Racial Cultural Conflict in Kamala Markandaya’s Novel Some Inner Fury
Usha Vikram Kaushik
M.A.Ph.D
Assistant professor
V. M. Patel College of Management Studies
Ganpat University Kherva

In Some Inner Fury Markandaya has highlighted two prominent aspects of the impact of Western education and culture on the outlook of Indians. Kamala Markandaya has depicted the effect of India’s contact with Western culture and civilization which led to the emergence of three distinct types of people among the educated Indians. The novel also depicts how they are transformed under the influence of western ideologies and systems affecting the Indian attitudes and life styles. First, there are those who have been completely swept off their feet by English education and find nothing valuable in their ancient culture and way of life. They look down upon their countrymen for their backwardness. They hold high positions in the British administration in India and are considered pillars of strength by the alien rulers. Kit and his father belong to this category. Second, there are those who are fundamentalists and stick blindly to the old Indian traditions and values; they are not ready to accept the British way of life, and are deeply hostile to the British rule in India and do not hesitate to resort to violent strategy to drive them out of their land. Govind belongs to this category. And the third category of people are those like Roshan and Mira who have got Western education but are deeply concerned with the freedom of the country.
Mirabai and her brother, Kitsamy, belong to a cultured, sophisticated and well-to-do Family. They have an adopted brother named Govind. In the opening chapter of the novel we are told that Kit returns home from England along with his English friend, Richard Marlowe. The author skillfully describes the efforts made by Kit’s parents to make an Englishman feel at home. She satirizes those Indians who try to imitate the Western style of dress in the scorching Indian climate. Rather than feel proud of their heritage, these characters are ashamed of it. Kit is so overwhelmed by the Western culture that he seems to have forgotten his own culture and dresses like an Englishman.
Kit is a typical westernized young man. After getting educated in Oxford, when he returns home, he finds it extremely difficult to adjust himself to the Indian conditions. Having lived for a long time in London, he admires everything British. When he complains about the hot Indian climate, his mother advises him to learn to tolerate Indian heat. She remarks, “He will have to make a lot of adjustments”2 Kit has imbibed a highly anglicized attitude to life. He drinks beer, brings with him the English mannerisms and Oxford gossip. It is racial disparity which makes Kit leave the English girl he loves and return to India. He violates Indian conventions and customs in selecting a bride of his own choice. Premala stays in Kit’s family before she is accepted as the bride. Kit chooses a suit and tie for himself. Kit, however, with his understanding and love of the West, furnishes his house-completely in English style with “nothing that was Indian about it”. The house-keeping is done by English-trained servants.
The décor of his house is entirely European. As Mira observes:
Kit’s house was different, the furnishing had been left in the hands of a European firm, and there was nothing that was Indian about it. There were wilton carpets on the floor, wing chairs and a cocktail cabinet in the drawing room Chintzes in the bed rooms, the side-board held English bone china and of the Pahari Miniatures, Premala had collected and the Kasha rugs, she had been given there was no sign.3

Premala wants to have another dining room in the Indian style considering the convenience of his parents but Kit considers it a waste. Kit cannot appreciate her point of view and there is no room for compromise in their marital life. Premala is always pressurized to adopt modern and western postures and manners in his marriage to Premala, his Western education and outlook make for cultural disparity, for she has been bred in a traditional Hindu family. Kit is appointed as a Collector, a senior member of the civil service, a part of the highest bureaucracy of the government. He does not think it worthwhile to participate in Hindu rituals. Kit is an example of what Macaulay, the architect of English education in India put the case succinctly in his famous ‘Minute on Indian education’ written in 1835. An English education, he suggested, would train natives who were,
‘Indian in blood and colour’ to become ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. These people would constitute a class who would in fact protect British interests and help them rule a vast and potentially unruly land.4

Kit feels himself alienated in his native land. As an Oxford product he finds himself a total stranger in his own country. This mal adjustment leads both Kit and his Indian wife Premala to their tragic end. O.P. Saxena remarks, 'Kit is typically alienated person who is only a vine clinging to the British Raj, having no individual identity of his own.'5 Western culture has entered deep into his blood and he has a genuine respect for it. Far from merely participating in it.
He was a part of it; his feeling for the West was no cheap flirtation, to be enjoyed so long, no longer, to be put aside thereafter and forgotten, or at best remembered with a faint nostalgia. It went deeper: it was understanding, and love.6

