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Indian Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies ISSN: 2321-8274

Volume 3, Number 2 April, 2015 https://ijclts.wordpress.com/

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A ‘Nationful’ of Concerns: An Eco-critical Reading of Kamala Markandaya’s A Handful of

Rice

Saurabh Bhattacharyya

In his well known work, Ecocriticism (2004) Greg Garrard posits the general parameters

that define and guide ecocritical studies by making a collection, as it were, of the different

definitions of ecological criticism in the first chapter of his work. For instance, he cites

Glotfelty’s definition from The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) of it as being “the relationship

between literature and the physical environment” (qtd. in Garrard 3). This is followed by Richard

Kerrigde’s definition in Writing the Environment (1998) which boils the meaning of

ecocriticism, as it were, down to the environmental issues of the day:

The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they

appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part concealed,

in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas

in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis (qtd. in

Garrard 4).

If one keeps these two definitions in the mind, Kamala Markandaya’s A Handful of Rice (1966)

does not appear to be a text that overtly lends itself to ecocritical analysis on the first reading. In

fact the novel it is most often coupled with as a sequel, though written more than a decade

earlier, Nectar in a Sieve (1955), with its plot dealing with the displacement of a peasant family

through industrialization in the form of establishment of a tannery in their village is more an



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ecological text in the accepted sense of the term. If Nectar in a Sieve is largely set in a village,

amidst what can be called a rural way of life, such a life exists in A Handful of Rice in the

memory of its protagonist, rather problematically, being intertwined with the memory of

suffering, and is carried by him in his urban existence, more as a deep psychological wound than

anything else. A Handful of Rice is the story of Ravi, a peasant by birth who has to leave his

ancestral village in search for work in the city of Madras. Under the influence of a man called

Damodar, he resorts to lead a life of petty crimes in the city until he chances upon a family of

tailors and enters the family in the pretext of being an apprentice of the head of the family, Apu,

in tailoring. As time goes by he grows deeply attracted towards Nalini, the unmarried daughter of

the family and, managing to marry her, he eventually takes over the tailoring business after

Apu’s death in a stroke. With the ruthlessness of his business life increasing, Ravi becomes more

and more hardened as a business man, causing the increase of emotional distance between him

and his wife. In fact, it was in his fight with the ruthless business world, dictated by western

standards of professionalism, that he loses his son and his family, something which he had

valued over everything in his life. Still, at the end of the novel, when under deep duress of

poverty the local people decide to loot the granaries, Ravi accompanies them all the way but is

unable to resort to violence as the ecological values of his actual home and his now lost family

have infused something in him that stand in the way of his destructive instinct. Ravi may have

been a victim of pollution from the ecological point of view, but he shies away from being an

instrument of that.



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The criminality with which Ravi is introduced at the outset is something that hardly

makes it credible for this deterrence on his part. It is true that he visits Apu and his wife

Jayamma’s household a number of times towards the beginning of the novel to infiltrate it and it

is also true that it was primarily Nalini, and the necessity of a family belonging which was in his

mind, still, at the outset, Ravi is introduced as a petty criminal, with hardly any sense of dignity

in him. More a hardened criminal than him is his friend Damodar. Our first impression of

Damodar is presented from the point of view of Ravi himself. Damodar is more a pollutant than

a humanised victim of the murky world as Ravi is. He is an organism fully adapted to the

polluted world he inhabits and, as a necessity, proliferates. He is the representative of the agents

that contribute to the ecological imbalance of the world that they inhabit. It is also due to this that

Damodar remains the same throughout the novel. He is instinctively drawn to pollution and dirt.

“He stayed where he had made his money, among the corn and grain merchants, the distillers and

importers, preferring the pungent air of these turbid streets to what he might have breathed in the

rarefied casuarina and hibiscus areas” (Markandaya 212). In the polluted world, only the

pollutant and those adapted to the pollution can keep on.

