Nectar Essay

Nectar Essay

"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve."- Samuel Coleridge. Kamala Markandaya, who was born as Kamala Purnaiya Taylor in Bangalore in 1924, is the author of Nectar and A Sieve. Her novel Nectar and A Sieve is about the life of an Indian woman and her family and their struggles to live through poverty and famine. The story takes place a few years after India's independence from Britain in a small unspecified village in India. Throughout this story, we meet the main character Rukmani, her husband Nathan, and their children and witness them as their small, quiet village life is disrupted by a tannery that moves into town. The characters must choose to either accept the modernization the tannery brings or cling to their traditions and culture that they have lived by for so long. In her novel, Markandaya clearly shows that modernization is inevitable and necessary for the economic well-being of any nation. Societies must be willing to set aside as many traditional beliefs as necessary in order to allow for the benefits of progress that modernization will bring. She shows this through the characters Rukmani, Kenny, and the tannery.

How does Markandaya show through Rukmani that modernization is inevitable and necessary for the economic well-being of any nation and that societies must be willing to set aside as many traditional beliefs as necessary in order to allow for the benefits of progress that modernization will bring? One of the first ways is in the very beginning of the book when Rukmani goes to Kenny, who is a medical doctor, to help her conceive a boy child (p. 20) Markandaya is showing here that sometimes there is no other alternative than to turn to modernization to survive; in this case Rukmani turned to western medicine after the charm her mother had given her did not work as she had hoped. Another way Markandaya proves the thesis through Rukmani is her repeatedly saying that the tannery is bad. The tannery, which is place that tans hides and sells them, was a huge change in Rukmani's life. She had to shift many of her beliefs to accommodate the changes the tannery brought like letting her sons work at the tannery even though it was traditional for the sons to work with their father (p. 51). The last way is when Rukmani is forced to start working as a reader and writer to people in the town her son was known to be in. Markandaya again shows that sometimes it is inevitable to live as you always have and to accept the change with a positive attitude.

Kenny is another great example of how Markandaya shows that modernization is inevitable and necessary for the economic well-being of any nation and that societies must be willing to set aside as many traditional beliefs as necessary in order to allow for the benefits of progress that modernization will bring. The first way is the fact that Kenny is in story in the first place. Kenny is a white man who practices