Rewriting
Womanhood: A Feminist Study of Gender, Identity and Agency in Select Writings
of Kamala Markandaya
Mohidur Rahman,
State Aided College Teacher,
Department of English,
Samsi College,
Malda, West Bengal, India.
Abstract: Kamala Markandaya, a prominent figure in Indian
English literature, draws attention through her exploration of gender,
identity, poverty, colonialism, sexuality, modernity, and ecological crisis.
This article examines the representation of womanhood and female agency in four
selected novels: Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Some Inner Fury (1955), Possession
(1963), and Two Virgins (1973). Drawing upon the feminist theories of Simone de
Beauvoir, Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, alongside
Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts and ecofeminist perspectives, the study
investigates how Markandaya challenges conventional definitions of femininity.
Rukmani’s endurance and narrative authority, Mira’s divided cultural identity,
Anasuya’s narrative agency, Lady Caroline Bell’s possessive power, and Lalitha
and Saroja’s contrasting experiences of sexuality and modernity reveal the
complex relationship between women and social structures. The article argues
that female agency in Markandaya’s fiction is neither absolute freedom nor
necessarily open rebellion; rather, it emerges through survival, memory,
self-awareness, negotiation, and resistance within restrictive circumstances.
Furthermore, her fiction challenges the simplistic opposition between tradition
and modernity by exposing the limitations of both. By connecting women’s
personal experiences with broader economic, political, cultural, and
environmental forces, Markandaya presents womanhood as a socially constructed
yet continually negotiated identity. Her fiction thus contributes significantly
to Indian feminist and postcolonial literary discourse by demonstrating how
women reinterpret and rewrite the conditions that shape their lives.
Keywords: Feminism; womanhood; gender identity; female agency;
Indian English literature; patriarchy; postcolonial feminism; ecofeminism;
hybridity
Introduction
The emergence of women’s
writing in Indian English literature has significantly altered the representation
of gender, identity, domesticity, sexuality, and social power. Indian women
writers have frequently transformed apparently private experiences into sites
of historical and political inquiry, demonstrating that marriage, motherhood,
family, sexuality, domestic labour, and female desire are never entirely
detached from wider structures of power. Kamala Markandaya is one of the most
important writers in this tradition. Across a career extending from the 1950s
into the late twentieth century, she repeatedly examined the tensions between
tradition and modernity, rural and urban existence, India and the West, poverty
and development, individual desire and social obligation. Her women characters
occupy these tensions rather than simply standing outside them. The result is a
body of fiction in which womanhood becomes a problem to be negotiated rather
than a stable identity to be inherited.
Markandaya’s first novel, Nectar
in a Sieve, was published in 1954 and remains her best-known exploration of
rural poverty, agricultural life, industrialization, marriage, motherhood, and
female survival. Bibliographical records identify the John Day Company as the
original publisher, while later editions include Signet and Penguin editions. Some
Inner Fury followed in 1955 and moved Markandaya’s attention towards the
political and emotional tensions of late colonial India. The novel places
Mirabai’s personal relationship with Richard against the background of
anti-colonial nationalism. The 2009 Penguin edition is catalogued as a 223-page
edition. Possession (1963) explores the cultural politics of an
Indo-British encounter through the relationship between Lady Caroline Bell, an
English patron, and Valmiki, a young Indian artist. The 2010 Penguin edition is
240 pages, while the original 1963 text has a different pagination. Two
Virgins (1973) turns towards female adolescence, sexuality, beauty,
ambition, and the encounter between rural life and modern popular culture.
These four novels are
particularly productive for a study of gender because they represent women at
different stages of social and cultural transformation. Rukmani belongs to a
rural agrarian world in which women’s identities are closely associated with
marriage, fertility, household labour, and the land. Mira belongs to an
educated Indian family whose cultural position has been shaped by colonialism
and Western influence. Anasuya, the narrator of Possession, is an Indian
writer whose authority is connected with observation and storytelling, while
Lady Caroline represents a form of female social power that is complicated by
colonial privilege and possessiveness. Lalitha and Saroja in Two Virgins
encounter a rapidly changing world in which female beauty, sexuality, consumer
culture, and media visibility create new opportunities as well as new forms of
vulnerability. The differences among these women make it impossible to speak of
“the Indian woman” as a homogeneous category.