His westernized outlook makes him an alien in his own country, "for Kit was too far outside the code of our caste and society to be more than its indifferent custodian or to be more than a perfunctory guardian to me." 7

Kit and Govind belong to the two extremes: Kit upholds the authority of the British Raj whereas Govind seeks to overthrow it. His attitude towards the West and to Western things has been observed and commented upon by Mira:
Govind was not and had never been a part of it. To him it was the produce of a culture which was not his own-the culture of an aloof and alien race twisted in the process of transplantation from its homeland, and so divorced from the people of the country as to be no longer real. For those who participated in it he had a savage harsh contempt.8

Govind is full of hatred for the missionary because the literary enterprise of familiarizing the Bible amongst benighted peoples was at various points framed in the imagery of empire building. Govind opposes and despises the missionaries, “who not only set up their alien and unwanted institutions in the land but who, for the preservation of these institutions, invariably sided with those other white men who ruled the country.”9 Govind looks upon the British as aliens who must be driven out of India. To achieve his purpose, he joins a group of terrorists. Mira's father is a member of the English club which provides, “amenities such as no other place did, there was a billiard room and a squash court and tennis courts which were infinitely better kept than the ones belonging to the Oriental club, which a small group of Indians, tired of being blackballed from the English club, had recently started."10

It is rather surprising that none of the characters of the novel is shown to be a member of the Oriental club. The activities of the Anglicized Indians in the English club have been portrayed authentically. This select group works conscientiously for the British Government and the Government has allocated them a high place in its hierarchy. Compared to the rest of the Indians, these people live a better life. They have big mansions with gardens and lawns, chauffeurs, butlers, gardeners, washer men, houseboys and other odd-job men. In summer, they go to the cool of the hills. Kit's father tells Richard: "We seldom stay in the plains in summer… We go up to the hills; you know… much cooler, so much healthier."11

Mira is brought up in a rich, sophisticated family that prides itself in being a part of the British social circle. Mira goes to the club not because she enjoys it, but because:
I was taken, and to learn to mix with Europeans. This last was part of my training, for one day —soon —I would marry a man of my own class who, like my brother, would have been educated abroad, and who would expect his wife to move as freely in European circles as he himself did. But (though I knew how important this was, sometimes I could not help sighing and wondering why the lesson had to be learned so hardly.12

Eventually Mira falls in love with Kit’s friend Richard. She finds, Richard Marlowe who is a handsome, unconventional, considerate and a sympathetic Englishman. He is different from other Englishmen living in India, "who had forgotten the decencies of England amid the authoritarianism of empire."13 Richard Marlowe loses no time in adapting himself to the Indian way of life and its dress style. His unconventional behaviour in putting on shirt, dhoti and chappals, borrowed from one of the servants, shocks Kit's father who remarks: "The Englishman has a lot to learn. I do not think his countrymen will approve his unconventionally."14

In spite of her mother's warnings she develops pre-marital relationship with Richard. Mira's mother can't really conceive of any ‘real’ relationship springing up between members of two alien races. In other words, this is a time of mutual hatred between the two races, not a time when a relationship such as Richard and Mira's can survive in the ‘real’ world. Kamala Markandaya has depicted the theme of interracial love and interracial marriage through the Mira —Richard relationship. Kamala Markandaya's approach to mixed marriages is more realistic. She thinks that lasting intimate relations between Indians and the British are not possible as long as India is ruled by Britain and the two races remain locked in political conflict.

As the Quit India Movement gathers momentum the British become easy targets. Richard barely escapes being hit by a hand bomb aimed at him. Mira who had so far watched the political changes sweeping the country as a mere observer, suddenly becomes aware of her Indian identity:
And now there was a change—so subtle, so secret, I could not tell how it had come about I was only aware that it had. ... I knew now that the silence of these streets enfolded me too. I was a part of it, it no longer repudiated me, and from within its invisible envelope, do what one could, there was no easy reaching out to those who stood outside.15

Whatever she may say to convince Richard that this feeling of hate was not directed at Englishmen like him, she knows, as he also knows, that they can no longer disregard their separate nationalities. They try to drown these racial dissimilarities and differences in love but somewhere deep down they know that this cannot be:

You hadn't a badge?—but it was there in your face, the colour of your skin, the accents of your speech, in the clothes on your back. You didn't ask to be there? Ah, but you had no option, for you there was no other place. But one can make another—one can—16

Govind and his men set fire to the school since it is a symbol of British rule. Premala is found inside, suffocated to death. Both Kit and Govind, torn by grief, jealousy and anger, accuse each other. In the dark and stormy night Kit is killed- and no one knows by whom. Govind is arrested for the murder on Hickey's evidence, though Mira is sure that he is not responsible. Mira swears that she had thrown her arms around Govind as Kit left the hut, and therefore it is impossible for him to have thrown the dagger: Hickey maintains that he had seen Govind throw the dagger. Govind is innocent but the entire court proceedings hinge on the English man's word against Mira's. The point at issue is not whether Hickey is speaking the truth but that, “he is being used as a tool by the British to destroy a man who was dangerous to them."17 Govind is on trial not because he is suspected of murder but because he has, "fought for freedom, for which crime and for none other… the British would soon make him pay with his life."18
There is a sudden change in Mira and Richard’s relationship, for she is an Indian and therefore, automatically on the side of the nationalists, while he belongs to the colonizing nation. The English believe Hickey when he accuses Govind of murder, the Indians believe Mira who asserts Govind's innocence. Mira asks Richard,
"Do you believe it ... this Englishman's word against mine?" and continues, " I said it, and it was as if I had inflicted some wound on myself. I stared at him, frightened; I saw the blood slowly ebbing from his face ..." 19 In the trial that follows, Mira's firm belief in Govind's innocence rouses in her a surging hatred against the ‘terrible power of the English’. Her association with Roshan, and with her experiences as a journalist of a ‘Progressive Daily’ Mira soon realizes that the British are here to exploit and to oppress. When she prepares a report on a British sponsored project, she is quite skeptical about the government's sincerity in implementing any welfare project for the Indians and above all Govind's trial have made her more deeply aware of the social and political realities of the British rule. Before the issue could be decided, the court is mobbed by slogan-shouting crowds and Govind is taken away. Mira also realizes that it is no longer possible for her to keep herself aloof from her own people and maintain her relationship with Richard; she throws in her lot with the crowd and leaves Richard behind who belongs to the class of oppressors.
They experience the finest hours of companionship, but due to the political turmoil in the country, Richard becomes a victim of political hatred and Mira is left to mourn the loss of her beloved for the rest of her life. Mira is merely the victim of forces beyond her control, the forces of history, as it were. As she leaves Richard in the midst of the angry mob, she thinks:

Go? Leave the man I loved to go with these people? What did they mean to me, what could they mean, more than the man I loved? They were my people —those others were his. Did it mean, something than —all this 'your people' and 'my people? … The forces that pulled us apart were too strong.20

The book ends on a note of pessimism deepening into despair, with Mira saying, “... still my heart wept, tearless, desolate, silently to itself. But what matter to universe... if now and then a world is born or a star should cite; or what matter to the world, if here and there a man should fall, or a head on a heart, should break."21

Thus we can say the novel deals with the clash between passion and patriotism. In this novel Kamala Markandaya has presented racial and cultural conflict through ‘Quit India’ movement. Those who hate the British and those who hate India are two sides of one coin. They represent the same kind of fanaticism which had pulled Mira and Richard apart.

References:

1. Kamala Markandaya, Some Inner Fury. London: Putnam, 1955, p. 11.
2. Ibid. p.11.
3. Ibid. p.97.
4. Macaulay, T.B. ‘Minute on Indian Education’. J Clive (Ed.)
Selected writings, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972, p. 249
5. O.P. Saxena, The Alienated Protagonist in the Indo-English Novel. Glimpses of Indo-English Fiction, Vol. I, New Delhi: Jainson Publishers, 1995 p. 78
6. Kamala Markandaya, Some Inner Fury. London: Putnam, 1955, p. 142
7. Ibid. p. 102
8. Ibid. p. 142
9. Ibid. p.166
10. Ibid. p. 24
11. Ibid. p. 12
12. Ibid. pp. 24-25
13. Ibid. p.124
14. Ibid. p.14
15. Ibid. p.215
16. Ibid. p. 218
17. Ibid. p. 267
18. Ibid. p. 267
19. Ibid. p.264
20. Ibid. p. 285
21. Ibid. pp. 285-286