of Rukmani and Nathan must evoke in readers' pity and sympathy. But at the same time, Rukmani, whom Nathan always appeased, might seem somewhat self-piteous, cynical, and complaisant (like Dr. Kennington said, she needed to cry out for help). Ira, who exchanged her body for Kuti's milk and food, had lost her reason and given up her sanity rather than faced the truth.

A recurring theme of the book is the significance of land that fostered life, spirits, happiness and family. Rukmani often found solace in the land on which her husband built a home for her with his own hands in the time he was waiting for her. She often reminisced the very home to which Nathan had brought her with pride. The land became 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)

So much was the book about Rukmani. The one character that stood out to me was Selvam, one of her younger son who flinched and quailed at the firecracker and used the money intended for firecracker to buy a confection cane. As wealth lured all his elder brothers away, he stayed behind and took care of his family, shouldered the household responsibilities while assisting in the village hospital.

Nectar in a Sieve is a book that will make you lump in the throat. The writing is painfully eloquent, taut, and cut-to-the-root. The living conditions, life struggles, poverty, fragility and abasement of life depicted are beyond imaginations to those who live in the first world and have never stretch a single meal portion to three meals. Everyday was a life-and-death situation. 4.2 stars.

Read Nectar in a Sieve and understand what life is like at the bottom of the heap, with the "have nots" struggling for a handful of rice to get through another day. Struggling to raise children and grow crops on land they don't own, in a community whose traditions and character are on the brink of extermination by big-business. Read this book and take up the fight for social justice, job creation, and land reform. If anything, read to understand and feel how lesser fortunate people in this world of ours have lived, and continue to live.

Though Necatar in a Sieve takes place in India and is about a rural family there, its themes are universally applicable, especially in these modern days of globalization and gentrification. Kamala Markandaya died in May of 2004 and it seems that the American press mostly ignored her passing, which is a shame because she is definitely a pioneer of a burgeoning Indo-European line of authors. Nectar in a Sieve has been on the reading list of many a high-school & college for decades now, and thus highly influential for thousands of American & European students past and present. And that's how I first came upon this little gem, in a college course on Eastern Religions, just before I visited India for myself. Though written/published in the early 1950's, I thought this book well crafted and insightful. I was better prepared for my own experiences of Southern India, feeling just a little wiser about life and the people I met there. Markandaya tells this story of the peasants Rukmani and her husband Nathan in a heart-felt, straight-forward manner with many picturesque passages creating an aura of beauty amidst hardship. Her love of the land is reflected in Rukmani & Nathan's joys growing rice and vegetables, raising children, and in their interactions with colorful characters from nearby villages. There are also vivid depictions of hunger, misfortune, anger, loss and sadness, which underly the harsh realities of this "fictional" novel.

Although Kamala Markandaya was from India's Brahmin/upper-class and became an ex-pat in London, she certainly spent time around India's agrarian peoples and was obviously affected by their plight (she has written nine other novels dealing with similar subjects). As a novel, Nectar in a Sieve has a lyrical, romantic quality to it, which may account for its initial popularity here in the States, however, reading it in the 1990's and again more recently, I find it poignant and interesting. If there's any passage which sums up this novel, it may be the following:

". . . We have no money. My husband can till and sow and reap with skill, but here there is no land. I can weave and spin, or plait matting, but there is no money for spindle, cotton or fibre. For where shall a man turn who has no money? Where can he go? Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand. Like a tethered goat, so far and not farther. Only money can make the rope stretch, only money." - Ch. XXVII

And anyone who chastizes the author for emphasizing "money" here, probably has their head in the clouds (not to mention, a full stomach, and some property to boot) and is missing the point. This novel is about hope, and the hope that is necessary for people to strive for a better, more secure life, ONLY achieved through gainful employment and a stable income in a capitalist world. Where these opportunities don't exist, or barely exist, you will have thousands of Rukmanis, Nathans, Selvams, Pulis, etc. begging in your towns and cities. And thankfully, there will be other "Kamala Markandayas" to document their stories for those who are willing to open their eyes to the world around them.