The present article
therefore uses the term “rewriting womanhood” to indicate a process rather than
a conclusion. Markandaya does not simply replace one definition of womanhood
with another. Instead, she exposes the instability of the category itself. Her
women are wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, artists, observers, narrators,
workers, and sexual subjects, but none of these identities completely defines
them. Their identities are produced through social expectations and material
circumstances, yet they also possess varying capacities to reinterpret those
expectations. Such reinterpretation constitutes the central form of agency
explored in this study. The existing scholarship on Markandaya provides
important foundations for such an investigation. Ramesh K. Srivastava’s The
Novels of Kamala Markandaya: A Critical Study devotes sustained attention
to Nectar in a Sieve, symbolism, hope and fear, rural transformation,
and Markandaya’s broader fictional method. Uma Parameswaran’s critical work has
similarly established the importance of cultural conflict and social
transformation in Markandaya’s fiction. Ecofeminist criticism has further
demonstrated that the representation of women in Nectar in a Sieve
cannot be separated from the novel’s concern with land, agricultural crisis,
industrialization, and environmental transformation. Sangita Patil Sharnappa
argues that the novel reconstructs an ecofeminist relationship between the
exploitation of the environment and vulnerable human communities. Scholarship
on Possession has also increasingly examined gender, race, colonialism,
and the relationship between patronage and possession. A recent study, for
instance, reads Caroline’s relationship with Valmiki through the intersections
of gender and race and notes the novel’s treatment of Valmiki as an exoticized
cultural object.
Despite these important
studies, a comparative examination of gender identity and agency across these
four novels remains useful because Markandaya’s representation of women changes
according to historical and cultural context. Studies of Nectar in a Sieve
understandably concentrate on Rukmani, poverty, ecology, and rural society;
readings of Some Inner Fury frequently emphasize East-West conflict and
nationalism; criticism of Possession often focuses on colonialism, art,
and cultural possession; and studies of Two Virgins tend to examine
modernity, sexuality, and the development of Saroja and Lalitha. The present
study brings these concerns together to argue that they are connected by
Markandaya’s continuing interrogation of the making of female identity. The
research gap addressed here is therefore not simply the absence of feminist
scholarship on individual novels but the need for a comparative framework
through which different forms of Markandayan womanhood can be understood as
stages and variations of a larger inquiry into agency. Such an inquiry requires
a theoretical framework capable of moving beyond a universal category of
“woman.” Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex provides a foundational
starting point because her claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes,
woman” foregrounds the social production of femininity (283). Judith Butler’s
theory of gender performativity further emphasizes that gender is repeatedly
constituted through bodily acts and social conventions. bell hooks’s
intersectional feminism complicates universalizing accounts of female
oppression by emphasizing the relationship between gender, class, race, and
other structures of inequality. Spivak’s discussion of the subaltern raises
questions about the conditions under which marginalized women can acquire
socially intelligible voices. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and the “third
space” helps explain the unstable identities produced by colonial contact.
Finally, ecofeminist criticism is especially relevant to Nectar in a Sieve,
where women’s lives are inseparable from land, agricultural production, hunger,
and industrial change. The central argument of this article is that
Markandaya’s women possess negotiated rather than absolute agency. They act
within structures they did not create and cannot simply escape. Rukmani’s
endurance, Mira’s political consciousness, Anasuya’s narrative authority, Lady
Caroline’s problematic autonomy, and Lalitha and Saroja’s contrasting
engagements with modernity demonstrate that agency may take the form of
survival, narration, memory, care, adaptation, desire, self-awareness, or
refusal. Markandaya therefore expands the meaning of feminist resistance. Her
women do not necessarily overthrow patriarchal structures; they negotiate them,
expose them, survive them, and sometimes transform the meanings assigned to
them.
Feminist Theory and the
Social Construction of Womanhood
The concept of womanhood is
central to feminist literary criticism because literature has historically
participated in defining what women should be. The literary woman has
frequently been represented through categories such as wife, mother, virgin,
temptress, muse, victim, angel, or domestic caretaker. Feminist criticism
challenges the assumption that these identities are natural. Beauvoir’s
proposition that woman is produced through social processes rather than simply
born into a fixed identity provides an essential framework for Markandaya’s
fiction. Her characters repeatedly enter roles that society has already defined
for them, but the novels show that these roles are neither complete nor
permanent.
Rukmani, for example,
enters marriage as a very young girl and initially understands womanhood
through the cultural assumptions of her community. Yet her later narration
demonstrates that the social role of wife does not exhaust her identity. Her
memories of marriage are filtered through an adult consciousness capable of
evaluating the past. The retrospective structure of Nectar in a Sieve is
therefore itself significant: the young woman who once entered marriage without
fully understanding its implications becomes the older narrator who interprets
that experience. This retrospective consciousness is visible from the
beginning. Rukmani remarks, “A woman, they say, always remembers her wedding
night. Well, maybe they do; but for me there are other nights I prefer to
remember” (Markandaya, Nectar 4). The statement simultaneously
acknowledges and revises a cultural expectation. The wedding night is
conventionally treated as the defining moment of a woman’s transition into
marriage, but Rukmani refuses to let it become the only meaningful memory of
her womanhood. She privileges later experiences in which she has “matured in
mind as well as in body” (4). Her identity is therefore represented as
something developing through experience rather than being completed by
marriage.
