February 15, 2009

Reviewed By Afia Mansoor
 

IT is interesting how intelligent and resourceful the human species is, and yet it remains essentially vulnerable before the might of nature and its design. Humans have charted a journey through history, achieving remarkable milestones of progress.

The magnificent construction of splendid architecture, the awe-inspiring flight through the skies, the enormous plans of advancement, all are rendered into an ironic waste if nature and its design are confronted head on and their might is challenged by human ego.

This is the principal theme of Kamala Markandaya’s book The Coffer Dams. Set in the post-partition period of a newly born independent India, the story is about Clinton, the founder and head of a firm of international construction engineers who lands up with a highly ambitious project to build a dam in India.

He brings with him a team of British experts and their families who with the exception of his own beautiful wife, Helen, are all full of a sense of superiority over the locals. The forests in the plain area reserved for the site are quickly demolished and their tribal inhabitants uprooted to make way for the luxurious colony of the constructors, later called the Clinton Lines. Locals are employed into the enormous project, yet they are scoffed at for being uncouth, inferior and referred to as ‘junglee’.

Clinton is an over-achiever. He plans meticulously and executes brilliantly through hard work and technical acumen. But he fails, as do many of his associates, in understanding the emotions and attitude of the locals. They make good workers but they are not to be mingled with. They have separate dwellings and facilities and their insight and wisdom through centuries of living in the plains are considered useless.

Clinton’s controlling demeanor however changes to one of warmth and indulgence when it comes to his wife. Helen stands apart from the rest in Clinton Lines. She visits the locals in their villages, empathises with them for the changes brought into their impoverished lives because of the settlement her husband has made and yet she is fiery and rebellious with her husband.

She is not inclined towards the indulgent parties thrown by the wives of her husband’s colleagues, and is often perceived by them to be arrogant. But trouble starts brewing when Helen feels that the project is a shameless display of inhuman ambition and her husband attributes her feelings to the ‘stress of being in an alien country’.

Kamala wrote this novel in the late 1960s when the pride of India smiting ‘gora prejudices’ did not make a fashionable story like it does now. Yet it makes the readers realise that the undercurrents of Indian pride have always been there through the nation’s struggle with struggling for acceptance into Caucasian cultures.

 

The novel makes the readers realise that the undercurrents of Indian nationalism have always been there through the nation’s struggle for acceptance into Caucasian cultures.

 

The nation is assimilated throughout the world with its people in every field of life and perhaps it has been this pride that has aided them in the struggle towards progress. But the triumph the author has achieved in later stories based on the same theme is that she has been subtle with what she wants the readers to understand. There is no jingoism and no poetic justice. The story unfolds fluidly and ends simply.

Kamala Markandaya was a journalist and a writer who was born in 1924 in India, and graduated from the Madras University to write short stories for various Indian newspapers. She moved to Britain after the Partition yet called herself an Indian expatriate for many years even though she lived the rest of her life mostly in England and died there in 2004. Markandaya was a pseudonym she used over her real name of Kamala Purnaiya Taylor.

The theme aside, the novel is beautifully written. The author certainly has a way with words. She uses language almost poetically in constructing an intriguing story. She is subtle yet powerful in invoking detailed imagery which makes the tale seem so real. Her narrative style is full of vivid imagery with some paragraphs standing out.

Her other celebrated works have also explored similar themes of conflict between Indian and British mindsets and even within India’s rural and urban society. Anybody inclined towards M. M. Kaye’s style of fluid literary narratives of colonial India or films set against similar backdrops shall find the The Coffer Dams an engaging read.

 

The Coffer Dams
By Kamala Markandaya
Penguin Books, India
ISBN 0-14-310212-0
235pp. Indian Rs250