Chapter 1

Introduction

(A)The Expatriate Tradition and Experience

India has been a source of interest to many because of its philosophical outlook and spiritual

message to the world. As early as 1500 BC, her first European invaders, the Aryans, came

through the north-western passes and settled on the banks of the river Indus to build a

civilization, which in course of time came to dominate and assimilate all the separate cultures of

the sub-continent. During the Middle Ages, there was little or no direct contact between India

and the West. It was established once again during the second European invasion following

Vasco de Gama’s discovery of India. Interest in India was revived leading to an idealization of

India in the European imagination. English poets from Shakespeare to Southey glorified the

exotic Ind they had never seen.

This image, however, was not in harmony with the image of India projected by English men and

women during the British ‘Raj’. A new tradition of writing evolved as a consequence of this

interaction and came to be called Expatriate or Anglo Indian. The seemingly identical interest in

the East-West encounter also evolved a complementary form known as Indo-Anglican fiction or

the novel in English by Indian authors. Thus, Indians writing novels and stories in English

belong to the Indo- Anglian or Indo-English tradition of fiction and European writing of India in

English to the Expatriate or Anglo-Indian tradition.

The effect of the two European invasions of India was dissimilar in character. The Aryans came

to settle, the British to colonize. The Aryans evolved Hinduism – a religion so catholic and

universal as not to be a religion at all but a way of life, whereas the British sowed the seeds of

division and evolved a deliberate policy of separatism for its government in India. Kipling’s

notorious statement: “Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, / till the

earth and sky stand presently at god’s great judgments seat;” came to be regarded as epitomizing

the spirit of ‘Raj’. It became a fundamental assumption that lesser the interaction there was

between the two races, the better it was for both. On the administrative level, the ruler was to

consider himself supreme and infallible. There was to be no admission of error and no amends or

apology for misrule. On the personal level, interaction between the races was to be reduced to the

minimum level, necessary to carry out the objectives of “Raj’.

This image of India evoked by Rudyard Kipling is similar to the general image of India that

emerges from the writings of Maud Diver, Flora Annie Steel, Alice Perrin and W.W. Honter.

The prime objective of these writers was to spread an imperialist ideology. For this they

propagated the racial superiority of the white and made it his right to rule over a people who

were “half devil and half children”. Where there is white blood it must rule seems to be the

verdict for this group. With such a perception, there could be no question of intercourse between

the races on both physical as well as cultural levels.

The most powerful corrective to the separatist principle was provided by E.M. Forster’s A

Passage to India1 (1924). Forster, unlike his counterparts in India, believed in the innate unity of

races and the brotherhood of men. He was bitterly critical of the British Government’s policy of

keeping the ruling race separated and the natives divided in the interest of the administration. “I

believe in personal relationships” he wrote, “one must be fond of people and trust them if one

does not want to make mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one

down.”

A Passage to India was not merely a milestone in the history of expatriate fiction, it also changed

its entire direction. This change is reflected in the changed image of India in the fiction of the

expatriate writers. Following Forster’s example, a number of writers regret the failure of the

races “to connect”.

Fictional writing after Forster, then, projects an image of India that is sharply different from that

of the imperialist writers. In one area, however, they followed the same old reservation- in the

smallness of the image and voice given to the Indians. The expatriates deal with the issues that

relate to their own race in India like the Englishman’s position and prestige, his burdens and

predicaments, his joys and sorrows, his strength and weaknesses, his inability to understand the

native character and his excessive race consciousness. Indians continue to remain in the

background. But with the arrival of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on the literary scene, the focus shifts

from the Indo-British context to that of Intra-Indian.

In this way, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala occupies a special position in the tradition. Her Indian family

background and her prolonged stay in India have made her viewpoint ambivalent. Her initially

exclusive and later fitful preoccupation with the intra-Indian context often leads to confusion

regarding the stream to which she belongs.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born on 7th May 1927 to Marcus Prawer, a Polish Jew, and his wife

Leonara (nee Cohen) in the city of Cologne in West Germany. A lawyer by profession, Marcus

Prawer had come over to Germany during the First World War to escape military conscription in

Poland and it was here that he met and married Leonora Cohen who, though born in Cologne,

was not a naturalized German- her father having emigrated from Russia. Musing on the

rootlessness of her ancestry, the novelist wrote many years later: “Whatever place we were in,

we did not go back into it very far. Not much rootedness- everyone having come from

somewhere else.”2 Yet, as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala also points out ,the Prawers seem to have,

during that phase at least, displayed a remarkable tendency for adaptation and were quickly

assimilated into the life around them:

…once there, settled in a place and feeling some measure of security in it, I must say my

family seems to have shown the same chameleon or cuckoo quality that I have already

had to confess in myself. And I was born into what seemed a very solidly based family

who had identified with the Germany around them- had been through the 1914-18 war

with them- had sung for Kaiser and fatherland. …my first memories then that are

between 1927 and 1933 were of a well-integrated, solid, assimilated German Jewish

family.3

Even then, the fact of their Jewish ancestry ruled in the lives of young Ruth and her elder brother