Butler’s theory of
performativity helps illuminate this process. Gender is not simply an internal
essence but something continually produced through repeated social practices.
Rukmani’s identity as wife and mother is created through labour, sexuality,
pregnancy, domesticity, and social expectation. Yet because those practices are
repeated rather than biologically predetermined, they can also be interpreted
differently. Rukmani does not cease to be a wife or mother; rather, she becomes
more than those roles. This distinction is equally important in Two Virgins.
Lalitha’s femininity is visibly performed through bodily gestures and beauty.
The narrator describes how “Lalitha was demure, passed her delicate feet
together, and cast down her eyes to show off her lashes, which were long and
lustrous” (Markandaya, Two Virgins 13). The passage is remarkable
because it presents modesty itself as performance. The lowered eyes
traditionally associated with feminine modesty are simultaneously used to
display physical beauty. Lalitha is not merely beautiful; she has learned how
beauty can be staged. The description therefore anticipates Butler’s argument
that gender is constituted through repeated bodily acts. Lalitha performs the
femininity that her culture recognizes, but she also manipulates that
performance for social attention. Her body becomes a form of communication. The
problem, however, is that women do not control all interpretations of their
performances. Lalitha’s beauty attracts male attention, and later the film
industry converts that attention into commercial value. Her attempt to use
femininity as social capital therefore produces a paradox: the same performance
that gives her visibility also exposes her to exploitation. Markandaya thus
demonstrates that gender performance can be both a resource and a constraint.
Rukmani: Rural Womanhood,
Labour, and Narrative Agency
Rukmani is arguably
Markandaya’s most important contribution to the representation of the Indian
rural woman. Her significance lies not only in what she experiences but also in
the fact that she narrates those experiences. The rural woman becomes the
centre of consciousness rather than the silent background of a story written
from an external perspective. The material conditions of Rukmani’s life are
fundamental. She marries Nathan, a tenant farmer, and enters a household in
which survival depends upon agricultural productivity. Her work includes
domestic labour, childcare, agricultural activity, food preparation, emotional
care, and the maintenance of family relationships. Much of this labour is
socially invisible because it is regarded as natural feminine responsibility.
Markandaya’s narrative structure challenges that invisibility. Rukmani does not
describe her work as heroic, but the cumulative narrative demonstrates how much
social reproduction depends upon it. Her early reflection on happiness is
particularly revealing: “When the sun shines on you and the fields are green
and beautiful to the eye, and your husband sees beauty in you which no one has
seen before, and you have a good store of grain laid away for hard times, a
roof over you and a sweet stirring in your body, what more can a woman ask
for?” (Markandaya, Nectar 8). The sentence combines nature, marriage,
sexuality, food security, and domestic shelter. Womanhood is represented
through several interconnected forms of material and emotional security.
The statement might
initially appear conservative because Rukmani defines happiness through
marriage, fertility, and household stability. Yet the passage is also
significant because she defines what happiness means for herself. Her voice is
not simply reproducing a male definition of the good woman; she is articulating
her own experience of fulfilment. The relationship between female identity and
agricultural labour becomes increasingly unstable as the village changes. The
arrival of the tannery introduces a form of industrial modernity that creates
employment but also disrupts traditional patterns of life. Rukmani recognizes
the transformation not through abstract economic language but through sensory
experience. She remembers how the tannery changed the landscape: “the clear
soft greens that had once colored our village” were stained by the construction
activity and its noise (131).
The passage reveals that
environmental change is also psychological change. The village is not merely a
geographical space; it is part of Rukmani’s identity. The tannery therefore
becomes significant to feminist analysis because it demonstrates the
relationship between economic development and the lives of vulnerable women.
Industrialization changes employment patterns, land use, food security, and
family structures. Rukmani’s world becomes increasingly insecure because the
economic system upon which her family depends is transformed. Ecofeminist
criticism helps explain this connection. Sharnappa argues that Nectar in a
Sieve can be read through the relationship between environmental
degradation and the vulnerability of rural communities. The significance of
this approach is not that women are naturally closer to nature but that woman
such as Rukmani experience environmental transformation through their material
responsibilities for food, family, and survival.