However, despite the pollution of the urban atmosphere, it would be wrong to assume

that the novel presents the rural and the urban as bipolar correspondents to the unpolluted and the

polluted. In fact, neither of the two worlds is pure in its essential characteristic. One effective

way of reading the novel along these lines is by keeping in mind the Pastoral Tradition that has

been there in the West as a very distinct trend of environment conscious literature. Quoting Terry

Gifford, Garrard provides three ways of defining the Pastoral. The first is characterised by the

retreat from the city to the countryside. Secondly, it could be a literature that places the country

in a relationship of explicit or implicit contrast to the urban; and thirdly a work can be called a



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pastoral in the negative sense that involves the idealization of the country and rural life with

total disregard for the qualities of life actually led there (Garrard 33). When the relationship

between the rural and the urban in the novel are judged keeping in mind these three definitions,

the treatment reveals a curious blend of affiliation and departure. While a Pastoral involves a

movement from the city to the countryside for a better and fuller life, as in As You Like It or

Scholar Gypsy, for instance, A Handful of Rice tells a story of migration from the countryside to

the city in search of sustenance. It is a movement from one site of environmental disaster to

another, the former instinctively congenial but not physically sustaining, the later, only allowing

one to lead the life of a beast of burden revealing its true self only after one has reached there.

Consequently people like Ravi find themselves caught between two different sorts of sordid life,

one relatively closer to the heart in being a kind of repository of childhood feelings and

associations, the archetypes with which the individual has associated his being through

generations, the other carrying with it a sense of allure, calling one with a prospect of starting

everything afresh, but cannot be reached at without undergoing a total displacement, and

choosing to undergo the general exodus to reach a diaspora state. Ravi has moved out of his city

following tradition because “their village has nothing to offer them. The cities had nothing either,

although they did not discover this until they arrived; but it held out before them like an

incandescent carrot the hope that one day, some day, there would be something” (25-26). There

is a distinct contrast presented between the city and the countryside, but the essential point of

similarity lies in the fact that both offer no natural physical sustenance to people like Ravi. This

fact also renders the third definition inapplicable to the attitude of either the novelist or her

central character towards the rural and the urban.



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In fact the use of the word diaspora in the present context is more appropriate when taken

in its vegetative etymological sense drawing from its original Greek meaning ‘a scattering of

seeds’, rather than its commonly used implication, largely in the area of postcolonial literature.

What the etymological root does not suggest is, however, the fact that most often the

displacement and the subsequent diaspora experience is more voluntary, than undesired. In

Ravi’s case it is partly so, though the cultural displacement works inside him to disorient him.

John A. Armstrong in ‘Mobilised and Proletarian Diasporas’ (1976) distinguishes between two

kinds of Diaspora. The first is what he calls the “mobilised Diaspora”, and the second is the

“proletarian Diaspora”. Both depend on the motivations of the character in the choice of the

Diaspora condition. If the former deals with a kind of diaspora that depends much of its

existence on the choice of a better life in the West, the latter forms a kind of compulsion to move

to the adopted ‘home’, not so much for the betterment of life as for the compulsion of living.

Ravi’s case is dominantly the latter one. However, in the allure he felt in the village for a new

life in the town provides some traces of an exodus of choice. In fact his diaspora predicament is a

curious mixture of both the types and is much more fundamental than Armstrong’s presentation

of diaspora as “ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity”

(Armstrong 393).

In A Handful of Rice there is an indirect representation of Environmental disaster, or at

least a movement towards ecocide occurring at two sites within the world of the novel. The first

being in the way Ravi has to be displaced from his native village on account of inadequacy of

food and resources to sustain himself. This mainly is informed by his internal monologues

recalling a remembrance which is polluted in such a way that any reminder of the moments of

environmental bliss in the village is impeded by the memory of the suffering and the



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displacement associated with it. It is only once in the novel that he wistfully remembers his

earlier state without being reminded of his compulsion to flee from that state. During the tensed

moments of his wait for his first child’s birth, he misses the emotional space that he found in the

natural surroundings of his home in the village:

Here there were no fields to lose oneself in, as the men of his village had done: and as he

waited he could not help remembering – stress having eaten away his defences – that here

was something about the land, mortgaged though it was to the last inch, that gave one

peace, a kind of inner calm, that he was acutely conscious of lacking as he gazed at the

narrow, hard, bustling and indifferent street (Markandaya 123-124).

