RURAL
ETHOS IN INDIAN NOVELS
Kamala Markandaya’s “Nectar in a Sieve”, Raja Rao’s
“Kanthapura” and Mulk Raj Anand’s “The Village”
K. S. LATHA
Many Indian novels in
English have used for their setting the village and its life, which reflect the
Indian ethos in all its multifacetedness needed for the conveying of the Indian
sensibility. Apart from the fact that the majority of India’s population lives
in villages, the Indian village spells a presence and a mood characteristic of
the Indian scene of life. Further, it represents a kind of stable society in
which the non-fulfilment of predictable expectations leads to tensions and even
crises affecting the lives of the characters concerned. Furthermore, it
resists, though often unsuccessfully, any change that socio-economic or
ideological forces from outside seek to bring about in its life.
The village in Indian
fiction in English is depicted in terms of documentary or romantic realism
often expressive of a distinctive personal vision.
More often than not, it is
the changing aspect of the village, as against its changeless one, that is
projected by the Indian writers in English, who are interested in imaging the
impact of industrialism and commercialism, general social awakening and social
reform, as also of democratic and socialist ideologies on the Indian masses.
The three novels, viz., Nectar
in a Sieve, Kanthapura and The Village focus on different facets of
the Indian village and the changeless yet changing spectrum that is Indian
rural life.
In the novel, Nectar in
a Sieve Rukmani, the narrator-heroine, stands for the traditional Indian
rural value system and views with concern the setting up of a tannery in her
village:
“...The tannery that
pollutes the vernal atmosphere of the village with its smells and glamour, and
corrodes the values of the people, is the main target of Rukmani’s attack. She
concedes that it brings in more money; but there are counter-balancing evils.
Greater commercialisation, an alien population, labour unrest and the death of
a son, are some of its consequences”.1
Significantly, the village
is unnamed which suggests that the image of it projected in the novel is
typical of what would be true of any other Indian village, since it brings out
the epiphenomena of psychopathology of the average villager, as also the
convulsions to which it is subjected as a result of the advent of
industrialisation. Indeed,
“One gets the impression
that Kamala Markandaya is not reacting to a specific village in India but to
the Western audience’s image of an Indian village. The poverty of the
villagers, along with their ignorance of modern agricultural techniques, is
stressed in the long talk Rukmani, the village woman who is the narrator of the
novel, has with Kenny, the English doctor, about the use and misuse of
cow-dung, Rukmani details the various uses the cow-dung is put to in the
village (which precludes its being used as a fertiliser, as Kenny wants) and
one feels that Markandaya is playing the tourist guide”.2
Raja Rao’s novel, Kanthapura,
unlike Nectar in a Sieve, focuses not on the clash of Eastern and
Western value systems but on that of castes and other socio-cultural structures
considered in the background of the freedom movement. People of different
castes are segregated in such a way that lanes are known by their castes. There
is a Brahmin street, a potter’s quarter, a weaver’s quarter, a Sudra quarter
and a parish quarter. The novel opens with a graphic description of the
village, which brings out its distinctive features related to the drama of existence
projected in the novel:
“High on the Ghats is it
high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian Seas up the Malabar coast
is it up Mangalore and Puthur and many a centre of cardamom and coffee, rice
and sugarcane, roads, narrow, dusty, rut covered roads, wind through the
forests of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing
gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and
now to the right and bring you through the Alambe and Champa and Mena and Kola
passed into the great granaries of trade. There, on the blue waters, they say,
our carted cardamoms and coffee gets into the ships the Red men bring and so
they say they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers
live”. 3
The focus of the life led
in the village is the shrine of the goddess of Kanthapura, Kenchemma.
And it is to her that they look up for protection and relief from pain and
distress which contrasts with what is proposed by Gandhiji’s socio-political
and economic reforms. The story is unfold through the narration of an old
woman, who has lived through Kanthapura’s troubled history.
“The narrative is hardly
very straightforward; there are involutions and digressions. There are
meaningful backward glances, there are rhythmic chains of proper names
(Rachanna and Chandranna and Madanna; Sampanna and Vaidyanna; Satamma and
Rangamma and Puttamma and Seethamma) there are poetic iridescences”. 4
The protagonist of the
novel is Moorthy, a staunch follower of Gandhiji, who goes through life, as
“A noble, low, quiet,
generous, serene, different and brahmanic, a very prince”. 5
and whose attempts at implementing Gandhian reforms programme create a
crisis with which he is unable to cope.
Beyond the village lies
the Skeffington Coffee Estate symbolising industrialisation
of Kanthapura, which is sought to be resisted by the villagers.
While Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
and the unnamed village in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve are
South Indian villages, that figuring as a setting in Mulk Raj Anand’s The
Village is North Indian, which, though manifesting the typical features of
rural ethos, have each been used to project a different theme. The village, one
of the Trilogy, the other two being Across the Black Writers and The
Sword and the Sickle, which is fashioned as a chronicle of Indian peasant
life, traces the revolt of Lal Singh, the youngest son of a peasant, Nihal
Singh, of Nandpur against the injustices and social repression, which define
the forces of tradition and with which the peasants have to contend. In defying
the unjust social order, which characterises his ancestral village as it does
many an Indian village, Lal Singh is virtually hounded out of the village. His career
symbolises the struggle for the realisation of values, which makes man human,
although he is unaware of his heroic role in it experiencing only the
ritualistic fears of his community, which, filling him with grave forebodings
about his future, make him desperate enough to decide to leave his village for
good. Indeed, his action inscapes the incipient rebellion against those aspects
of rural ethos in India, which have become suffocating for sensitive youth like
Lal Singh, who fight a losing battle against their legacy of a repressive
immemorial order sustained by superstition, feudalism and petrified social
structures.
Mulk Raj Anand evokes the
typical atmosphere of an Indian village through a distillation of the
experience of his protagonist, who, witnessing the prevalence of ignorance and
deceit in his village, becomes rebellious. His simmering anger drives him to do
what is forbidden – eat in a Muslim shop and have his hair shorn at a
hair-cutting saloon in defiance of his faith (Sikhism) for which act of
sacrilege he gets his face blackened as a prelude to his being paraded in the
streets on a donkey’s back, which is the typical rural way of branding a
heretic and rebel. His fascination for Maya, infuriates her father, the
landlord of the village who falsely accusing him of stealing three bundles of
fodder from his farm calls the police. Lalu (Lal Singh), however, manages to
escape leaving the village for good and enlisting in the army. Anand’s novel, The
Village stands out among the Indian rural novels in English on account of
its emphasis on the pastoral tie binding man and land, as brought out by Lalu’s
distress at having to leave his village.
Thus, it may be seen that
while Kamala Markandaya and Raja Rao convey the rural ethos refracted through
the aesthetics of critical realism, Mulk Raj Anand does so through that of
humanism.
REFERENCES
1 Margaret P. Joseph, Kamala
Markandaya (New Delhi: Hiremann, 1980), Pp. 15-16
2 Shyamala Venkateswaran: “The Language of Kamala Markandaya’s Novels”
The Literary Criterion, No. 3 (Writer
1970), p. 59
3 Raja Rao, Kanthapura (Oxford
University Press, Amen House, London) p. 1
4 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian
Writing in English
5 Raja Rao, Kanthapura (Oxford
University Press, Amen House, London) p. 6