Rukmani’s agency emerges
most clearly through her response to suffering. When Kenny urges her to resist
passivity, she thinks:
“Well, and what if we gave
in to our troubles at every step! We would be pitiable creatures indeed to be
so weak, for is not a man’s spirit given to him to rise above his misfortunes?”
(Markandaya, Nectar 111).
She subsequently asks,
“What profit to bewail that which has always been and cannot change?” (111).
The passage has sometimes been interpreted as evidence of Rukmani’s
resignation, but such an interpretation is incomplete. Her statement is better
understood as an articulation of a survival philosophy.
Her position differs from
Kenny’s because she has fewer material resources with which to challenge
suffering. Kenny possesses education and professional mobility; Rukmani
possesses experience, endurance, and familial responsibility. Their apparently
opposing philosophies therefore emerge from unequal social positions. Rukmani’s
endurance should not be romanticized. Poverty is not liberating, and suffering
is not inherently empowering. Yet her capacity to continue living, caring,
remembering, and narrating demonstrates that agency can exist within severe
structural limitation. The distinction between endurance and passivity is
consequently essential. Passivity implies the absence of meaningful response;
Rukmani repeatedly responds. She makes decisions concerning her children, her
work, her relationship with Nathan, and her future. Her agency is therefore
quiet and negotiated.
This becomes particularly
clear in her relationship with Kenny. She does not simply accept his worldview.
She listens, considers, and ultimately maintains her own understanding of
suffering. Her disagreement demonstrates intellectual independence. Rukmani’s
narrative authority thus becomes inseparable from her moral agency. She does
not merely survive events; she interprets them.
Fertility, Marriage, and
the Female Body
The politics of the female
body becomes particularly visible through Ira. In patriarchal societies, female
identity is often tied to reproductive capacity, and Markandaya exposes the
violence of this expectation by showing what happens when a woman fails to
conform to it. Ira is rejected by her husband because she cannot conceive. Her
infertility transforms her from wife into an unwanted woman. The social
structure thereby reveals its instrumental understanding of marriage: the woman
is valued partly through her reproductive function. Her later economic
vulnerability demonstrates the consequences of that rejection. Ira’s decision
to engage in prostitution cannot be read solely through a moral framework. It
is connected to poverty, hunger, family responsibility, and the absence of
alternative economic opportunities. The novel thus exposes the material
foundations of sexual morality.
A feminist reading must
therefore distinguish between sexual judgment and structural analysis. Society
may condemn Ira, but the novel asks the reader to understand the conditions
under which her decision becomes imaginable. The female body is simultaneously
reproductive, economic, and sexual. This is one of the ways in which
Markandaya’s fiction anticipates intersectional feminist analysis. Gender
cannot be separated from class. The experience of an economically secure woman
is not identical to that of a poor woman whose survival depends upon bodily
labour. Rukmani and Ira consequently represent different forms of female agency
under similar structures of deprivation. Rukmani remains within domestic and
agricultural labour, whereas Ira enters a stigmatized sexual economy. Both are
attempting to sustain life. Their different choices demonstrate that agency is
partly determined by the range of alternatives available to the individual.
Mira: Gender, Colonialism,
and Cultural Hybridity in Some Inner Fury
Mira’s experience in Some
Inner Fury shifts the question of womanhood from agrarian poverty to
colonial identity. She belongs to an educated Indian family situated within the
cultural contradictions of British India. Her relationship with Richard, an
Englishman, becomes increasingly difficult as the independence movement
intensifies. The novel is therefore concerned not only with romantic conflict
but with the historical structures that make the romance politically unstable.
Mira’s position can be interpreted through Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. She
occupies a cultural space shaped by both Indian and Western influences. Her
identity cannot be reduced to a pure national category because colonialism has
already transformed the cultural environment in which she lives. Yet hybridity
does not necessarily produce harmony. It can also generate psychological
conflict.
Mira initially imagines
that love might transcend political boundaries. But the nationalist movement
increasingly forces her to recognize the difference between personal affection
and collective identity.
At the climax, she asks:
“What did they mean to me,
what could they mean, more than the man I loved? They were my people, those
others were his. Did it mean something then, all this ‘your people’ and ‘my
people’?” (Markandaya, Some Inner Fury 223).
The passage is crucial
because it demonstrates the moment when political identity becomes personal
consciousness. Mira’s use of “my people” and “his” does not merely indicate
ideological conversion. It reveals her realization that colonialism has
produced an unequal relationship between the lovers.
A recent scholarly
discussion of the novel reproduces the complete passage and locates it at page
223, emphasizing that Mira ultimately recognizes the force of the political
divisions separating her from Richard. Her agency therefore consists partly in
acknowledging the historical conditions of her relationship. The novel also complicates
nationalist representations of women. Women in nationalist discourse may be
asked to represent cultural purity or national loyalty. Mira, however, is an
individual with emotional desires that do not automatically correspond to
political expectations.