What is remarkable here is the fact that Markandaya takes care to mention that his ‘defences’

have been deactivated by the stress before he makes this acknowledgement. The defences that

Markandaya talks about are the defences working in and through memory.

The second site of disaster is the city, going through the process of being more and more

westernised, in which he eventually has to lose his family and reenter the world of criminality,

accepting the predicament of being a pollutant himself. The world is repeatedly called a jungle

in the novel and recurrently contrasted with the images of the village in which he lived and

which lives only in his memory, though in a complicated way because of its association with the

sense of dislodgment and loss of home described above. According to Dr. Nagendra Kumar

Singh, “The author uses the symbol of jungle several times in the novel to indicate the kind and

quality of life the urban Indian offers us” (Singh 69). Singh in fact, goes on to provide the

instances from as many as five places in the novel where the urban life has been compared to that

of the jungle and the rules of survival over there are equated to the ruthless laws of the jungle.



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One of the essential aspects of the novel is its placing of these two worlds alongside. One

is the world of the past which is most often described in terms of its association with

reminiscences associated with it. The other is the present which is compared, very significantly,

to a jungle on multiple occasions. The following extract from the text will demonstrate how the

past is celebrated in terms of scenic beauty, but when it comes to the question of natural

sustenance, it is discarded for the present jungle. Brooding on the Bougainvillaea flowers

scattered on the surface of the road, he suddenly becomes aware of the beauty of the sight and is

taken back to the world of his early days which he had to leave despite its occasional beauty:

It was a pretty creeper, the bougainvillaea, he thought, lovely bright

colours although the flowers had no smell. He had not realised how pretty it was until he

saw the way they used it in the big houses, slap against white-washed walls where their

brilliance could show, and the flowers hung down in great heavy trusses of crimson and

purple. But you had to have that wide expanse of wall first. If one planted the creeper

here—not that you could, there was no earth to set a root in—it would hardly show

against the drab brick and tiles, except perhaps to bring out the drabness more. That was

the one thing about his village life, though he had not dwelt on it much before: there had

been a small plot of ground beside their hut, which his mother had planted with chillis

and brinjal and pumpkins—and how pretty that had been in season, golden swelling

gourds among the vivid green vines! Ravi shook himself angrily. What was the matter

with him, harking back to that putrid existence? Of course it was all right in the one good

season that came their way out of five— but what about the others when the paddy fields

turned brown and the pumpkins looked like wrinkled old hags? He felt his mouth

working in the old way, as if to be rid of the bitter remembered flavour, and he spat into



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the gutter that ran along the street in front of the houses, narrowly missing the man

perched on a flagstone that spanned it to form a footbridge (Markandaya 107).

The contrast that we find in these lines are reminiscent of the two oft-quoted contrasting

paragraphs from what has become a cult book in ecological studies, - Rachel Carson’s Silent

Spring (1962). Markandaya does not go into the evocation that Carson’s prose ventures into, but

the contrast between the moments of ecological balance and those of pollution, for Carson

informs later that it is DDT and other pesticides that had led to this environmental disaster, are

similar in both the texts:

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the

traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of

beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the

dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the

abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring

through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others

came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady

pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers

raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell

had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the

cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers

spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and

more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been



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several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children,

who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours (Carson 1-2).

