Existential despair in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve: A study

Abstract

Among the diasporic novelists of India, Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) occupies a prominent place as being one of the founding figures of the tradition. When she started writing novels in the 1950s, the theme of hunger and degradation, East- West encounter, colonial politics and its effects on human relationships, rootlessness and alienation had already been dealt with by some Indian English Novelists, but her uniqueness lies in the fact that she provides an original approach, intimacy and poignancy to these issues. In all her novels, spanning three decades, the readers are impressed by her realistic presentation of life. It would not be wrong to say that as a sensitive person and an astute artist she was ahead of her times and wrote about issues, which the next generation of novelists took up later