Her conflict reveals the
double burden of the colonized woman: she may be expected to participate in
resistance to colonial domination while simultaneously remaining subject to
patriarchal expectations within her own culture. This is why postcolonial feminism
is particularly useful here. Mira cannot be understood through gender alone.
Her experience emerges at the intersection of gender, class, education,
colonialism, nationalism, and romantic desire. Her identity is hybrid, but her
historical circumstances force her to make a choice. The novel’s title, Some
Inner Fury, can therefore be understood psychologically as well as
politically. The “fury” is the emotional consequence of a cultural
contradiction that cannot be resolved through personal desire alone.
The Female Subject and the
Politics of Possession
Possession provides perhaps the most
complex treatment of female power in Markandaya’s fiction. Lady Caroline Bell
possesses considerable wealth, social mobility, and cultural authority. Unlike
Rukmani or Mira, she is not primarily represented as a woman restricted by
patriarchal structures. Instead, she occupies a position from which she can
exercise power over others. This reversal is important because it prevents
feminist criticism from equating female power with feminist liberation.
Caroline discovers Valmiki, a young Indian artist, and decides to take him to
England. Her intervention is presented in the language of possession from the
beginning. She declares, “He must come away with us now, at once” (Markandaya, Possession
10). The narrator then emphasizes the absence of meaningful consent: “There was
not even a pause to consider whether he would like to or not; not any
recognition of him as a human being” (10).
The significance of this
moment lies in the relationship between gender and colonial power. Caroline is
a woman, but she occupies the position of the culturally powerful colonizer.
Valmiki is a man, but he occupies the position of the colonized and
economically vulnerable subject. The relationship therefore cannot be
interpreted through a simple male/female binary. Caroline’s power is
simultaneously gendered, class-based, racialized, and colonial.
Anasuya’s interpretation
makes the relationship explicit:
“Caroline thinks Valmiki
belongs to her . . . People don’t easily give up what they think are their
possessions. The English never have” (Markandaya, Possession).
The Penguin edition itself
uses this passage in its description of the novel and identifies it as
Anasuya’s observation. The word “possessions” is crucial because it shifts the
discussion from patronage to ownership. Caroline initially appears to be
helping Valmiki by providing access to education, artistic recognition, and
European society. Yet the relationship becomes oppressive because she
increasingly attempts to determine his identity. Her patronage therefore
becomes possession. This transformation is particularly important for feminist
theory because it challenges the assumption that women who acquire social power
automatically become emancipatory figures. Caroline possesses autonomy over her
own life, but she also attempts to deny autonomy to Valmiki. The novel thus
distinguishes between self-determination and domination. Anasuya’s role further
complicates the issue. She is an Indian writer and the narrator of the story.
Her authority derives not from wealth or political power but from her ability
to observe and interpret. Narrative authority becomes a form of female agency.
She watches Caroline’s actions, understands their implications, and gives
meaning to Valmiki’s experience. The narrator’s position also raises the
question of who has the right to represent another person. Anasuya represents
Caroline. She represents Valmiki. She represents the relationship between India
and Britain. But she also remains conscious of the limits of representation.
The novel thereby connects feminism with narrative ethics. The ability to tell
another person’s story is itself a form of power.
Female Power and the
Colonial Gaze
Caroline’s representation
also reveals the relationship between gender and colonial gaze. Her fascination
with Valmiki is partly an aesthetic fascination with the “Indian” artist. His
difference becomes part of his attraction. A study of gender narratives in Possession
observes that Caroline’s “English good looks” are presented as culturally
distinctive in India, linking physical appearance with the rhetoric of racial
difference. The novel therefore shows how beauty itself can become racialized.
Caroline is socially constructed as sophisticated because of her Englishness,
while Valmiki is initially valued because his difference appears exotic. This
creates an unequal exchange. Valmiki’s artistic identity becomes an object
through which Caroline can construct her own cultural sophistication. The
artist is therefore in danger of becoming a possession. His eventual movement
away from Caroline becomes a movement towards self-definition. The importance
of Valmiki’s development to a feminist reading lies in the fact that the novel
destabilizes conventional gender assumptions. It demonstrates that domination
does not always travel from male to female. Colonial, economic, and cultural
power can intersect with gender in unpredictable ways. This intersectional
structure is one of the most sophisticated elements of Markandaya’s fiction.