Markandaya’s contrast between the “golden swelling gourds among the vivid green vines” and

the “paddy fields turned brown and the pumpkins looked like wrinkled old hags” is more

complex in the fact that in Carson’s description one follows the other, in Markandaya it appears

to be similarly progressive in its sequence in memory, but are actually repeating in a cyclical

sequence. This has been going on for generations for people like Ravi and no human pollutant is

located there except the poverty that is engrained and is a product of the system of being “rack-

rent farmers” as Ravi and the other members of his family are. Despite the unusual spelling of

the bougainvillaea which is most often spelled as bougainvillea, and the inaccuracy in the fact

that it is not a creeper, the movement of thought, as one may easily trace, is from the urbane to

the rural. First, beauty is discovered here and now in the city in the way the bougainvillaea looks

against the white washed walls. What follows is the contrast between the flowers when they are

placed in the rich urban context and them being imagined in the context of the dingy locale to

which he had migrated to at the beginning of his life in the city. However, what follows is a

wistful reminiscence of his mother’s kitchen garden with, importantly, fruits and not flowers as

the edibles are more important for them, perhaps the colour of the bougainvillaea leading the

memory to the colours of the red chilli. Ravi’s anger does not come from a sense of escape, as

that would have also given him a sense of relief. The anger, the source of which lie even beyond

his own understanding, is caused by a sense of pain at his having left everything, at the

displacement from the village and finally taking refuge to the jungle over here. This anger

becomes more and more until finally it comes out that the displacement is not complete at the

climactic final scene.



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There is hardly a single occasion in the story where the bliss of the village life comes to his mind

without being accompanied by the bitter memory of why Ravi had to leave his home. When his

father blames the temptation in the villagers towards urban life for the plight they face after

migrating to the town or city, Ravi seethes deep inside:

Town, town, town, thought Ravi, chafing in silence. They gathered every evil they could

think of and laid it at the feet of a town, as if they were making an offering to some black

god. He felt he knew "why: because they had nowhere else to spill the blame. But his

father? Who knew the evils of another kind which their village? What right had he to

slander any town? It was hopeless, he decided: a hopeless case; and the gulf widened

between parent and son (Markandaya 51).

The entire urban life, in which he lives from the beginning to the end of the novel, adapting with

it as necessity comes, seems to be polluted to the extreme. It is a pollution that would lead one

toward a kind of ecological disaster, as is evident in the later parts of the novel when Ravi

becomes the victim of it, living through poverty once again and losing his family in the way.

In this context, His attraction towards Nalini is a kind of going back to the other world,

the world from which he has been displaced and where he needs to return to. Just after his first

encounter with her in Apu’s family, he realises that he needed:

this girl with the bright eyes and the thick, glossy hair, who could transform a man's life.

He would have liked to meet her—properly, not as a labouring coolie in her father's

house; to talk to her as an equal, to get to know her, as other young men came to know

young girls, within the approving, carefully conducted circle of mutual friends and family

relationships (Markandaya 25).



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Getting the girl also involved adapting to a better living standard, morally, as well as from the

societal point of view. It is this that comes out very directly in the description of Nalini as

antithetical to that of the jungle he inhabits and hates. While his remembrance of an emotionally

congenial village life is impeded by the memory of suffering instinctively associated with it, it is

only in Nalini’s thought that he finds perfect compatibility with his environment which is not

impeded by memory or suffering:

Ah, Nalini, he thought, Nalini. She was worth it, worth anything, even worth giving up

the sweet life for. He put it all on her, forgetting the trinity of hunger, drink and misery

that had been intermittent companion to his sweet life, and which had forced his entry

into Apu's menage in the first place (Markandaya 40).