Siegbert Saloman and put apart them from others, at least partially, from the mainstream of

German life. Their grandfather being the cantor of the biggest Jewish synagogue in Cologne, the

children must have been initiated early into the mysteries of the Tohra and Talmud and the duties

attendant up on the Jew as suffering servant of God. The impulse that led Ruth Jhabvala in her

subsequent life to explore the different aspects of assimilations in her novels and stories may be

attributed in part of her Judaic ancestry and her early exposure to the history of a separate people

who had created their present out of a memory, and in doing so had cut themselves off from the

rest of mankind. The sense of her separateness as Jewish child must have deepened after 1933

when, immediately on taking over power in Germany, Hitler set in motion a systematic,

politically motivated persecution of the Jews. Elementary education in a segregated Jewish

school was followed, for the child Ruth, by the trauma of exodus. Between 1933 and 1939,

Germany was drained of her Jews- whole families emigrating to Holland, France, what was then

Palestine, and the United States. The Prawer family was one of the last to emigrate. The

novelist’s grandparents had died in the meantime and the uncles and aunts who survived had

already gone. In April 1939, Marcus Prawer, his wife and two children left Germany for England

and settled in Hendon, a suburb of North West London with a sizeable Jewish population. “I was

practically born a displaced person”, Ruth Jhabvala told Ram Lal Agarwal thirty five years later,

“and all of us ever wanted was a travel document and a residential permit. One just did not care

as long as one was allowed to live somewhere.”4

In England twelve-year old Ruth was enrolled initially in Stoke Park Secondary School and then

in Hendon County School. She seems to have had a natural flair for language and made the

transition from German to English very smoothly. She had experienced the thrill of creative

writing at the age of six with her first school composition Der Hase (The Hare). Essays and

stories written in German chiefly on religious and Jewish subjects had followed. Within a week

of her arrival in England, she started writing in English:

England 1939, my first entirely instinctive demonstration of my cuckoo or chameleon

qualities. I took to England and English immediately…

I did not have that much English- only what I had learnt at school in Germany- but once

in England I did learn fast. And not only did I then write in the English language but also-

and this is where the chameleon or cuckoo quality really came in- about English

subjects.5

She wrote large numbers of unfinished novels and stories, but long before she had acquired

enough skill, in her own judgment, to round off the formless structures and complete the

fragments, she stopped writing about England. If one had access to her juvenilia, one could

perhaps have caught a glimpse of the sensibility at work, and have thereby discovered the cause

of her reticence about this phase of her life. It is indeed a significant fact that this major upheaval

in her life is so feebly represented in her fiction and autobiographical writing. Barring one

personal communication in 1978 in which she described the experience of losing in the Nazi

holocaust “my father’s entire family, part of my mother’s family, most of the children I first went

to school with, and most of my parent’s family friends- in fact our entire social and family

circle”,6 her silence on the subject has been amazingly consistent. Her childhood spent in the

dreaded Nazi regime and then as expatriate in war torn England, was surely an area of

experience from which she should have drawn literary inspiration over and over again. But the

recreation of this past in her writing is slight. One story, “A birthday in London”, centering on

the lives of German expatriates in post war London is her only published attempt to recreate the

world of her adolescence and youth. Renee Winegarten comments on this strange phenomenon:

…as we reflect on the large part, childhood memories or conditioning play in the

development of the most outstanding post Romantic writers, her reticence seems even

more astonishing. We may venture to attribute it to various causes. Among these might

be a sense of unassuaged pain or alienation.7

One is certainly aware of some strong emotion, kept painfully in check, in the picture she paints

of the ageing German Jews in “A Birthday in London”. They are no longer penniless refugees

but British citizens made wealthy by reparation. Yet they are continually haunted by the hardship

and humiliation suffered in their first years in England. A sense of lost caste is consistently with

them. Sonia’s bitterest regret is that her children have adapted to the new life and have no inkling

of their past: “We know who we are”, she cries, “but what does my Werner know, and y Lilo…

my poor Lilo- I have had such a lovely girlhood, such lovely dresses and always parties and

dancing classes…And she has had only hard work in the Kibbutz, hard work with their hands”8.

Like her own creations Werner and Lilo, Ruth Jhabvala, too quickly forgot the old life. Yet there

was an awareness of the pain of rootlessness all around her and a sense of disinheritance. This is

borne out in her statement that she was indebted to England for giving her a world which she

could embrace:

England opened out the world of literature for me; what other writers have experienced

and set down. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by

absorbing the world of others. The more regional, the more deeply rooted a writer was,

the more I loved them.9

Although Ruth Jhabvala became a British citizen in 1948, she was not destined to make England

her permanent home. While studying for her Masters degree in London University, she met

Cyrus S.H. Jhabvala, an Indian architect. They were married on 16 June 1951 and left

immediately afterwards for Delhi where she lived for the next twenty four years. Ruth Jhabvala

had no prior connections with India or any preconceptions. Although familiar with the country

through the novels of the expatriate writers, she was not sufficiently enthused by them to wish to

visit India:

I’d read Kim and A Passage to India, as literature; and neither made me want to go to

India nor become anything more than another literary landscape to be enjoyed. Nor was I

in the least attracted to anything else Indian- like for instance, the spiritual scene. I knew

nothing about it and I had done I would not have cared. I went to India as if I were blind.

