Nectar in a Sieve (Signet Classics)

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.


Down here with the rest of us   June 7, 2005
Christopher Nelson (Oakland, CA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

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.


A story of India.   June 21, 1999
R. D. Allison (dallison@biochem.med.ufl.edu) (Gainesville, Florida, USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

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.


One of my favorite books   August 10, 2004
Christine Hamilton (NY, United States)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

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.


Surviving gracefully - an uplifting story   September 9, 2003
Naima Rashid (Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

`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.