Thus, even in this jungle there is an environment, closed in itself, that promises a kind of

emotional sustenance that is rarely there in the life he has left in the village and utterly absent in

his life in Madras. It is the world surrounding Nalini. Apu and Jayamma’s family becomes a kind

of emotional abode to him only because of the fact that it houses Nalini. It corresponds to a more

environmentally attuned way of life:

Nalini, his girl. He said it to himself sweetly, roundly, secretly, and it filled him with a

delicious sense of pleasure. Nalini, the girl who could make a man feel like a man even

outside the jungle of his choosing, the girl for whom he was ready to repudiate all in his

life that was unworthy. And what this was, he realised clearly, was precisely what would

have alienated his own respectable family: his dubious activities on the fringes of the law

in the dubious company of Damodar. But whereas the standards of his family filled him

with contempt—for what had it taught them except an excessive endurance, and what had



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it brought them except perpetual poverty!—he accepted them as entirely necessary for

this girl. Nor did the split in his thinking trouble him. One varied one's criteria to

circumstance, as any fool knew: and how a man reacted to the strictures of his father was

entirely different from the returns he willingly made to his girl (Markandaya 33).

The ‘varying of one’s criteria to circumstance’ is in fact adaptation, and this he will perform

fairly well given the fact how he enters the family of Apu and ultimately becomes a compliant

member of the family. Later when he encounters a moment of unadulterated bliss in his life in

which he sees Nalini bathing, the reference to the hair acting as curtain and the uncovered breasts

reflect a sylvan situation, so to say, which hardly goes with the jungle of his life and, unawares,

brings him to the earlier existence from which he has had to escape. Needless to say, the

language used to evoke the sense of bliss over here, the bliss of his seeing the semi nude Nalini

and her uncovered breasts is more spiritual than erotic. It in fact links him to his earlier life, the

life of ecological balance which is interrupted by the law of the jungle:

Sometimes there was not even this: sometimes after a whole day's endurance all he had

for his comfort was the sound of her, the swish of her sari as she whisked about the place

at her mother's bidding, or a glimpse of her sitting cross-legged like an inaccessible

goddess in one of the inner rooms. Except once, when someone had forgotten to close the

door that led to the tiny open courtyard beyond, and he had seen her sitting on a small

wooden plank near the tap in the centre, soft and flushed from her bath, dressed in a pink

mull sari with her hair loose about her shoulders. It was like a curtain, her hair: a shining

silk curtain that rippled and shimmered as the ivory comb worked down from root to tip.



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He hardly dared to breathe, he was so taken by the beauty of it, her grace, the lovely

movement of bead and rounded arm that curved and lifted her uncovered breast.

But this was only once, a single isolated moment of distilled pleasure (Markandaya 34).

While the rarity of such moments of bliss is described, there is an implicit superimposition of a

feeling of natural opulence working through the fullness of the hand and the uncovered breasts.

The world to which Ravi is transported goes back to prelapsarian world, as it were, to which he

belonged. This is an enclosed space of environmental balance, “a single isolated moment of

distilled pleasure” (Markandaya 34) in the urban jungle. Nalini contains in herself that enclosed

space and thus symbolises a kind of ecological balance that he seeks through his life. When Apu

and Ravi walk their way to Nungambukkam, the description of the locale becomes extremely

symbolic, pointing out, as it were, a mixture of the urban and the village from which he has

come. Just as Apu’s family is like an oasis in the otherwise harsh society that is polluted by

people like Damodar, there is also a different world in the urban jungle itself, described in the

imagery of trees and flowers, in which he may be able to find some rest. “it was quiet here, with

large cool detached houses, and dancing patches of shade from spreading tamarind trees and

gulmohar such as never lines the streets where they lived, and in the shade an occasional slab of

stone or a concrete bench where people could sit” (Markandaya 37).

