Search for identity

lead review

The reissued Two Virgins (1973) is the seventh of 10 novels published by Kamala Markandaya between 1955 and 1982; another appeared posthumously in 2007.

Markandaya moved to England at the age of 24, just after India had become independent, and the themes of her novels reflect both a personal and collective search for identity and direction, a navigation between the shores of tradition and modernity, Western and Indian values, and the simultaneous tug of the past and the future.

Markandaya’s characters in Two Virgins are sharply — perhaps a little too sharply — defined. The two virgins of the title are the sisters Saroja and Lalitha. The older, Lalitha, is pretty and bold and impatient with the closed provinciality of village life. Stoking her disaffection is her teacher, Miss Mendonza, a prim, England-returned converted Christian with progressive ideas. Saroja is a plain-looking, unambitious girl, content with going to school and participating in a life of rural domesticity. The sisters’ father is a minor freedom-fighter-turned-farmer with a voluble contempt for religion, superstition and backwardness in general. The countervailing force is the widowed aunt, who laments the slightest deviation from tradition. The sisters’ mother is a pragmatic woman and long-suffering wife who keeps the household together.

Enter the Oxford educated Mr Gupta in his two-tone shoes. He is a film director who wants to cast Lalitha in his documentary about an Indian village. This immediately sparks in Lalitha the dream of becoming an actress and escaping village life. We see the village and the nearby city (to which there is a troubled visit) through the eyes of Saroja, as she simultaneously observes her sister’s growing wiles and her own incipient sexuality.

Markandaya’s gentle humour is best visible in the parts of the book where Mr Gupta visits the village: “(Mr Gupta) said there would be shots of the village pond, and of the weavers’ quarters, and a wedding and a funeral as well. Amma, who knew what went on, said neither was in the offing; there was no pond either, the villagers used the river or the wells. Mr Gupta said these were little difficulties to be got over. He turned to Appa and said he might use the whole set-up, meaning Appa’s house and field and Appa himself, as typifying village living. Appa didn’t look too pleased, he didn’t regard himself as a typical villager.”

Makandaya makes a conscious decision to avoid specifics and this contributes to the feeling that the novel is too sparsely realised. The village and the city remain unnamed, more arguments than places. We know they are in the South, but there is no mention of food or language or anything that can root the novel in the particular. There is almost no dialogue, only reported speech, and in an idiom that is occasionally distant: Lalitha, after certain transgressions, captures a butterfly: “They call it a Common Jezebel, she said, like me.”

Two Virgins is really about women and the burdens they bear, regardless of whether they live in accordance with tradition or adopt more modern ways of life, but especially when they find themselves caught in-between. These themes and the larger context remain as relevant today as they were when the novel was first released. But Two Virgins runs too close to being an elaboration of its themes rather than a representation of the world in which those themes can be discerned.