Kamala Markandaya (23 June 1924 – 16 May 2004)

Kamala Markandaya pseudonym of Kamala Purnaiya, married name Kamala Taylor, was
a British Indian novelist and journalist. She has been called "one of the most important Indian
novelists writing in English".
Early life
Markandaya was born into an upper-middle-class Brahmin family. A native of Mysore, India,
Markandaya was a graduate of Madras University, and afterwards published several short stories
in Indian newspapers. After India declared its independence, Markandaya moved to Britain,
though she still labeled herself an Indian expatriate long afterwards. Kamala was fluent
in Kannada and Marathi. In 1948 she settled in England and later married an Englishman.

Works
 Nectar in a Sieve, 1954
 Some Inner Fury, 1955
 A Silence of Desire, 1960
 Possession; a novel, 1963
 A Handful of Rice, 1966
 The Coffer Dams, 1969
 The Nowhere Man, 1973
 Two Virgins, 1974
 The Golden Honeycomb, 1977
 Pleasure City, 1982.
 Bombay Tiger, 2008 (Posthumously published)

During Markandaya's youth, India was officially a colony of the British Empire. This led to a
mix of both traditional Indian and contemporary English cultural influences, most notably the
widespread use of the English language. A popular movement supporting the independence of
India gained momentum throughout the 1920s and 1930s, largely due to the leadership of
Gandhi. India finally achieved its independence from Britain in 1948, the year Markandaya left
the country.

She was well-known for writing about culture clash between Indian urban and rural societies,
Markandaya's first published novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), was a bestseller and cited as
an American Library Association Notable Book in 1955. Markandaya never reveals the setting of
the novel and never sets the action in a particular time or place, thus ensuring the story's timeless
quality and universal appeal. This technique is especially effective given that the novel was
published less than a decade after India won its independence from Britain.

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).

Kamala Markandaya is one of India's best-known novelists. Markandaya explores a number of

issues in her novels, including urbanization, poverty, sexuality, gender, interracial relationships,
India's struggle to maintain its identity in an increasingly Westernized world, and colonialism's
impact. She was the face and catapult of the rural community of India which was facing issues
due to Industrialization. She wrote extensively from a transgressive, feminist lens about people
who were stuck at the bottom of the social ladder in modern India: the agricultural community.

Although she lived in Britain for the larger part of her life, Kamala Markandaya always labelled
herself as an expatriate. Waves of her geographically bifurcated and culturally divided marriage
made appearances in her work repetitively. She was the product of a country in the midst of
conflict and represented the social hierarchies of such a systematically cracked place.
Kamala Markandaya wrote various fictional short stories and novels, out of which ten were
published. Her books deal with post-colonial themes, undertones of the human condition in a
dichotomous world, marriages, social distinctions and the westernization of Indianness in
Modern India.
However, Markandaya’s characters were round, semi-autobiographical and aware of their
context. Her writing was skilled enough to provide her characters with aids for survival in a
battle with her critics. Kamala Markandaya was awarded the National Association of
Independent Schools Award (USA) in 1967 and the Asian Prize in 1974.

She lived an intensely private life in England, traveling to India only occasionally. As with the
beginning of her life, little is known about the author's later years. Markandaya died of kidney
failure on May 16, 2004, in London, England. She is survived by her daughter, Kim Oliver.