When marriage is fixed in between Ravi and Nalini, the list of articles necessary for

marriage given by Jayamma reconstitutes a world of its own much different from the drab

surroundings of the city “‘Jaggery, gingelly oil, jeeragam, lavangam, turmeric, venthiam,’ he

heard her intoning. ‘Cardamom, coriander, cummin seed, tamarind, chillies, two bundles plantain

leaves, twenty limes, coco-nuts another twenty, flower garlands …’” (Markandaya 58). It is a



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subconscious effort in Ravi’s mind that makes him set up an adaptive ecologically balanced site

of peace in a general environment of imbalance and struggle. In fact, at multiple occasions in the

novel, Nalini and the household are described with profuse imagery of flowers, the flowers that

Ravi misses in his life in the city, which recall his childhood in the village, the life he left back:

She sat upright, dressed in her best shot-silk sari, orange and green with a narrow mango

border and an orange blouse to match. Her hair was braided and coiled, and circled with

jasmine flowers and rosemary—he had seen her that afternoon, twining the florets

together. When she moved he could smell their fragrance, wafted up strongly on the

slight current of air; and if he moved he could touch her, their seats were so jammed

together (Markandaya 44).

Falling flowers from the mango tree interlace their moments of romance. In one of the rare

places in the novel celebrating beauty in nature, Markandaya writes:

The light was going, grey edged the extravagant swathes of colour in the sky. Punctually,

as if set in motion by a clock, a light breeze wafted up, fanning out over the blistered city,

bringing a hint of cool showers and the sharp scent of mango. Pale gold bruised flowers

fell, swirled round in a last eddy and were still. Ravi scooped up a handful of the tiny

stars and crushed them for the smell. There must be a mango-tree near by, though he

could not think where. In this quarter so far as he knew no trees grew (Markandaya 98).

The flowers could be bruised, yet they are flowers. Ravi knew that trees do not grow in these

places; there is a presence of a tree, more significantly, a mango tree that must have carried for

him associations from his childhood, things about which he does not love to think for their

association in his memory with suffering and the subsequent the loss of the home. Even on the



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marriage day, Ravi finds “flowers, flowers everywhere” (Markandaya 59). Subsequent to the

marriage, His proximity with Nalini made him dream of a home, an enclosed space that he can

call his own, free from the pollution of the outside world. “If only, Ravi thought irritably, with

longing, then savagely, if only they had their own small house—however small, a doll's house—

just somewhere to call their own!” (Markandaya 77).

Eventually, as time passes, Damodar and Nalini become two aspects of his world.

Damodar is the pollutant in the urban jungle, while Nalini is the essence of life itself, the

ecological opposite of pollution that Damodar or the memory of the “trinity of hunger, drink and

misery” (Markandaya 40) can not pollute. Even at a stage very early in the novel, Ravi is

apprehensive if the fact that Damodar might prove injurious to his newly found family:

Damodar who knew the brewery, who knew all the bootleggers in town, who knew the

town like the back of his hand—it would not take him long to pinpoint the house with the

broken grating. And his friend wasn't like him, a country youth newly up from a village.

Damodar was a city slicker, born and bred in the streets of the city, with city standards

that were not exactly different from his own but tougher, more elastic, so that Ravi was

never sure exactly how far they would stretch. Usually it did not concern him. He knew

that life was a battle in which the weak always went under; he accepted the fact that the

man who did not do all he could to keep on top was a fool. He would never fault

Damodar on that score. It was simply that he had some way to go yet in toughening his

own fibre, flabby from all those homilies on decency (Markandaya 15).

There is a distinct implication of pollution in the introduction of Damodar. The use of the word

‘slicker’, meaning a deceiver, etymologically closer to the word ‘slick’, has a particular



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association with pollution. Here Markandaya is perhaps stressing on the fact that Damodar is

more adapted to the ways of the jungle than Ravi. In fact he proves to be that throughout the

novel but if the location of a pollutant and the source of pollution that threatens the well being of

the physical environment become crucial in ecological criticism, there is a distinct presence of

that in the character of Damodar and the world he inhabits. In the paragraphs that compare

between how Ravi and Damodar drink, drinking implicitly becoming a rite of ritual initiation to

the world of pollution, the difference is clearly representative to their respective adaptability to

pollution:

Ravi was not much of a drinker, he got drunk too easily, but the interregnum of

companionable tippling before he arrived at this blind state was agreeable, and blunted

the thoughts that had griped him all day. Relaxed and mellow, he gazed at Damodar with

a distant affection, and wondered why he had ever considered him sub-standard, unfit for

the strait-laced, dull, foolish, craven and killjoy company in which he had landed himself.

