Redefining ‘Development Model’: An Ecofeminist Reading of Markandya’s Nectar in a Sieve

Abstract

For many of us the word ‘development’ bears positive connotations. After independence of India many initiatives were taken to make a “New India”, a developing India. The makers of this idea of new and developed India envisaged a country that is at pace with the sea change that the rest of the world was going through.  A change that can be defined in terms of industry, factory, new economy and development. This was a development model primarily borrowed from the west. We followed the west to revolutionize our rather agricultural economy. At this stage something went wrong. The promise of a good life remained a distant dream and the reality struck hard. Kamala Markandya’s novel Nectar in a Sieve documents how industry destroys the rural economy, damages the subtle ecology and alters the lives of poor village people through the struggles of her protagonist Rukmini. This is a study of the novel from an ecofeminist perspective which is at the very core a critique of modernity ; a modernity that is an imitation of western ideas of progress and development.