"Never the Twain . . ."

SOME INNER FURY (255 pp.)--Komala Markandaya--John Day ($3.50).

The East to West flow of novels has swollen from a trickle to a stream in the past 15 months. From Japan have come Some Prefer Nettles and Homecoming, together with a reissue of The Honorable Picnic. A Chinese woman living in Hong Kong drew a portrait of present-day China in the Rice-Sprout Song. India contributed Amrita and Nectar in a Sieve, the latter by the author of the latest Indian entry, Some Inner Fury. The bulk of these novels pursue one theme--the disruptive impact of Western manners, morals and ideas on the semifeudal, arch-familistic patterns of Eastern life. Kipling said "never the twain shall meet"; the novelists of the East seem to be ruefully saying "never the twain shall part," and rather regretting that East and West met headon.

For the first three-quarters of her novel, India's Kamala Markandaya, 32, chronicles this head-on culture clash on the purely domestic level, but in the last part Some Inner Fury is rocked by the ferocity of an India passion-bent on independence. In the eye of this hurricane is Author Markandaya's heroine, a grave-eyed, gentle-born girl of 16 named Mira. When her brother Kitsamy brings an Oxford classmate, Richard Marlowe, home with him after graduation, Mira is so blushing-bold as to beg her mother to let her go on an unchaperoned swimming party with the handsome blond Englishman. Mama quickly scotches that outing, and British officialdom does the rest by ordering Richard off to his colonial duties.

East-West tensions tug more severely at brother Kit. When Mama unleashes the marriage brokers to round up a suitable bride for him, Kit balks: "How can I marry a girl I have not even seen? Sleep with her, call her my wife?" But after Premala, a devoted homebody with a sweet disposition, lives with the family for a few months, even Kit can think of no good reason for not marrying her.

Within the year, the newlyweds invite Mira for a visit to their big-city home. In due time she meets Richard again. With India's sun-scorched earth and evergreen-crowned peaks for a backdrop, their illicit love affair is a many-splendored dream. They wake up to the man-made India riven by hate. In a tragedy of errors, Kit and Premala are murdered by nationalist extremists, and as the episode ramifies, Mira and Richard find that not even their love can break through the sociocultural barrier.

Author Markandaya lives and writes in London, and her book has the drawbacks of the contemporary English novel in which the writer's gentlemanly reach never exceeds the grasp of a meticulously tailored talent. However, the personal relationships of her characters have a tenderness and warmth noticeably above Anglo-Saxon room temperature. When East and West finally do spill blood in Some Inner Fury, it is not stanched with muffling allusions to history-on-the-march, but flows with the startling immediacy and open-faced surprise of an accident in the family kitchen where homely, familiar objects sometimes rise up and deal the unkindest cuts of all.

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