If my husband has happened to live in Africa, I’d have gone there equally blindly; asking

no questions and fearing no fears.10

As from Germany to England, the transition from England to India was smooth and easy move, it

was a wonderful experience. “I was enchanted. It was paradise on earth”, she described her first

impressions of India to Caroline Morehead, “Just to look at the place, the huge sky, the light, the

colours. I loved the heat, going around with few clothes, the stone floors”.11 There is no reticence

here, no withdrawal. The intense joy of discovery finds expression in a delighted stream of

adjectives and evocative phrases in her autobiographical writing:

I still can’t talk about the first impact India made on my innocent- meaning blank and

unprepared- mind and senses. To try to express it would make me stutter. I enter a world

of sensuous delights that perhaps children- other children- enter. I remember nothing of it

from my childhood.12

This phase, which according to her lasted a decade, had come about instinctively. She thought

she understood India, loved her and felt completely assimilated:

At that time I loved everything there; yes- to my shame I have say- even the beggars, the

poverty, they did not bother me than; they seemed right somehow, a part of life that had

been taken out of the West (like death, which was always present, in India, carried on a

bier in front of my window down to the burning ghats, or the vultures swooping over

something indescribable in a ditch). It was life as one read about it in the Bible; whole, I

thought; pure, I thought.13

Perhaps her Jewish ancestry with its Eastern basis was at the heart of this recognition. It was as if

this impact made by India percolate through layers of consciousness to open up some deeply

buried ancestral memory. Whatever it was, it is certain that her creative instincts found in the

Indian scene an outlet the like of which she had never experienced. During those first few years,

she never visited England whose memories seemed dull and depressing in contrast. She made no

European friends. Living with her family in her beautiful house by the river, she keenly observed

the life around her and, as she herself describes it, “really lived”.14

And all this time she was recording her experience of India in novel after novel, adapting for her

purpose the old English novel of manners that had found its most chiseled expression in a

delineation of the static English society of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her

choice of such a form to depict life as it was lived in the rapidly changing ethos of Independent

India is significant. It indicates an awareness of a deep assimilative instinct in the Indian

character that ultimately triumphs over the divisions and conflicts that political and sociological

changes bring in their wake. Thus, the harmonious resolution that is fundamental to the comedy

of manners became, in Ruth Jhabvala’s early novels, the natural corollary to the clashes and

tensions of Indian family life.

Ruth Jhabvala’s acceptance of India amounted to conscious identification. Describing her

personal stance as an author, she writes:

I was pretending to be writing as an insider, as if I did not know anything else. As if I was

not a European at all, had never heard of such a place. I do not know how I had the

impudence to write like that… about people who did not even think in English, let alone

speak it. But I pretended I knew them- no, more I pretended I was them. For instance I

was always fond of writing about great big beautiful sensual Indian women, full of

passion and instinct; the opposite of myself, physically and in every other way. And yet I

wrote about them, was them, wanted to be them. All this is quite inexplicable to me;

those ten years of delight and immersion and more (much more) than acceptance.15

The community she chose to identify with and delineate in her novels was, curiously enough, not

the Parsee community to which she belonged by right. In the same way as the predicament of the

Jew in exile did not prove to be a sufficiently potent source of inspiration for the novelist, the

state of stagnation and decay that the Parsee has fallen into through centuries of insulated living

and inbreeding in India failed to kindle the creative spark. She turned instead, with interest, to

the Punjabi refugee- also an alien community trying to adapt itself to an unknown ethos. She

noted the resilience wit which the Punjabi overcame the trauma of partition; the quickness with

which he put down new roots and the eagerness with which he embraced a new sun and wind to

become in time so vigorous and strong as to tower over the original inhabitants. Though she

laughs at their bourgeois and simplistic values in her fiction, there is a measure of genuine

respect for these people who have neither been scattered like the Jews not enclosed themselves

like the Parsees in a social structure that seemingly protects but actually imprisons.

Yasmine Gooneratne tells us that the field for the novelist’s observation of the Punjabi refugee

community was provided by the large extended family of her husband’s partner with which she

was on friendly terms. Perhaps some aspects of the domestic life of this household, filled with

relatives and in-laws, reminded her of her own Jewish background. The strong sense of racial

allegiance and clan loyalty that she saw in this family, the self-deprecating humour of its

members and their emotional exuberance tinged with self pity, seem to have awakened

atmosphere of the clan assemblies is described by her in the following words:

For them it is enough just to be together; there are long stretches of silence in which

everyone stares into space. From time to time there is a little spurt of conversation,

usually on some common place everyday subject… There is no attempt at exercising the

mind or testing one’s wits against those of others: the pleasure lies only in having other

familiar people around and enjoying the air together…There is actually something very

restful about this mode of social intercourse and certainly holds more pleasure than the

synthetic social life led by the Westernized Indians. It is also more adapted to the Indian

climate which invites one to be absolutely relaxed in mind and body, to do nothing, to

think nothing, just to feel, to be, I have in fact enjoyed sitting around like that for hours

on end…16

At what point her strong acceptance of India starts fading and ultimately lead her to leave the

country is not possible to trace. Though the novelist herself places it around 1959, during her

first visit to England after her marriage, one suspects that the process of disenchantment had

been set in motion some time earlier. In an interview with Paul Grimes, many years later, Ruth

Jhabvala said:

I saw people eating in London…Everyone had clothes. Everything in India was so

different- you know, the way people have to live. Human being should not have to live

like that, from birth to death. In India the degradation starts from birth- you have no

choice…

So after that first visit I felt more and more alien to India.17

In her essay “Myself In India” published in 1966, she describes the western reaction (European

and American alike) to India as a sort of cycle with three stages: “…first state; tremendous

enthusiasm- everything in India is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous;

third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends here, for others the cycle

renews itself and goes on.18 On what she bases this generalization is not clear particularly in the

light of her confession that in the first ten years of her life in India she had cut herself off from

everything European. Whether she had met as many westerners in the next few years on the level

of interaction that warrants such a universalization is very doubtful indeed. Yet she assures her

readers that the cycle of response she describes is particularly opposite to the experience of those

westerners who tend to be liberal in outlook and have been educated to be sensitive and receptive

to India. Unfortunately, she goes on to say, it is not easy to retain this mood of openness for any

length of time to a country that proves to be too strong for western nerves. A time comes when

one’s inheritance reasserts itself and one finds oneself painfully estranged from a culture that had

once seemed so easy to assimilate. Describing this experience in her own case, she writes: “I

won’t call it disillusionment; I do not think it was that; it was more the process of becoming

myself again. Becoming European again.”19

What phase of her life is she recalling here? What exactly does “becoming European again”

mean in her case? Is she recalling the terrors and affections of her infancy in a Hilter- ruled

Germany or the bleakness of her adolescence as a German refugee in Hendon? What then did she

mean when she spoke of her “disinheritance” and “not having a world of my own”. To quote her

own words when describing the glory of the initial impact made by India:

Was it in reaction to the bleakness and deprivations of my own childhood- Nazi Germany

and then war-time blitzed London (those nights and days spent in damp air-raid shelters,

and queuing for matches and margarine)? Or did it go further, and was it that whatever

was oriental within me- I mean through my being Jewish- was opening up to buried

ancestral memory?20

Whatever was oriental in her apparently not strong enough to sustain a lasting relationship of

love with India. By her own admission, then, a state of alienation accompanied by a drastic

change of vision followed the first phase of exuberant identification:

I still wrote about India but now seen from a European point of view. I became a

European sensibility again, and now I saw everything as perhaps I should have seen in

from the beginning. I was no longer immersed in sensuous delights but had to struggle

against all the things people have to struggle against in India: the tide of poverty, disease

and squalor rising all around; the heat- the frayed nerves; the strange alien often

inexplicable, often maddening Indian character. 21

In 1975, at the peak of her career as novelist and screenplay writer, Ruth Jhabvala decided to

leave India. Her choice of the United States for refuge from India was in contradiction to her

claim of a European reclamation. She had consistently identifies=d herself with Europeans; had

declared herself “homesick for Europe”- yet when the time came to make the change it was in

favor of a country which was not only new to her but also one in which she was relatively

unknown. Some of her admirers, which included literary critics, in America, but it was

microscopic compared with that of England. Extensively interviewed in the after- glow of her

two greatest triumphs- the Booker award for Heat and Dust and the John Smith Guggenheim

Memorial Fellowship- one of the questions repeatedly put to her was the reason for her choice of

the United States for emigration from India. To patricia Mooney who interviewed her for

Newsweek, she gave an interesting reply:

For one thing I’ve gotten used to a big country in India and all of Europe seems a little

small. America on the other hand is another vast country, and again it is one of contrasts.

It is stimulating in a completely different way from India. Everybody in New York seems

to have the same background as I have. After all I am a European Jew and so are a great

number of New Yorkers. So the step from India to here is nothing compared with the step

I took from Europe to India. People here talk like me, think like me- and that is not so in

India. In India, I am an alien.22

Her reasons for preferring America to Europe were presented more explicitly in her interview

with Paul Grimes, a year and half earlier:

I know England so much better, I was brought up there…Even in India I was much closer

to England because there were still some vestiges of British India there. So England

might have been the natural choice, except that I am not English. I feel that people like

myself, displaced Europeans, found a home in America and especially in New York. My

parents wanted to come to America, but could not get a visa in time. So we went to

England and waited for a visa there, and then the war broke out.23

America, with New Your as its microcosm, is then, in Ruth Jhabvala’s opinion, the ideal refuge

for the displaced European since it is of such that her nation is compounded. A vast, new and

vital country, it should have presented itself as a permanent resting place for the already twice

expatriated novelist. Yet, the images of America and her people that are portrayed in her writing

of the last twenty two years is not one of potential assimilation but that of acute alienation.

