From East–West Dialectics to Gendered Precarity: Rewriting the Critical Legacy of Kamala Markandaya in Indo-Anglian Literary Studies

Early criticism of Kamala Markandaya’s fiction, particularly between 1968 and 1985, positioned her novels within frameworks of East–West cultural dialectics, identity formation, symbolic patterning, and tragic inevitability. While these foundational readings established her as a major Indo-Anglian novelist, they frequently privileged civilizational conflict and aesthetic structure over gendered material realities. This article revisits major early critics, including Chandrasekharan, Harrex, Chauhan, Gulati, Inamdar, Jain, and Jha—to examine how Markandaya’s critical reception was shaped by nationalist humanism and formalist paradigms that under-theorized women’s embodied precarity. Through the method of historiographical analysis and feminist re-reading, this paper contends that Markandaya’s fiction precedes postcolonial feminist realist trends in the areas of hunger, labour, economic dispossession, and agency. Rather than being situated in the East/West divide, this paper seeks to reposition Markandaya as a novelist of gendered vulnerability in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Moreover, this paper also argues that the early Indo-Anglian criticism itself needs to be re-read, as its own canon-forming project precluded feminist analysis. Through a re-reading of Markandaya’s fiction and early criticism, this paper seeks to reinsert Markandaya into contemporary debates and to open up new methodological possibilities for feminist literary studies in India. Markandaya appears not only as a mediator of cultural conflict but also as a precursor to structural feminist critique based on precarity, endurance, and ethical survival.