This is the first novel of Ms. Markandaya, an Indian author living in England (she has written at least nine other novels). This novel, written in the first person, presents the life of a peasant woman living in a remote Hindu village in India. Since the village is never named nor is a year ever mentioned in the book, a number of commenters have suggested that the book represents the story of India herself, arising out of feudalism and through industrialization. One of the characters is an English physician, Kennington (called Kenny by the narrator), who often appears to exhibit compassion for the people yet continues to fail to understand them or their culture (nor does he ever appear to make a serious effort to learn). This is a criticism many have given toward the British rule of India. The book begins with the narrator, Rukmani, at an old age and near death. She begins her story with her wedding. She was the third daughter of a village head and, at the age of twelve, is married off to a tenant rice farmer named Nathan. Through births, deaths, prosperous times, and devastating times (such as times of famine and when they lose their farm and are forced to travel to the city with nothing to call their own), she and Nathan remain close and truly bonded together. Even at the time of her own death approaching, she still sees him (her husband had passed away earlier); he has never left her. The book also illustrates the importance of family and the support one should always get from family. It is an uplifting history of a poor, but intelligent, honest, and noble Indian woman.

After reading this book, I felt like I knew Rukimani personally. Her grace, her inner beauty, her happiness and sorrows were a part of my life forever.

It was sad to realize that her grace was often a product of having no choices. When she accepts her husband's shocking revelations (don't want to spoil it for you) it's not because she's the most level-headed, forgiving woman on earth - I mean - where is she going to go exactly? She has no choices and in her soul she knows it.

Yet she still can find her life a better fate than that of others. There is a scene in which Ruki sells some of her vegetables to a wealthy muslim woman in a burka who has all the material things that Ruki lacks (I do not have the book in front of me I can remember her description of the woman's rings "any one of which would have fed us for a year"). But Ruki is not jealous - she feels sorry for the woman's cloistered existence and the fact that she is not free, cannot walk outside and feel the sun against her skin and work side-by-side with men. It was very interesting.

I can envision Ruki buying the dum-dum cart for her grandson. I can picture her grandson in the shade, eyes watering, waiting for a chance to play with the others. I have seen many times the rupee that fell from Irawaddy's sari into the river. I have felt the hopeless struggle that cost her son his tannery job.

This book is beautiful, sad, interesting, and moving. I recommend it highly.

`Nectar In A Sieve' joins the ranks of `An Equal Music' and `God of Small Things' as yet another treat by an Indian writer. For the beauty that it possesses, it is a remarkably simple narrative, tracing the life of an Indian woman Rukmani through changing times and fortunes.

The novel beautifully portrays the life of people living by the land, of those whose fortunes are bound by it. This lot, unintelligent, earthbound and convention-ridden, living on the level of the basics, but even here, finding redemption, even here, despite resignation, suffering, death, loss, tragedy and disillusion, rejoicing in the compensations that land brings, living sometimes by them and sometimes for them. It follows the unsteady, unpredictable and uncontrollable rhythm of their lives. These people, with the land their only benefactor being lost to the wave of industrialization, live a life punctuated by poverty, illiteracy and stringent rituals and tempered only mildly by the blessings that the land ladles out from time to time. Their sorrows are great, their sufferings many , with little and rare joys between, but their hopes are high and their hearts large.

Rukmani, like her lot, loses much to poverty but through the vicissitudes, stays positive and hopeful, never hardening to stoicism and never sinking into dull indifference. Generous in good times and foresighted and alert in leaner ones, she's modest in her rejoicings and uncomplaining in her suffering, bravely bracing tragedy and humbly welcoming joy, she acquires that peculiar Eastern grace that is compounded of resignation, composure and passivity.

The woman's perspective becomes the narrative well as it required that extra degree of sensitivity and emotional intelligence that only a woman possesses. The story is told with beauty and restraint, narrated with as much fineness as the events unfold with crudeness. With a woman's sensitivity, she perceives the unseen and gleans the unsaid. Like a woman, with the fidelity that only an Eastern woman can know, she lives by the pledge of loyalty to her husband, home and family, always planning ahead, ensuring their comfort, sacrificing her joys for their needs. The books is a homage to her loyalty as it is a homage to a marriage that endures the worst, to the love that binds two hearts together.

