KAMLA MARKANDYA

KAMLA MARKANDYA
Born : 1 January 1924

Died : 16 May 2004

Place of Birth : Mysore, India

Place of Death :  London, England

Born in a Hindu Brahmin family

Pseudonym -  Kamala Purnaiya Taylor

KAMLA MARKANDYA
Occupation : Novelist and Journalist

 Markandaya studied at the University of Madras, then

worked as a journalist.

   After India declared its independence, Markandaya

moved to Britain, though she still labeled herself an
Indian expatriate long afterwards.
KAMLA MARKANDYA
 Indian novelist whose works concern the struggles of
contemporary Indians with conflicting Eastern and
Western values.

Awards: National Association of Independent Schools

award (U.S.A.), 1967; English-Speaking Union award, 1974

Kamala Markandaya's strength as a novelist comes from her

sensitive creation of individual characters and situations
which are simultaneously representative of a larger
collective. Her prose style is mellifluous and controlled.
KAMLA MARKANDYA
Novels

Nectar in a Sieve. London, Putnam, 1954; New York, Day, 1955.

Some Inner Fury. London, Putnam, 1955; New York, Day, 1956.

A Silence of Desire. London, Putnam, and New York, Day,

1960.

Possession. Bombay, Jaico, London, Putnam, and New York,

Day, 1963.
KAMLA MARKANDYA
Novels

A Handful of Rice. London, Hamish Hamilton, and New York, Day, 1966.

The Coffer Dams. London, Hamish Hamilton, and New York, Day, 1969.

The Nowhere Man. New York, Day, 1972; London, Allen Lane, 1973.

Two Virgins. New York, Day, 1973; London, Chatto and Windus, 1974.

The Golden Honeycomb. London, Chatto and Windus, and New York,

Crowell, 1977.
KAMLA MARKANDYA
Literary criticism

Almeida, Rochelle. Originality and Imitation: Indianness in the Novels of

Kamala Markandaya. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2000.

Jha, Rekha. The Novels of Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A

Study in East-West Encounter. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1990.

Joseph, Margaret P. Kamala Markandaya, Indian Writers Series, N. Delhi:

Arnold-Heinemann, 1980.

Krishna Rao, A. V. The Indo-Anglian Novel and Changing Tradition: A Study

of the Novels of Mulk Raj Anad, Kamala Markandaya, R.K. Narayan, Raja
Rao, 1930–64. Mysore: 1972.
KAMLA MARKANDYA
Almeida, Rochelle. Originality and Imitation: Indianness in the Novels
of Kamala Markandaya. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2000.

Jha, Rekha. The Novels of Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer

Jhabvala: A Study in East-West Encounter. New Delhi: Prestige Books,
1990.

Joseph, Margaret P. Kamala Markandaya, Indian Writers Series, N.

Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980.

Krishna Rao, A. V. The Indo-Anglian Novel and Changing Tradition: A

Study of the Novels of Mulk Raj Anad, Kamala Markandaya, R.K.
Narayan, Raja Rao, 1930–64. Mysore: 1972.
KAMLA MARKANDYA
Markandaya's first published novel, Nectar in a Sieve,
was a bestseller and cited as an American Library
Association Notable Book in 1955.’

It is an Indian peasant’s narrative of her difficult life,

the storms of Nature and the winds of Change stoically
borne by landless lessee peasants, remains
Markandaya’s most popular work.

Translated into more than a dozen languages,

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.

It  is semi-autobiographical

KAMLA MARKANDYA
A Silence of Desire is about an office clerk caught
between different values - old and new, eastern and
western, religious and agnostic. This is Markandaya's
most achieved and characteristic work

These three novels form a trilogy as it were, of Indian

society - peasants, upper middle class, and lower
middle class
KAMLA MARKANDYA
The Golden Honeycomb  gives us a glimpse of princely India.

The Coffer Dams and Pleasure City form a pair, one showing

the best of both English and tribal India and the other
showing the worst of foreign and indigenous
commercialism.

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),
KAMLA MARKANDYA
She is a pioneer member of  the Indian Diaspora, and
her best novel, The Nowhere Man (1972) foreshadows
many diasporic issues with which we are preoccupied
today.