Two
Virgins:
Beauty, Sexuality, and Modernity
Two Virgins represents another
transformation in Markandaya’s treatment of female identity. Lalitha and Saroja
are adolescent girls growing up in a rural environment while increasingly
encountering the values of urban modernity. The novel examines beauty,
sexuality, consumerism, cinema, ambition, family, and female reputation.
Lalitha is immediately associated with beauty. The narrator’s description of
her physical appearance is not neutral. Her gestures demonstrate that she is
conscious of the social power of beauty. She “was demure, passed her delicate
feet together, and cast down her eyes to show off her lashes, which were long
and lustrous” (Markandaya, Two Virgins 13).
The passage demonstrates
that femininity is learned through social performance. Lalitha understands how
modesty and attractiveness can coexist. Her beauty attracts attention from men
and their families, and she begins to recognize that beauty can produce social
possibilities. Her desire for modernity is expressed through consumer culture.
She tells her mother, “It is barbaric not having a fridge” (26).
The statement is humorous
but significant. The refrigerator becomes a symbol of a modern lifestyle that
is increasingly defined by urban consumption. Lalitha’s ambition to become a
film star develops within this cultural environment. The city appears to offer
escape from rural restrictions. Yet Markandaya refuses to present urban
modernity as straightforward liberation. Lalitha’s body becomes increasingly
exposed to commercial and male control. The film industry offers her visibility
but simultaneously makes her body an object of consumption. Her experience
therefore demonstrates the double nature of modernity. A woman may acquire
mobility while losing control over the terms through which she is represented.
This is why the feminist significance of Two Virgins lies in its
critique of both traditional patriarchy and modern commodification. Traditional
society regulates the female body through marriage, chastity, and family
honour. Modern commercial culture regulates it through beauty, sexuality,
glamour, and market value. The forms of regulation change, but regulation
remains.
Saroja and the Formation of
Female Consciousness
Saroja’s development
provides a different model of agency. Unlike Lalitha, she is initially less
confident and less attracted to public glamour. Yet she observes the
transformation taking place around her. Her consciousness is therefore shaped
by observation. She learns about sexuality by watching her sister. She learns
about modernity through Lalitha’s ambitions. She learns about social judgment
through the family’s responses. She learns that women are judged according to
standards that are not applied equally to men. This process of learning is
central to her formation as a subject. A recent narratological study of Two
Virgins argues that the novel’s narrative structure allows readers to
encounter the experiences of Lalitha and Saroja through shifting focalization,
while also challenging conventional patriarchal narratives of female chastity
and virtue. The importance of Saroja lies in her capacity to reflect upon what
she sees. She does not simply imitate Lalitha. She interprets Lalitha. This
distinction transforms her from a passive observer into a developing subject.
Her agency therefore appears as consciousness.
Such consciousness is
especially important in relation to sexuality. Patriarchal society often
defines female sexuality through categories such as virginity, purity, modesty,
and honour. The title Two Virgins itself draws attention to these
cultural categories. Yet the novel complicates the meaning of virginity.
Virginity is not merely biological; it becomes a social judgment. Lalitha’s
pregnancy outside marriage demonstrates how quickly a woman can be excluded
from respectability once she violates this expectation. The consequences fall
disproportionately upon her. The male participant in the relationship does not
experience the same level of social condemnation. The novel therefore exposes
the sexual double standard through which female bodies become repositories of family
honour. Saroja’s developing consciousness allows the reader to perceive the
injustice of this structure. Her education is therefore not simply sexual. It
is social and political.
The Politics of Beauty and
Female Ambition
Lalitha’s ambition deserves
a more sympathetic reading than interpretations that simply categorize her as
morally fallen. She desires beauty, recognition, comfort, and social mobility.
These desires are not inherently immoral. The problem is that the culture
around her teaches her to seek mobility through a narrow model of femininity.
Beauty becomes capital. Sexual attractiveness becomes visibility. Visibility
becomes opportunity. Opportunity becomes vulnerability. This sequence is
central to the novel’s critique of modernity.
Lalitha is not merely a
victim because she actively seeks the city. Nor is she completely liberated
because her choices are shaped by structures she does not control. Her agency
is therefore contradictory. She chooses, but her choices are socially
conditioned. This is precisely the kind of negotiated agency that Butler’s
theory helps explain. Gender norms do not simply prohibit behaviour. They also
determine what forms of behaviour appear desirable. Lalitha wants the modern
life she has been taught to admire. Her desire is therefore socially produced.
Markandaya’s achievement lies in making that production visible.
