Nectar in a Sieve (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

Nectar in a Sieve (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Kamala Markandaya
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411476790

Book preview

Cover of SparkNotes Guide to Nectar in a Sieve by SparkNotes Editors

Nectar in a Sieve

Kamala Markandaya

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7679-0

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Context

Kamala Markandaya was born in 1924 in Mysore, in southern India. She attended college at the University of Madras, where she studied history. Between 1940 and 1947, she worked as a journalist and published short stories in Indian newspapers. She married an Englishman and immigrated to England in 1948, where she had one daughter.

Markandaya published Nectar in a Sieve, her first novel, in 1954, to wide critical acclaim. In the United States, it was chosen as a Book of the Month Club Main Selection, and in 1955, the American Library Association named it a Notable Book. Remarkably, Markandaya was the only woman in a group of mid-century Indians writing in English, a group that included Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Khushwant Singh. Despite her success, Markandaya remained an intensely private writer who revealed little about her personal influences. She was so private, in fact, that she used a pen name—she was born Kamala Purnaiya. However, we can gain insight into her work by evaluating the religious, political, and social contexts in which she lived and wrote.

Raised in India as a Hindu-Brahmin, Markandaya addresses a fundamental question of Hindu belief in her work: what does it mean to be human? To a Hindu, dharma is a moral or virtuous way of living, characterized in part by devotion to truth, the practice of forgiveness, inner and outer