‘The Housewife’

Abstract

In the ‘ashram’ fiction just discussed, the guru was the willing repository for fantasies of the divinely powerful, all-knowing, demon-lover. But the demon-lover comes in many forms. In the next novel, Heat and Dust, and in the stories that lead up to it, one meets him in less unusual guises — though he must, by definition, be somehow extraordinary. In ‘The Housewife’ (in An Experience of India) art is the demon-lover’s powerful lure.