The narrative is sparse and pared, like the life of the people that it talks about. It's a monument to simplicity, with a distinct beauty that wrings poetry out of the prosaic and the sublime out of the mundane. Moving through joy and sorrow, bubbling over comedy and weeping over tragedy, it's a timeless tale of survival, hope and optimism. It has something of the quality of a fable, something of its timelessness; it's a story standing out of context, out of history and geography, a monument, an eternal reminder of a universal truth, of life __ ` an elemental book', of all that's quintessential and irreducible.

In the final analysis, the novel is waif-like, like a poem said upon the breath, creating beauty, harmony, music and hope despite odds, finding it where none exists and always, hopeful and marching on.

This was a very good book for its time...a sort of "The Good Earth" with the setting in India instead of China. It seems a bit dated now, but still, the situations are entirely credible. I especially liked the character of Kenny, the English doctor who was alternately angered by the peasants' unquestioning acceptance of their fate and sympathetic to the point of sacrificing his own life to helping them. The main character came across as someone whose values were utterly admirable. She valued family, education, hard work and the beauty of the natural world.
I was appalled at some of the insensitive reader reviews I read. Who are these people? Have they no understanding of the world? Do they not know that the vast majority of the world's population still suffers under many of the same conditions of poverty and enslavement to the caprices of nature and disease? I guess they have easy access to McDonald's for food and TV for entertainment.
The writing was simple yet moving and the overall feeling was one of hope for the human condition.

Kamala Markandaya's novel of life in rural India is beautiful, as it is haunting. The story follows the life of a young woman who marries a farmer and lives through the trials and tribulations of a changing India. Enduring poverty, starvation, the death of one child, and the decent into prostitution of another, Rukmani somehow survives, her faith unwavering, her love for her husband and children her rock to hold onto in the days when food is scare and shelter but a mat on a roadside. Kamala's book is not about the tragedy of India; rather it is about the human spirit and how it survives against all odds. If you get a chance to read this book then do, it will probably change your life...

