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 Gamas 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. Kiplings
notorious statement: Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, / till the
earth and sky stand presently at gods 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. Forsters 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 Governments 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 Forsters 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 Englishmans 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
novelists 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 alsoand 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 fathers entire family, part of my mothers family, most of the children I first went
to school with, and most of my parents 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. Sonias 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 classesAnd 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:
Id 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, Id 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 cant 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 Jhabvalas early novels, the natural corollary to the clashes and
tensions of Indian family life.
Ruth Jhabvalas 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 novelists observation of the Punjabi refugee
community was provided by the large extended family of her husbands 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 ones wits against those of others: the pleasure lies only in having other
familiar people around and enjoying the air togetherThere 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 end16
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 LondonEveryone 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
ones 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
wont 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 Ive 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 thereEven 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 Jhabvalas 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
peoples faces there were so closed in and so with hope. In India, he said, even with the
beggars theres just some radiance about them sometimes and the faces do have a hope
and a kind of refinement. I feel thats 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 Ill 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.
Theres a saying and I cant (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. Jhabvalas 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, Ive
tried. But after seeing what one has to see here every day, it is not really possible to go on
living ones 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 Indias 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 havent lived among
villagers and I havent lived among the very poor, so obviously I cant 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 Jhabvalas 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 ones 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 Englishshe 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 Indias problems but they dont 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. Amritas
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 Jhabvalas mild satire is perceptible in the following lines:

And Indian woman hood, said Professor Hoch, raising a desert-spoon heaped with
mocha souffl 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 sweepers daughter was
married. She is twelve.
In a way, if Jhabvalas educated Indian women are often superficial and selfish, the more
backward woman tends to be silly and sentimental. Esmonds 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).
Jhabvalas 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 Lalajis rich and yet essentially homely household (The Nature of
Passion), the rivalry of Haris family to encounter an embattled Prema, the desperate attempts of

both families not to be shown up at the railway station, Indus 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 didnt 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, Nimmiss
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 cant 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 doesnt 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 cookingbut
those are gifts handed down by an older, richer civilization. One really cant- mustntexpect 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.
Jhabvalas views on religion and Godman are completely different. She never associates
religion with Sadhus, Gurus and Babas. For her the souls 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 WOMANS 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 doesnt 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 cant 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
husbands 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 Womans 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? Well 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 Jhabvalas 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 Jhabvalas Testament, op.cit.
10. Ibid.
11. A Solitary Writers Window on the heat and dust of India: An Interview with Caroline
Morehead, The Times, London, 20 November 1975, p. 16.
12. Ruth Prawer Jhabvalas 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 Jhabvalas 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 Jhabvalas 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.