Analysis Of Kamala Markandaya's A Silence Of Desire

Visits to the Swamy 's place leave Dandekar more confused than ever. When he is with the Swamy, Dandekar sees things differ¬ently from when he is by himself or with his friends or his boss, Chari. The pug-faced Dwarf at the Swamy 's place is the sharp means of helping Dandekar to one or two insights; Sarojini and Dandekar 's cousin, Rajam, also try to make him see; and Dande¬kar himself comes very nearly to the point of belief but soon falls back:

Dandekar knew, now, what Sarojini had believed. When you were with the Swamy, actually there, nothing material, or physical, mattered. You saw things for the worthless trumperies that they were, rose above your body, knew for a while the meaning of peace. Then you came away and the pains crept

Possession(1963), Kamala Markandaya 's fourth novel, is in a sense, a continuation of A Silence of Desire. The Swamy figures again, but he seems to have grown in the meantime; he is a 'modern ' Swamy, he flies to London, he is as much at home in Society as among the silences, and he has admirers (if not disci¬ples) in the most sophisticated circles. In A Silence, his anta¬gonist is the pitiable Dandekar who is afraid he is losing - or might lose - his wife, and his silver and gold. In Possession, Swamy 's antagonist is the formidable Caroline Bell – “rich, divorced, well – bom” - who has spirited away the Tamil rustic boy Valmiki and made a painter and paramour of him. She would possess him, if she could. But she has to reckon with her rivals: Ellie with her nightmarish memories of a Nazi concentra¬tion camp, the girl Annabel, the pet monkey Minou that Val is so fond of, and above all the Swamy himself under whose pro¬tection Val had been before Caroline swooped upon him and took him away to London. Ultimately the Swamywins, and Caroline suffers discomfiture. Even in A Silence, although Dande¬kar apparently wins, for after all Sarojini returns to him and the Swamy practically disappears, the real victory is with the Swamy. When the issue is joined, the sovereignty of the spirit must score over the ego 's armoured regiments. All 'possession ' is slavery, or a perilous precariousness. What we try to possess is taken away, sooner or later: Val loses Ellie, Annabel,

In Possession,the scene shifts from India to England and America, and again back to India; and the clash of wills, the contrasts in scene and situation, the unleashing of passions, the con-fusion of cross-purposes, all contribute to the exoticism of the drama unfolded here: Caroline, so purblindly ruthless and demanding, and the Swamy so full of serene self-assurance, fighting an unequal battle with Val for prize! Yet the real theme of the novel is not economics, politics or even spirituality, but Art - what is the 'soul ' of Art, what is the 'elan ' that makes art Possible? Technique has its uses, but the essence of Art is not a matter of technique. Val 's work makes an American critic say: "This young painter paints as if unknown to himself he had glimpsed, beyond the horizon, the transcendent powers of the Universe, and the refracted light brings a hint of the power and the menace into his own painting", Anasuya (who is supposed to tell the story) finds these words "disturbing in their insight and impact", but after seeing his still maturer work in the cave on his return to India, she comments:

There was, too, a change in his work, so subtle it might easily have been a fight of fancy; but to me there seemed to be a moving, extraordinary yearning in the human countenances he had depicted, upturned, groping towards the light, a quality of compassion and profundity in his divine images, that had never