Multiculturalism In Kamala Markandaya

What is true of the educated Indian is especially true of the Indian writer because “a writer is concerned with human action and motivation behind human behavior.” Almost all major Indian novelists writing in English like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Manohar Malgonkar, Bhabhani Bhattacharya, Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sehgal and anita Desai have diluted thus factor in their different and distinctive ways. Kamala Markandaya is a major novelist who has projected the image of India, before and after Independence, its tradition and change, its modernity, its rural surroundings as well as organization and technology. But what is most striking in her novels is the fact that multiculturalism forms the matrix of her vision. In novel after novel, she

There she marries to an Englishman and settled permanently in London as an expatriate. She continued to work under the maiden name although after marriage she is Purnia Kamala Taylor. In view of this basic truth that the novel draws its sustenance inevitably from the life of the novelist as well as from the creative power of imagination, the significance of Kamala Markandaya’s own life becomes highly relevant to the shaping of her complex vision of life. The theme of uprootedness, racial tension and prejudice, conflict between tradition and materialism, faith and reason, primitivism and technology, a search for one’s true self, the experience of exile and alienation are myriad shades of her fictional prism. Markandaya’s fictional corpus reveals its deeper implications if it is explicated from the stance that cultural dualism is her contingent condition, her personal predicament and it is also the constant shaping of her vision. In this quality she is akin to other commonwealth novelists but she carves out a distinctive place for herself by constancy of her concern, candour of her experience and multitudinous responses to cultural interactions that have percolated into the fabric of Indian

When two cultures encounter, several reactions work simultaneously, but in certain cases a distinctive response outlasts other auxiliary manifestations. If Possession rejects the possibility of an artist flourishing in an alien soil, and adopted cultures, Some Inner Fury of Markandaya illustrates a movement towards assimilation. Complete assimilation is impossible and no novel by any commonwealth novelist has yet been able to record such an experience. In many cases, however, a co-presence of the two becomes the reality. Ambivalence is a recurring and happy experience because it takes cognizance of both the ways of life, of both cultures. In this age of growing global co-operation and understanding the human cry for cultural coexistence, has become very relevant. If complete cultural assimilation is impossible, total insularity against other cultures is undesirable and smothering for a culture. Culture is a dynamic process and hence it has to grow and change. Kamala Markandaya is also sensitive to this facet of cultural dynamics and thus have articulated the subtle co-presence of two cultures in our life. It can be meaningfully portrayed in terms of the meeting of two races, the ethnic juxtaposition or in terms of two ways of life representing the spirit of the West and the