Abstract :
The paper, keeping in its backdrop the popular and critical readings of Kamala Markandaya’s debut novel Nectar in a Sieve (1954) as a vindication of the fortitude of rural Indian way of life, in the face of displacement through aggressive western industrialization, anatomizes the role played by an European character Kenny in the novel in its representative aspect. The reason for introducing Kenny is shown to be the endorsement of an elite private westerner to live and work in rural India without sharing in either the identity of the rural self or the power the tannery represents in the novel. The paper also goes on to show how Kenny’s inability to fully understand the rural Indian way of life makes him a representative of the Western reader, and thus, ease out the process of the depiction of the East as a distant and mysterious other. The stance thereby seeks to reimburse the lack of verisimilitude, and that of a distinct ethno- geographic specificity that the Western readers and critics may find in this novel. In conclusion, the paper examines the resultant idea that if, on the collective scale, the novel questions the idea of industrial development in a way that is commonly associated with the representation of the West in Indian English fiction of its time, on the personal level; the West provides a kind of authorization and empowerment for the writer herself. It also gives her a paradoxically privileged status of an outsider to the order she apparently authenticates.