Curiously, once again, India becomes the scapegoat. Transposing to Manhattan, she has a vision

of a kind of India now growing in New York, a vision, which she believes is her inheritance from

India:

Perhaps the crumbling monuments and decaying civilizations have seeped into me after

all these years and I have brought my vision with me. But the decaying elements do loom

large in American life. There is so much poverty, among the blacks, among the “paper

bags,” the women who rummage in the garbage, so many mad people, twitching away

and laughing out loud in the streets, shouting-you cannot go out without seeing freaks

and mad men. And all my work seems to end up being about parasites and perverts.24

By her own confession, she has lost her subject. Following her departure from India, her creative

impulse has registered a steady decline and her fictional output has suffered both qualitatively

and quantitatively. In these twenty two years, she has written only four novels- In Search of

Love and Beauty (1983); Three Continents (1995); Poet and Dancer (1993) and Shards of

Memory (1995) and a few short stories. This flagging of inspiration may be the consequence of

her vision new country. Her comments on the American way of life and her observation of the

changes wrought in her own personality within a few years of her arrival in the States are

significant. In her interviews with Patricia Mooney, she remarks:

Someone was saying just the other day as he visited a New York State fir that even the

people’s faces there were so closed in and so with hope. In India, he said, even with the

beggars there’s just some radiance about them sometimes and the faces do have a hope

and a kind of refinement. I feel that’s true…..

When I used to come for a short time I used to ask everybody, why are you so neurotic,

why are you so nervous? But now I am beginning to be just like every other New York

women writer-edgy, nervous, grumpy, demanding irritable. How that happened I do not

know, but I know that it happened.25

The bulk of her writing in this final phase, her four novels in particular are concerned, with the

central American problems of loneliness and neurosis:

It is in the air there as diseases are in India, you feel like screaming with nerve pain…. I

think it is I in the noise, the crowds, the shrieking ambulances and police cars-all the pain

in the world you hear all the time.26

Ruth Jhabvala probably tries to shut it out in the same way that she tried to shut out the heat, the

dust, the poverty and filth of India-and with as little success. “I am a born outsider,” she admits

in the final analysis, “always looking in through the window. I would love to stay in one place.

But I’ll never settle down, never accept a place as home”. In the concluding remarks of her

commemorative lecture on Neil Gunn in 1980, she tries to offer the sum total of her experience

as an expatriate. Likening herself to a fickle woman who frequently changes her lovers, she says:

Perhaps after my first disinheritance-and my calm acceptance of it, of so cheerfully

pretending to be English, and then Indian and then Anglo-Indian, changing colour as I

changed countries- may be I will just have to go on doing it changing countries like

lovers….

There’s a saying and I can’t (characteristically enough) remember whether it is a Jewish,

or a Muslim, or a Hindu or a Buddhist one; “it is forbidden to grow old’. I take that to

mean that one just has to go on learning, being throughout however many twenty year

stretches in however many different countries or places-actual physical ones or countries

of the mind-to which one may be called.27

(B) INDIA IN THE FICTION OF RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA:

The image of India figures quite prominently in the works of Anglo-Indian writers as

well as in those of Indo-Anglian writers but with a shade of difference. Many foreigners who

came India before Independence and after Independence have often engrossed themselves with

various problems which could be termed universal. The only difference is the way in which they

have assessed the problem and this varies from writer depending upon his psychology and

perception of the situation.

Although Ruth prawer Jhabvala belongs to the category of aliens in India, there is

certainly a difference in her attitude to a great extent because she has been able to identify herself

with the Indian sensibility. Like many other Anglo-Indian writers she had come to India by

virtue of her marriage and has contributed to the literary field of India in the form of a few

novels and anthologies of short stories depicting India as it appears the eyes of an expatriate.

There is a considerable enthusiasm and fresh interest in the beginning, which ends in

disillusionment. Her India represents the people, the country, their customs, traditions, arts etc.

wherein she is appreciative and critical at the same time.

The India of Mrs. Jhabvala’s fiction is confined largely to Delhi, and almost entirely to

the middle class of India. Peasants, railway-workers, labourers, domestic servants, rickshaw

pullers, beggars- in fact a vast mass of Indian society seething in poverty hardly find its mention

in her earlier novels. They are not present even in the streets. Her own awareness of this ‘other

India’ can be seen in the introduction to her volume of short stories called An Experience of

India:

Whatever we say, not for one moment should we lose sight of the fact that a very great

number on Indians never get enough to eat. Literally that: from birth to death they never

for one day cease to suffer from hunger. Can one lose sight of that fact? God knows, I’ve

tried. But after seeing what one has to see here every day, it is not really possible to go on

living one’s life the way one is used to. People dying of starvation in the streets, children

kidnapped and maimed to be sent out as beggars-but there is no point in making a

catalogue of the horrors with which one lives, on which one lives, as on the back of an

animal.