Intersectionality and the
Multiple Conditions of Female Agency
The four novels demonstrate
that gender is never an isolated category. Rukmani’s gender is inseparable from
poverty and agricultural dependence. Ira’s gender is inseparable from fertility
and economic vulnerability. Mira’s gender is inseparable from colonial
nationalism. Anasuya’s gender is inseparable from narrative authority and
cultural identity. Caroline’s gender is inseparable from class and colonial
privilege. Lalitha’s gender is inseparable from beauty culture and commercial
modernity. Saroja’s gender is inseparable from family, rural culture, and
sexual morality. An intersectional approach therefore provides a more precise
understanding of Markandaya’s women than a universal category of “female
oppression.” bell hooks’s feminist theory is especially relevant because she
insists that feminist analysis must attend to differences among women rather
than assuming a single female experience. Markandaya’s fiction anticipates this
insight. The woman who possesses wealth and international mobility experiences
gender differently from the woman whose survival depends upon agricultural
labour. The woman who lives within colonial privilege experiences power
differently from the woman whose body is governed by colonial and patriarchal
structures. The adolescent girl seeking a modern life experiences femininity
differently from the peasant wife struggling against famine. Thus, there is no
single Markandayan woman. There are multiple women negotiating different
structures.
Womanhood, Labour, and the
Invisible Economy of Care
Another significant feature
of Markandaya’s fiction is the relationship between womanhood and labour.
Rukmani’s domestic labour is necessary for family survival but rarely
recognized as economic production. Ira’s labour becomes visible only when it
takes the socially stigmatized form of prostitution. Lalitha’s body becomes a
potential source of commercial income through the entertainment industry. These
different forms of labour reveal the gendered economy of the body. Traditional
society expects women to perform unpaid domestic labour. Modern society may
convert female beauty and sexuality into marketable commodities. The transition
from one system to another does not necessarily eliminate exploitation. It may
simply change its form. This is particularly visible in Two Virgins. The
city appears to offer Lalitha a new economic future, but her body becomes part
of the commercial structure through which she seeks that future. The novel
therefore challenges the idea that economic modernization automatically
produces gender equality. Economic independence may increase agency, but only
when women have meaningful control over the conditions of labour.
Care, Endurance, and the
Ethics of Survival
A feminist interpretation
of Markandaya must also reconsider the value of care. Rukmani’s care for her
family is often described through the language of maternal devotion. Yet such
language can obscure the labour involved. She feeds, protects, remembers,
works, and emotionally sustains the household. Care is therefore labour. At the
same time, Markandaya shows the danger of making care an exclusively feminine
obligation. Women are expected to sacrifice themselves for husbands and
children, and their social worth is frequently measured by their ability to do
so.
The novel neither entirely
rejects care nor simply celebrates it. Instead, it demonstrates its double
nature. Care can be a source of meaning. It can also become a mechanism through
which women are denied independent identities. Rukmani’s significance lies in
the fact that she possesses a consciousness beyond caregiving. She is a
narrator. She remembers. She interprets. She judges. Her identity cannot be
reduced to the family she sustains.
Voice and Narrative Agency
One of the most important
achievements of Markandaya’s feminist representation is her use of female
narrative consciousness. Rukmani narrates Nectar in a Sieve. Mira
narrates Some Inner Fury. Anasuya narrates Possession. Saroja’s
focalized consciousness shapes Two Virgins. The narrative structures of
these novels therefore repeatedly place women in positions from which they can
interpret experience. This is important because representation is itself a form
of power. A woman who is only described by others remains an object. A woman
who narrates becomes a subject. Rukmani’s voice is particularly significant
because she belongs to a socially marginalized class. Her narration does not
erase her marginalization, but it gives that marginalization literary
authority. Spivak’s discussion of the subaltern is relevant here. The question
is not simply whether the marginalized can literally speak but whether their
speech can enter structures of recognition without being transformed by
dominant representation. Rukmani’s story remains mediated through Markandaya’s
English-language authorship. Nevertheless, the novel creates a powerful
literary space in which rural female experience becomes the organizing
consciousness of the narrative. Anasuya’s role in Possession further
intensifies this relationship between gender and authorship. She observes a
powerful Englishwoman and an Indian artist, but she is also the person who
transforms their relationship into narrative. Her power is interpretive rather
than material. Yet interpretation is itself a form of authority.
Tradition, Modernity, and
the Limits of Liberation
Markandaya’s women cannot
be classified according to a simple hierarchy in which modern women are free
and traditional women are oppressed. Such a hierarchy would reproduce a
Westernizing model of feminist liberation. Rukmani lives within traditional
structures but possesses a strong narrative consciousness. Lalitha enters
modernity but becomes vulnerable to commodification. Caroline possesses
extraordinary social independence but exercises possessive control. Mira is
culturally hybrid but experiences intense conflict. Saroja remains closer to
village life while developing critical awareness. The distinction between
tradition and modernity is therefore unstable. Markandaya is not asking whether
tradition should be accepted or modernity rejected. She is asking how both
systems shape women. Traditional structures may restrict women through
marriage, fertility, family honour, and domestic expectations. Modern
structures may restrict women through consumerism, beauty culture, sexual
commodification, and commercial exploitation. The feminist question is therefore
not simply which system is modern. It is which structures allow women to define
themselves.
