Reading Time: 5 minutes
Basudeb profiles Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an unsung Anglo-Indian woman novelist, penned 18 novels, short stories, many screenplays, anthologies, and encyclopedias, etc., between 1955 and 2011. Known as the Indian Jane Austin, her writings show influences of many other novelists. Read more about her, in the weekly column, exclusively in Different Truths.
Another woman novelist who was contemporary to Kamala Markandaya was Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013). Some of her well-known novels are, To Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of Passion (1956), Esmond in India (1958), The Householder (1960) Get Ready for Battle (1962), A Backward Place (1965), and Heat and Dust (1975). Ruth was born in Cologne to Polish parents. She was rich with triple or quadruple heritage and those heritages were Jewish (European), British, Indian and American. In fact, she was a resident of four continents. She was a frequent visitor to Britain but during the winter she would stay in India. She married a Parsi gentleman, Cyrus Jhabvala, who was an architect. Maybe, it will be appropriate to address Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an Anglo-Indian novelist in English. The Householder and Heat and Dust, these two novels were filmed. For her novel, Heat and Dust she got the Booker Prize, in 1975.
A study
Esmond in India (1958) is a story of an inter-racial marriage between a British Civil Servant, posted in India, who is of philandering nature, and an Indian woman. The I.C.S. officer makes friendship with a lot of middle-class Indian women. An analysis of his mind shows that he has a kind of ‘love and hate’ relationship with this Indian sub-continent.
Heat and Dust. which won the Booker Prize, is one of this author’s most complex, sophisticated works,
A critical study of her novels leads us to comment that Ruth tries to laugh at follies and foibles, oddities and eccentricities of the middle-class Indian society like Jane Austen. She may be considered to be an ‘ Indian Jane Austin’, writing Comedy of Manners. She is not a writer of Indian Diaspora or of an American writer though she emigrates to the United States of America, visiting frequently England and India particularly in the winter season. She is of Anglo-Saxon origin because she is born in a Polish family. She gets her formal education at London’s Queen Marry and obtains her M.A. degree from there in 1951. She is basically an Anglo-Indian novelist for she marries an Indian Parsi. Considering her an Anglo-Indian novelist because of her marriage with an Indian has an overtone of patriarchal bias. But the reading of her novels confirms every one of the importance of Indian society and Indian locale as well as the conspicuous presence of considerable Indian lexical items, barfi, sari, ladoos, gulab jamuns, jalebi, and samosa. Indian names are found in her novels.
Furthermore, in her novels, we find she is very insightful and sensitive in her descriptions of Indian
It’s unfortunate she will have to wait and stand the test of time.
©Basudeb Chakraborti
Photos from the internet.
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