Being a central European herself and being used to the affluent way of life of the West,

Jhabvala personally considers India’s poverty as the most salient feature of this country. In her

autobiographical essay ‘Myself in India’ Jhabvala says:

The most salient fact about India is that it is very poor and very backward. There are so

many other things to be said about it but this remains the basis of all of them.

In a particular context when Ram Lal Agarwal interviews her for Quest asking her why she has

ignored the other sections of the society, her answer was:

I have always moved up and down the social scale quite freely I think- though only, as I

say, among the urban, upper middle and lower middle classes. I haven’t lived among

villagers and I haven’t lived among the very poor, so obviously I can’t write about them

directly. Although I like to think that they are there indirectly the great mass of India

beneath these middle class lives-as they are there indirectly for all of us who live here.28

She is true to her statement and she has never attempted to depict the lives of the poor in her

fiction. We can say that she has written all her novels with cosmopolitan Delhi and the people

living their serving the background. The feelings and the psychology of the people are

universalized through the Jhabvala’s unique sensibility.

In all her novels written in India right from To Whom She Will29 (1955), The Nature of

Passion30 (1956), Esmond in India31 (1958), The Householder32 (1960), Get Ready for

Battle33 (1962), A Backward Place34 (1965), A New Dominion35 (1972), to Heat and Dust36

(1975), we find an image of India that is at once lively and dull, pictured by the novelist

differently in different circumstances. In her early novels, her focus remains at the intra-Indian

context, whereas in her later novels she shifts her focus to East-West encounter. Through this

shift the novelist comes to the conclusion that if one wants to accept India as it is one must be

either a social worker or a firm believer like other Indians who believe that everything happens

according to one’s Dharma and Karma. If one fails to apprehend the psychology behind these

two principles, one has to undergo a nerve breaking self-analysis in India.

In her early novels we find various types of people undergoing transition from tradition to

modernity. Like Jane Austen her range is restricted to the theme of love, marriage and family

life. In her early novels she has two ways of approaching her characters. First, there are the

almost Dickensian caricatures that are the main target of her satire and secondly there are the

mire central characters, which are presented with greater psychological depth, humour and

sympathy. Some characters, of course, fall between the two categories like Esmond and Har

Dayal.

The most persistent target of her satire is the Westernized Indian woman. In her

introduction to the essay ‘An Experience of India’ she writes about this character:

She has been to Oxford or Cambridge or some smart American college. She speaks

flawless, easy, colloquial English…she has a degree in economics or political science or

English literature.

Jhabvala describes the typical, educated, westernized and wealthy background of such a woman

and her pseudo addiction to Indian ‘culture’. Jhabvala humorously talks of her excellent buffet

suppers hosted for intelligent and interesting people on her moonlit lawn, and the variety of

topics she can discuss with her ‘emancipated mind’. Jhabvala describes her own response to such

a character:

In fact, my teeth are set on edge if I have to listen to her for more than five

minutes…..Even though I know the words to be true, they ring completely false. It is

merely lips moving and words coming out.

To Jhabvala, such people may be stocked with statistical information or may propose sensible

solutions to India’s problems but they don’t really care. For them India is:

A subject for debate-an abstract subject-and not a live animal actually moving under their

feet.

An example of such a woman is Mrs. Kaul who is the secretary of the ‘Cultural Dais’ in

A Backward Place. She is snobbish and affected, and the incident where she callously dismisses

a despairing young secretary highlights the inhuman nature of her so-called culture. Amrita’s

aunt Tarla is another example in her first novel To Whom She Will. She lives in a rich home,

with marble floors, Persian carpets, etc., and is busy with her committees and good works. The

European hanger on Professor Hoch and an ungracious lady Mrs. Mukharji attend one of her

luncheons. On this occasion Jhabvala’s mild satire is perceptible in the following lines:

‘And Indian woman hood’, said Professor Hoch, raising a desert-spoon heaped with

mocha soufflé by way of toast, ‘is the greatest justification for feminine emancipation. A

modern Indian lady is one of the rarest, finest flowers civilization has brought forth.’ All

the ladies except Dr. Mukharji looked modest. ‘Of course,’ said Tarla, in her best

platform manner, ‘the greatest step forward was the abandonment of the idea of early

marriage. We must be grateful that today society is sufficiently advanced to think of

women as something more than a mere marriageable commodity.’ Dr. Mukherji made her

second contribution to the conversation: ‘Last week,’ she said, ‘my sweeper’s daughter

was married. She is twelve.’

In a way, if Jhabvala’s educated Indian women are often superficial and selfish, the more

backward woman tends to be silly and sentimental. Esmond’s wife Gulab in her novel Esmond

in India is an extreme example of a person governed entirely by instinct and unquestioned

tradition. She is full of the spicy smell of Indian cooking. She looks pretty but she is so

unresponsive and stolid that her husband wants to break himself free from the trap of a dull,

heavy, alien and meaningless marriage: “He thought of himself as trapped- trapped in her

stupidity, in her dull heavy, alien mind, which could understand nothing: not him, not his way of

life nor his way of thought.” (EI 37).