Damodar's drinking was of a different order. He drank with a kind of dedication, in a

cold, systematic rebuttal of the tenets of a religion which had been thrust upon him with

relentless fervour, his grey eyes grown harder in his pale face as he watched his weaker

companions reel from a consumption that left his own faculties as sharp and chiselled as

ever. Sometimes—now—Ravi speculated whether Damodar could possibly enjoy this

kind of drinking, only to have his doubts dispelled by sudden outrageous clowning, or a

general hilarious bonhomie that only in his more sober moments did he question whether

put on (Markandaya 72).



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The way Damodar drinks bears testimony to the way he has adapted himself to the pollution of

the world around. He is a person used to the world of drinking.

Displacement is one of the key motifs in the text and is in some way linked to the concept

of westernistion. It is clearly described how the memsahibs, the remnants of the British raj,

would cancel total lots of orders on the instance of a single failure of reaching deadline. It is an

exacting world with no place for sentiments. It is entirely an anthropogenic world, so to say, but

human values do not matter. Ravi is expected to carry on with his duties unaltered by the client

memsahib, even when his father in law, Apu, dies (Markandaya 184). Actually, what is hinted at

is the role that the large or medium scale industry is playing in displacing first the agrarian

community, and then the petty bourgeois. While in Nectar in a Sieve, the cause of the

displacement from the village is particularly specified to be the establishment of a tannery, in this

case, no particular cause is stated for the famine that displaces them. The second level of

displacement occurs in the city itself, in the poverty there, in Ravi’s loss in the battle of survival

in his increased separation from his wife and in the death of his son. The way in which the death

of the son is described is itself a kind of statement of the ecologically symbolic expansion of one

life form into the other and the disorientation of the both that happens through death:

Raju lay quietly in between spasms; but as darkness gathered in the room he began to

scream, short sharp cries, and a quivering wait for the membrane of silence to rupture

again. Then at last Ravi prayed, not for himself but for his child to die; and towards dawn

there was a last convulsion. Ravi held his son in his arms, tightly, crooning to him to take

the terror away, until it was over. He would have gone on holding him but Nalini touched



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him, and turning saw the tears rolling down her face and then he knew, and laid his child

down.

'My son,' he said gently, 'my son.' His face was wet. He wiped it with his hands so that

Raju should not see before he bent and drew up the covers. He hoped Raju could not hear

him cry: it was unfitting for a man, which was what he had wanted his son to be; but

whatever he did he could not check the-hoarse sobs that rose in his throat (Markandaya

230).

Ravi has not lost the village in him, despite the fact that he partly justifies his exodus

from it. In fact Markandaya used images that subconsciously recall his earlier life in the village

when narrating from Ravi’s point of view. He calls the warehouse they plan to rob “more than a

plum, it was a real orchard” (Markandaya 29); he calls a heated conversation “prickley

exchange” (Markandaya 35). Importantly, the picture that he proposes to go and see with Nalini

is Shakuntala, though the ostensible reason is that it is “a nice classic picture without any modern

forward nonsense to which the parents might object” (Markandaya 43) In all these, there is a

very undercurrent of a subconscious presence of Ravi’s earlier more emotionally balanced

existence in the village. His memory and perceptions are literally strewn with flowers and fruits

all belonging to his life in the village. However it is purely subconscious for Ravi who, when

reminded of the squalor of the city cannot but remind himself of the sufferings in the village that

caused him to move into the city.

