Impact of Industrialization on Rural Life in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve

Pages:206-207
Kamal Rani (Department of English, Vaish College, Rohtak, Haryana)

When Nectar in a Sieve was published in 1954, it was hailed as a genuine novel of rural India. Hari Mohan Prasad termed it “an epic of the Indian life at the grass-roots, a full view of the village life where peasant grow and live suffer and endure and emerge more dignified, more human in their elements with their tattered rags, their dying moans and their obstinate clinging to the soil like the stump withered all over but its roots delved in the earth.” The novel depicts the story of a simple peasant couple from south India. Rukmani recasts her life from her marriage to Nathan, a landless farmer who was “poor in everything but in love,” till his death in the city and her return home. The villagers are tradition-bound and superstitious. Most of them are illiterate. The novel deals with industrialization and its impact on rural human life. The social problems like poverty, hunger, beggary, lack of family planning, the element of crime, unemployment, prostitution caste system, demoralization superstitions and beliefs, dowry system, low status of woman in family, marriage system, zamindari system are very realistically drawn by Kamala Markandaya in this novel. Their over-all characteristics can be summed up by what. Kenny says about them. Calling them “Acquiescent imbeciles”(p.114), he retorts ‘I work among you when my spirit wills it……. I go when I am tired, of your follies and stupidities, your eternal, shameful poverty. I can only take you people……. in small doses.'(p.71)