Jhabvala’s attitude to more traditional Indian family life is ambiguous. On the one hand

her satirical pen finds plenty of snobbishness, hypocrisy and materialism to attack; on the other,

she endows her conventional Indian character with greater warmth and humanity. The humour of

the gossiping women in Lalaji’s rich and yet essentially homely household (The Nature of

Passion), the rivalry of Hari’s family to encounter an embattled Prema, the desperate attempts of

both families not to be ‘shown up’ at the railway station, Indu’s laughing at her priggish young

husband (The Householder)- all this is gentle and affectionate mockery.

Regarding the political scene and social evils, Jhabvala has not given much thought but

very subtly she has drawn the sketches of the ways of ministers, their importance and their

condescending behaviour in society. Her depiction of corruption and bribery in India is quite

vivid. Lalaji of The Nature of Passion is of the opinion:

Here in India, he thought one didn’t know much words, giving presents and gratifications

to government officers was an indispensable courtesy and a respectable, civilized way of

carrying on business (TNP 54).

Jhabvala gives a lot importance to the social set-up, and portrays the average woman as

sensuous and lazy who is fond of engrossing herself in gossip. For example almost the entire

middle class and the rich people are described as fond of jewels, gaudy dresses, strong scents and

perfumes. Sophisticated people are described as slim, tall and dressed in a simple way. Family

gathering at the time of any occasion in any household is described in a typical way, Nimmis’s

observations in The Nature of Passion are worth mentioning:

One scratched under her armpit, another wiped her perspiration from her face with the

end of her sari; another blew her nose between her fingers, and even Rani made a noise

and opened her mouth too wide while chewing sweetmeats (TNP 32).

What needs to be emphasized here is the fact that this may be true of a comparatively small

section of society in India but this can’t be universalized.

As far as Indian traditions and customs are concerned, Jhabvala has given importance

only to one particular society namely, the North-Indian Punjabi families. It is interesting to note

that although Jhabvala had married into Parsee community she doesn’t mention anything about

the Parsees. We come to know of her frankness and her detachment regarding any personal

inquisitiveness in her interview with Ram Lal Agarwal where she says:

India does have two highly developed art forms of its own… music and cooking…but

those are gifts handed down by an older, richer civilization. One really can’t- mustn’t-

expect any developments of that sort from contemporary India.37

Jhabvala has subtly hinted at the fondness for food among Indians, especially women.

Her enthusiasm with regard to this art can be seen in her novel To Whom She will wherein she

takes the trouble of giving recipes of all the dishes she has mentioned at the end of the novel. In

the novel Esmond in India we see how Esmond despises the strong spicy Indian food which

Gulab is fond of. In the same novel the scene describing the Indians consuming huge quantities

of food provide a food source of laughter for people outside India.

Jhabvala’s views on religion and Godman are completely different. She never associates

religion with ‘Sadhus’, ‘Gurus’ and ‘Babas’. For her the soul’s yearning for God can be heard

through the enjoyment of devotional songs. Even though she is a foreigner she has read all the

Upanishads, Gita and other religions books and tries her best in understanding the sweetness of

the soul of India. She has even mastered the themes by taking an idea from these holy scripts and

giving it shape in the form of a novel. But as time progresses her rational mind questions these

very typical Indian experiences as becomes clear from her essay ‘Myself in India’ where she

says:

religious. He abuses the girls sexually who come to get spiritual salvation under his guidance.

Unfortunately these Swamijis cheat and fraud people. They are not true spiritual Gurus but men

who have been alienated by the society. This is the picture she gives while dealing with the

theme of spirituality of India.

Thus, the novels of Jhabvala bring out a mixed impression about India. Her exposure of India is

limited to modern, well-off, cultured and highly westernized Indians. As a foreigner she finds

here a number of things, which were quite alien to her western upbringing and sensibility, and

these things she depicts with the characteristic eyes of a westerner. She is not, however,

impervious to the good in Indian culture and society. It is to her credit that the western readers

get a reasonably good glimpse of Indian life and custom from her novels even though the

fullness and an inner view of life has not been fully portrayed.

(C) WHITE WOMAN’S BURDEN:

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala belongs to the category of aliens in India. She has contributed to the

literary field of India in the form of a few novels and anthologies of short stories, depicting India

as it appears to the eyes of an expatriate. The advantages and disadvantages of her literary

situation are peculiar to her because of her being a European lady of Polish- German- Jewish

origin. She writes from the viewpoint of a European and is constantly aware of her western

values and her western readers. She states: “when one writes about India as a European and in

English, as I do, inevitably one writes not for Indians but for western readers.39

Jhabvala is illustrative of the fact that living in India doesn’t necessarily mean living the Indian

life or sharing the Indian vision of life. Her non-involvement and detachment have made her a

perpetual alien life Peggy in her short story The aliens: “Oh I can’t tell you how fed up I am with

it all and how awful it is, and the heat and everyone shouting all the time and they are all

coarse.”40 Peggy is fully against the coarse manners and crude ways of behaviour in a newly rich

Punjabi merchant family. Yet she, unlike Jhabvala, tries hard ‘to live and let live’, in her Indian

husband’s family.