The Female Body as a Site
of Identity
Across the four novels, the
body repeatedly becomes a site where identity is constructed and contested.
Rukmani’s body is connected with marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, labour,
hunger, and age. Ira’s body becomes the object of judgment because of
infertility and later becomes a means of economic survival. Mira’s romantic
body becomes politically significant because her relationship crosses colonial
boundaries. Caroline’s body is associated with Englishness, class, and colonial
privilege. Lalitha’s body becomes a source of beauty and commercial visibility.
Saroja learns to understand her own body through the cultural meanings surrounding
sexuality. The body is therefore never merely biological. It is interpreted by
society. Its meaning is produced through language, morality, religion, family,
class, and politics. This is one of the reasons Butler’s theory of
performativity is useful for reading Markandaya. The female body becomes
culturally intelligible through repeated practices. But Markandaya also shows
that these practices can produce suffering. The body is both the medium of
social identity and the site of social control.
Female Agency as Negotiated Resistance
The comparative evidence
suggests that agency in Markandaya should be conceptualized as negotiated
resistance. Rukmani cannot abolish poverty, but she can decide how to respond
to it. Mira cannot erase colonial history, but she can interpret her position
within it. Anasuya cannot prevent Caroline’s actions, but she can narrate and
critique them. Lalitha cannot control the structures of the film industry, but
she actively seeks social mobility through them. Saroja cannot escape
patriarchal expectations completely, but she can develop critical
consciousness. Caroline possesses significant autonomy, yet her exercise of
power demonstrates that autonomy itself must be ethically examined. This model
of agency avoids two extremes. The first is the idea that oppressed women are
completely powerless. The second is the idea that any act of choice
automatically constitutes liberation. Markandaya occupies the space between
these extremes. Her women make choices under conditions they did not choose.
Their agency is therefore real but limited. This is perhaps the most persuasive
way to understand her feminist significance.
Rewriting Womanhood across
Markandaya’s Fiction
The four novels
collectively demonstrate a broadening of Markandaya’s representation of female
identity. Nectar in a Sieve asks what it means to be a woman when
survival depends upon land, marriage, labour, and family. Some Inner Fury
asks what it means to be an Indian woman when personal love becomes entangled
with colonial nationalism. Possession asks what it means for a woman to
possess power when that power is connected with wealth, race, colonial
privilege, and the desire to control another person. Two Virgins asks
what it means to become a woman in a modernizing society where beauty,
sexuality, consumerism, and media increasingly define feminine identity. These
questions are different, but they are structurally connected. Each novel places
a woman within a system that seeks to define her. Each woman then develops some
capacity to interpret, negotiate, or resist that definition. This is why the
term “rewriting” is appropriate. Markandaya does not merely describe women. She
changes the narrative terms through which women can be understood.
Conclusion
Kamala Markandaya’s fiction
offers an important feminist interrogation of womanhood, gender identity, and
female agency. Through Rukmani, Mira, Lady Caroline, Anasuya, Lalitha, and
Saroja, Markandaya demonstrates that women’s identities emerge from complex
interactions among gender, class, colonialism, sexuality, culture, and
environment. In Nectar in a Sieve, Rukmani’s endurance and narrative
authority transform survival into a form of negotiated agency. Some Inner
Fury situates Mira’s personal choices within colonial nationalism,
revealing the inseparability of private relationships and political history. In
Possession, Lady Caroline’s dominance exposes how female power may
reproduce structures of possession, while Anasuya’s narrative authority
establishes writing as a means of interpreting experience. Two Virgins
explores the contradictions of modernity, demonstrating how beauty, sexuality,
and consumer culture can simultaneously promise freedom and reinforce
exploitation. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, intersectional, and
ecofeminist perspectives, this study establishes that Markandaya’s women cannot
be reduced to passive victims or uncomplicated rebels. Their agency emerges
through resistance, negotiation, memory, and self-awareness. Ultimately,
rewriting womanhood signifies the transformation of women from objects of
social representation into interpreters of their own experiences. Markandaya’s
enduring feminist contribution lies in portraying female identity as a
continuous negotiation between social expectations and individual
consciousness, exposing patriarchal constraints while affirming women’s
capacity to construct meaningful identities within them.
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