Kamala Markandaya's Nectar In A Sieve is a 1954 novel about a family of Hindu farmers living in a remote Indian village over several decades in the first half of the twentieth century. During a period of urbanization, the family navigates hardships and challenges brought on by poverty, social expectations, and rapid societal change.
Rukmani looks back on her life, commenting on how, at age twelve, she has an arranged marriage to Nathan, a tenant farmer who lives in a small village far from Rukmani's parents. They work tirelessly to cultivate rice and vegetables on land they do not own, paying a yearly rent to the landowner through a rent collector. After giving birth to a daughter, Rukmani finds she can't conceive again. She befriends a white English doctor who gives her fertility treatments in secret, and she gives birth to many sons. When a tannery is established in the village, Rukmani worries it will ruin their local culture. When a drought dries up the family's rice paddy, the couple sells everything they can to pay their landlord. The family survives for months on meager reserves of rice, with two children dying before the next harvest. Eventually, the tannery owners buy the couple's farm. Rukmani and Nathan leave the village to live in a distant city where their son Murugan lives. However, Murugan has left his wife and cannot be tracked down. The couple earn money for the return journey to the village by breaking rocks at a quarry, and Nathan collapses and dies while laboring in the rain. Rukmani returns to the village to live with the son and daughter who are still there.
Exploring themes of poverty, gender roles, grief, and motherhood, Markandaya depicts a woman coming to terms with how a rapidly changing social, economic, and physical environment is displacing her humble way of life. Throughout the novel, Rukmani emerges as an enduring, resilient character who embodies the Hindu principle of bearing one's sorrows in silence.
Markandaya's first novel, Nectar In A Sieve has sold over one million copies and is an American Library Association Notable Book. The title is taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1825 poem "Work Without Hope," which contains the closing couplet: "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, / And hope without an object cannot live."