Nectar In A Sieve Written by: Kamala Markandaya Reviewed by: Suzannah Gerber

Written in the early fifties, Nectar in a Sieve reflects a time of immense difficulty and change in India. The push for Indian independence from Britain was booming, and India suffered some of the worst, cultural, economic, climatic and social set backs they have ever known. This book is comprehensive to most novel-aged reading levels, and with good reason. The message of successful struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds is an age-old tale that diligently seeks out a wide range for its audience. Although graphic details are used, they enact a dramatic affect that is delightful and not gory or excessive. Immediately setting up the reader for a poignant tale of strife, Markandaya chooses the title and inscription for the book from the same Coleridge quote which reads "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object can not live." That quote could theoretically be a credo for Rukmani, the protagonist of this story, who is an Indian girl is set up in an arranged marriage at 14, and begins a life of her own with her husband Nathan, on his rented plot of land. We see Rukmani's life unfold through the tumults of India's changes, among which high birth rate, industrialization, high poverty, and white occupancy play no small part. Early on, a tanning factory is built in their primitive village asserting the white presence as an immediate a relevant issue central to the novel. The affect of the newcomers sends the limbo-like message of an India dealing with white industry and Muslim labor migration. Quickly, the factory sets the former bartering village into unrest, as we see it directly responsible for the death of Rukmani's third son, Raja; the relative exile-of-necessity of her two eldest sons, Arjun and Thambi, and for cost inflation of the village produce and goods, such as rice, which were depended upon for survival. Although politics and international affairs aren't dealt with outright in the novel, social practices of a traditional India are discussed at great length. India is known to have a class system known as a caste, in which members of society are expected to fulfill certain roles and responsibilities in the society. To go against the caste meant risking shame and exclusion not only for yourself but for your entire family. Rukmani, whose father was a member of a once, but no longer, important local authority for a higher caste, must marry beneath her into the farming caste, resulting in only mild shame but the increased hardship of a life to which she is unprepared. Caste again becomes an issue when Rukmani's sons wish to enter into industry, which belongs to another section of the caste, to which Rukmani is skeptical for many reasons. The topic of bearing male children versus females is also one key to Indian life in this novel. Daughters need dowries, which often means a life of scrimping and saving for the family until it is time for her to marry, but also male children are needed to raise and manage the land so that subsistence can be maintained. Traditions concerning wedding ceremony, how to keep and cleanse the dead, family/gender roles and respect among the villagers are thematic concerns constant throughout the book shown top us in the inner dialogue and actions of Rukmani. The key conflict for Rukmani's family is money, especially the money to afford food. The extreme and relentless poverty that repeatedly sweeps the country throughout the course of this book is an issue of befuddlement for the central white character, a doctor named Kenny, who often expresses contempt for the Indian way of life. A certain Western arrogance is communicated from Kenny who disapproves of what he terms the "Indian philosophy" of suffering hardships in silence. However, suffering in silence is exactly what Rukmani perfects. While monsoons ravage, crops fail, a landlord exacts payment, and rain doesn't fall, Rukmani, the married mother of six maintains her faith in life and humanity. She sees her sons leave after a failed union organization attempt and in desperate need of assuaging hunger. She suffers the rejection of her daughter from her son-in-law after child bearing fails, then watches her later become a prostitute in an attempt to save the baby of the family, Kuti, ultimately failing, instead producing an illegitimate albino child with little chance for survival. Rukmani suffers the knowledge of her husband's philandery and ... child with her village rival Kunthi, and still finds the love within her to struggle on to happier days. Along the way, Kenny and Rukmani establish an interesting rapport (rumored to be an affair) that shows an interesting atmosphere concurrent to the Indian fifties. The introspective juxtaposition of a reluctant philanthropist and an innocent village woman tenses as they teach each other to respect the life of one another, both being lives of loss and maintenance for different reasons. Both Rukmani and Kenny are highly adaptive and private people, bent on expediently exacting their moral sense of duty. Through interactions with each other, however, they grow as people, becoming happier and more accepting of the unpreventable changes occurring all around them. Although rampant with melodrama, and a bevy of startling plot twists, Nectar In A Sieve tells a story that needs to be told about the brutal life conditions of India. Although the characters are made into heroes, and their dead into martyrs, this is a tragic life story with a hope that trickles through it, as the title foreshadows it would. Life is rampant throughout the book, even in its darkest moments, and hope corresponds; the hope that India will one day overcome the poverty, disease and famine still crippling its people. Nectar In A Sieve is written in quickly read British style English, acceptable for most ages, and comes with a glossary of Indian terms providing the story little snippets of Indian culture in its native language for colouring.

Nectar in A Sieve was originally published in 1954, seven years after India's independence from Britain and the economic and social upheavals that resulted. This context is in the story through the construction of a tannery and hospital and the changes they bring. The story follows Rukmani from her traditional marriage through the birth of her children and grandchildren. Tied to the land, Rukmani and her family suffer drought and bad weather and obligations to their landlord. She learns to "Bend like the grass, that you do not break," and survive injustices and devastations. An eloquently written deeply human story, simply and beautifully told.

The next time I think: "I wish I could afford to get my second car fixed," I hope I'll think of how Rukmani and frail Nathan had to spend weeks working in a quarry to earn enough money just to be able to afford to pay someone to drive them on a cart so they could return to their home.

The next time I hear a whining: "Dad, how come I can't have $10 to buy another pack of Pokemon cards?", then I hope I think of starving Kuti, and how his sister had to turn to prostitution just to earn enough to put a little milk in his mouth.

The next time I think: "Why didn't I get a Christmas bonus this year?", I hope I'll think of Rukmani and her anguish over how to make a few handfuls of rice feed a family for a month.

The next time I make a meal for my children, and after they've eaten, they all say: "I'm full.", I hope I remember Rukmani, and how she and her brothers and sisters of India and the other lands where people are starving by the millions, would laugh and sing if they could have a tiny fraction of what most Americans take for granted.

Markandaya's book was published in the 1950s. But hunger and poverty are of every decade, century and millennia.

This book influenced me more than any other I have read in 1999. I am humbled to be able to give my children three meals a day without it busting my budget.