Jhabvala has a marvelous ear for the rhythms of Indian speech and an observant eye for the

modes of behaviour in an adopted culture. It is to her credit that the Western readers may

reasonably get a glimpse of Indian life and customs from her novel even though the fullness and

an inner view of that life is not fully portrayed. Her early novels To Whom She Will, The Nature

of Passion, and the Householder are the best examples of her craft at this stage in her literary

life. Although her approach to the theme and situations she has treated is realistic and

photographic, yet they contain flashes of human understanding and kindred spirit. All these early

novels have almost Indian characters and only Indian culture contrasts. In this early phase of her

literary career, she exhibits her enthusiasm and awareness of new modes of living.

This period of enthusiasm, however, was not destined to last for a long time. With the passing of

time, there is a growth in the process of alienation and with it a deeper awareness of her

predicament as a European woman in India. She brings a sense of her personal anguish and

mental turmoil in her novels belonging to this period. Marital dissonance amidst East-West

conflicts is portrayed sharply in novels like Esmond in India, Get Ready for Battle, and A

Backward Place.

With the last two novels, A New Dominion and Heat and Dust, the process of withdrawal is

completed. Everything falls apart, everything Indian becomes abominable. Her departure from

India, from everything Indian, from what she labels ‘the richest soil for disillusionment’ is

unsatisfying and uncertain. Now she puts Europe and India in a constant state of futile antimony.

India has become a sort of ‘White Woman’s Burden’ for her. She feels she can never become

Indian and her stay in Indian threatens her Europeanness, her personality. This personal dilemma

is transposed as a generalization, as the principle problem faced by the European or white

characters in her novels under study. They, like their creator, have to choose between staying on

and suffering (like Etta, Olivia and Lee) or else flee towards greener pastures abroad (like Betty,

Esmond and Raymond).

The purpose of this of this study is to make an in- depth analysis of failure of cross

culture assimilations in India in the fiction of Ruth Jhabvala. Why dose India appear to be a

burden for her European or white characters? Whether India is really a burden for every white

woman or her personals anguish is transposed as generalization? We’ll have to keep an observant

eye on the white characters in her in her fiction to explore these facts.

Notes

1. E.M. Forster. A Passage to India, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as API.

2. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament,” The Hindustan Times Weekly, 27 July 1980 p.1

3. Ibid.

4. Ram Lal Aggarwal, “An Interview with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,” Quest, 91 (1974), p.36.

5. Ibid.

6. Yasmine Gooneratne, Silence, Exile and Cunning (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1983), pp.1-2.

7. Renne Winegarten, “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Jewish Passage to India,” Midstream, 20, No. 3 (1974) p.73

8. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “A Birthday in London.” In Like Fishes (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, N.D.), p. 137. All references cited are from this edition.

9. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament,” op.cit.

10. Ibid.

11. “A Solitary Writer’s Window on the heat and dust of India: An Interview with Caroline Morehead,” The Times, London, 20 November 1975, p. 16.

12. “ Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament,” op.cit.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Myself in India,” in How I become a Holy Mother and Other Stories. (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p.13. All references cited are from this edition.

17. “A Passage to U.S. for Writer of India: an Interview with Paul Grimes,” New York Times, 15 May 1976, p.14

18. “ Myself in India,” p.9

19. “ Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament,” op.cit.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Patrica Moony, “Another Dimention of Living: An Interview with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,” Newsweek, 31 October 1977, p .52.

23. “A passage to U.S. for writer of India: An Interview with Paul Grimes ,” op.cit., p. 14

24. Lyn Owen, “A Passage from India to America,” Observer Review, 9 April, 1978, p. 30.

25. Another Dimension of Living: An Interview with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, op. Cit., p.52.

26. “A Passage from India to America,” op. Cit., p. 30.

27. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament”, Op.cit.

28. Ramlal Agarwal. ‘An Interview with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’, Quest, 91, (Sept.- Oct. 1974) pp 34- 36.

29. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. To Whom She Will, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as TWSW.

30. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The Nature of Passion, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd.,1986. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred to this edition will be referred as TNP.

31. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Esmond in India, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd., 1978. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as EI.

32. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The Householder, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd., 1980. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as TH.

33. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Get Ready for Battle, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd., 1981. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as GRB.

34. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Backward Place, Great Britain: Penguine Books Ltd., 1980. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as ABP.

35. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A New Dominion, Great Britain: Penguine Books Ltd., 1972. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as ABP.

36. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust, London: Future Publications, 1976. All subsequent references to this edition will be referred as HAD.

37. Ramlal Agarwal, Ibid 36.

38. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, ‘Myself in India’ in An Experience of India, p. 17-18.

39. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, ‘Moonlight, Jasmine and Rickets’, The New York Times (New York: Ap.22, 1975), p.35.

40. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, ‘The Aliens’, Like Birds, Like Fishes (London: John Murray, 1963), p. 99.