Abstract
Heat and Dust (1975) is at the time of writing probably Jhabvala’s best-known novel; it has been available in a paperback edition ever since the appearance of the film version of the novel in 1977. It contains Jhabvala’s most characteristic techniques — filmic flashback, using a combination of first- and third-person narrative, and themes — the dangers of sexual passion, Westerners in India, heterosexual women in relation to homosexual men. Again, the work is constructed, magically, it seems, on the fine line between the comic and the tragic. The two factors of the novel’s availability and its centrality, I offer to justify the disproportionate amount of space that it occupies in this study. In fact, it is a rather short novel, almost a novella, and its spare, compressed prose has almost the effect of poetry, reverberating with meanings and significations that seem to lie just beneath the surface — another quality that may explain my fascination with it.
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Notes
James Ivory, Autobiography of a Princess: Also Being the Adventures of an American Film Director in the Land of the Maharajas (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) p. 36.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, ‘India, Inc.: Hullabaloo Over Merchant-Ivory Pictures’, Harpers, March 1982, p. 67.
Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Avon Books, 1978) p. 183.
See Elizabeth Fisher, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979) p. 297.
J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor, The Subjection of Women (London, 1869).
John Updike, review of Heat and Dust in the New Yorker, 5 July 1976.
My summary follows R. J. Furbank’s in Forster: A Life, 2 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978) vol. II, p. 68ff.
This point is made by R. J. Cronin, ‘The Hill of Devi and Heat and Dust’, Essays in Criticism, 36 (April 1986) pp. 142–59.
Yasmine Gooneratne, Silence, Exile and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1983) pp. 222, 223, 224.
in Vasant Shahane, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (New Delhi: Heinemann, 1976) ch. 4, pp. 129–41.
Dorothy K. Stein, ‘Women to Burn: Suttee as a Normative Institution’ (Signs 4, no. 2 [Winter 1978], p. 255).
Colonel Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (1844)
is cited in Shirley Chew, ‘Fictions of Princely States and Empire’, Ariel, 17 (July 1986) pp. 103–16.
from D. N. Majumdar, Caste and Communication in an Indian Village (Bombay, 1961);
quoted in Ronald Segal, The Anguish of India (New York: Stein & Day, 1965) p. 161
Gita Mehta gives some horrible examples in Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979) p. 160.
Kate Millett makes the point that they also serve to parody these roles. See her Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970) p. 447.
The 1927 description by a British physician is quoted in Nora Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, University of Chicago: Department of Geography, Research Paper no. 141 (1972).
David G. