Research Scholar, Department of English, Doon University, India.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v2n2/v2n202
[Article History: Received: 13 July 2025. Accepted: 04 September 2025. Published: 11 September 2025]
Abstract
The current paper explores Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954) through the intersecting lenses of ecological resilience. It attempts to position the protagonist’s narrative as a site of embodied resistance and adaptation within a rapidly transforming agrarian landscape. The novel offers a profound account of environmental degradation, economic instability, and gendered survival. Markandaya constructs a female-centred narrative through Rukmani’s narrative, reflecting the interdependence between ecological change and women’s agency. The paper will read the novel as a narrative that often overlooks the role of women as both victims and agents in environmental crises, applying the concepts of ecocriticism, especially ecological resilience theory, and feminist literary criticism of Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ecological resilience is typically applied in environmental studies to assess the capacity of ecosystems to absorb disturbance and reorganize while changing. It is adapted to examine the rural community and particularly Rukmani’s tenacity in the face of recurring environmental shocks, including monsoons, droughts, and socioeconomic upheavals caused by industrial encroachment. In the novel, through acts such as cultivating food, nursing children, or walking miles for sustenance. Rukmini asserts a form of embodied resistance that challenges dominant patriarchal and capitalist narratives. The novel thus transforms into a site where women’s voices are able to reclaim agency through what might be described as ‘resilient poetics.’ The paper aims to provide a counter-narrative to the depiction of rural women as passive victims of modernity’s destruction, focusing instead on resilience as both ecological and gendered. The female body, particularly in its reproductive and labouring capacities, is portrayed not as a symbol of vulnerability but as a source of generative power within hostile environments. This paper will argue that Nectar in a Sieve exemplifies how literary fiction can function as an archive of environmental and feminist knowledge.
Keywords: resilience, cultural memory, agency, landscape, silent endurance, environmental shocks.
