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What was it like to be Kamala Markandaya? In a sensitively written introduction to her posthumously published novel Bombay Tiger, Charles Larson gives us a sense of her life, the high points of her literary career and the lows, of which there seem to have been many. When Markandaya died in 2004, most of her 10 novels, with the exception of her first, Nectar in a Sieve (which was taught and continues to be taught in many universities), were out of print. Markandaya had all but disappeared from public view, from the noise and clamour that literary culture had become over the years.

The publication of Bombay Tiger is therefore an event of great literary significance, the history of both the book as well as its author worth detailing. Married to an Englishman whose name she did not use in her career because she did not want her readers to question the authenticity of her work, Markandaya began and continued her literary career in England. She wrote some 10 novels, notable among whom were Nectar in a Sieve, Two Virgins and The Golden Honeycomb. The novels that succeeded her first were all published between 1963 and 1977 and Shalimar, the last of them, appeared in 1982. This was when, according to Larson, Markandaya entered the most discouraging phase of her writing career. For the rest of her life, he says, she seems to have worked on Bombay Tiger and perhaps one other novel. Bombay Tiger did not find acceptance from publishers in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Shortly after Markandaya’s death, her daughter, who discovered the finished typescript, got it published.

Markandaya seems to have last visited India in 1978. The India of the 1980s that we read about in Bombay Tiger is clearly an India that she herself has not lived in. It is the India of her imagination, a fast-changing India that is beginning to be transformed by private enterprise. Bombay Tiger sketches for us the spectacular rise of Ganguli, a village boy turned ruthless businessman, pitting him against his former schoolmate Rao, a pompous and ineffectual character. Unfortunately, the complex world of Bombay business that Markandaya attempts to portray, a world epitomised by Ganguli, does not convince and Markandaya comes off sounding vague, as in the following instance: “The industrialist was absorbed in a visionary project that reflected his virtues, being big, bad and breathtaking. It consisted, quite simply, of cornering the market in refrigerators.”

Another problem that plagues the narration is the language in which Markandaya tells her story. It is strangely stilted and doesn’t sound real. It is also at odds with the lives and times of her characters Ganguli, Rao, Seshu and the others. There is, for instance, nothing of the cadences and rhythms of Indian English and little by way of the colloquial, the kind of English one might expect Ganguli to speak or think in. The language, especially from the second chapter onwards, breaks the flow of our reading and actually becomes a barrier you have to get past. If you manage to do that though, things gets better. But then of course every few lines the language with its archaisms and breathless sentences, trips you up and your interest flags. To give credit where it is due though, Markandaya does a much better job of the dialogue of which one only wishes there was more. Strange that this ease does not carry over into the narration. So what we end up with is some choppy writing: Dialogues that are fairly fluid and narration that stops you in your tracks.

The plot of the novel is another weak area. Laboured and poorly paced, it teeters towards some rather melodramatic events clustered towards the end of the novel. The scenes don’t flow, one into the other.

The novel’s strength which, unfortunately, Markandaya seems to have hastily sacrificed to the exigencies of her massive canvas, is its humour and the little things we learn about its characters. The first two scenes where Seshu, Rao’s son, attempts to tackle his embarrassing family and a recalcitrant chauffeur show a certain promise that the rest of the book fails to keep up.

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