While talking on the relevance of diaspora theorizing in contemporary literature studies,

Jana Evans Braziel, Anita Mannur writes, “First, diaspora forces us to rethink the rubrics of

nation and nationalism, while refiguring the relations of citizens and nation states. Second,



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diaspora offers myriad, dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of

globalization” (Braziel, Mannur 7). And it is in this that Markandaya’s concern rests, in the fact

that Markandaya is here speaking for the opposition to westernised city centred culture which is

a germinal entity of globalisation. If nationalism is a construct, as Partha Chatterjee writes in

Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986) of a larger industrial

culture that replaces a smaller fragmented culture in terms of groups and communities, Ravi gets

no scope of involving himself as an individual in the larger industrial culture, represented by the

granary in the city, to seek a nation of his own. He remains a nation-less individual seeking

desperatiely a nationality that gives him a right to live peacefully; “the myriad dislocated sites of

contestation” that Braziel and Mannur write about are those of the idyllic childhood, contested

by Ravi’s memory of suffering and loss, and the “single isolated moment of distilled pleasure”

(Markandaya 34) that Ravi experiences in his union with Nalini, which is only a fleeting moment

of life. Markandaya does not put the city and the village as bipolar entities, symbolizing the two

states of Carson’s world before and after the act of environmental disaster. In fact her concern is

with the survival of man. It goes beyond doubt that Ravi carries within him the subconscious

memory of a fuller life amidst the physical environment in his village. But the village does not

allow the lives of its inhabitants to prosper any more. It is true that his relationship with the

village is love-hate while that with the city is only of hate. It is also true that his final act of

desisting himself from violence is also a kind of materialization of the seed of a culture of

benevolence drawn from the village which he has carried within him and which has been

sustained by the family which he has lost, corresponding to the balance of his earlier life.

However, the concluding part also becomes a kind of a prolepsis, a jeremiad for an all engulfing

ecocide:



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'We'll get them yet,' a hoarse voice beside him exulted. 'Your turn, brother!'

Ravi took aim, poising the jagged brick level at his shoulder. But suddenly he could not.

The strength that had inflamed him, the strength of a suppressed, laminated anger, ebbed

as quickly as it had risen. His hand dropped.

'Go on, brother, go on! What is the matter with you?'

'I don't feel in the mood today,' he answered, a great weariness settling upon him. 'But

tomorrow, yes, tomorrow....' (237)

The last lines are ambiguous and full of concern. While one well known critic1 has pointed out

that this tomorrow will never come, and despite its very telling recall of Macbeth, there is a kind

of open endedness that brings out a concern of the writer, this concern is purely an ecological

one. How long is the tradition of non violent tolerance going to sustain? Ravi has already joined

the gang, he, evidently, has not been sufficiently dehumanised despite living through the novel in

the city, but is there any assurance that the subconscious values of ecological peace, that he

retains till now, will accompany him perpetually? The clock for the ecological apocalypse has

started ticking and perhaps not a very long night is left now for Ravi to reach that tomorrow.

Notes

1 Fawzia Afzal-Khan 112. (See Works Cited)



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Works Cited

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural imperialism and the Indo-English novel. University Park, PA:

Penn State Press, 1993. Print.

Armstrong, John A. “ Mobilised and Proletarian Diasporas.” American Political Science Review

70.2 (1976): 393-408. Print.

Braziel, Jana Evans, Anita Mannur. "Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in

Diaspora Studies". Theorizing diaspora: a reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel, Anita Mannur.

Malden, Massachussets: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. Print.

Carson, Rachel. Silent spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. Print.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A Derivative Discourse. Tokyo

and London: Zed Books for United Nations Library, 1986.Print.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Markandaya, Kamala. A Handful of Rice. Delhi: Hind Pocket Books , 1966. Print.

Singh, Dr. Nagendra Kumar. "Dialectics of society and Self in Kamala Markandaya's A Handful

of Rice". New lights on Indian women novelists in English. Ed. Dr. Amar Nath Prasad. New

Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2003. Print.

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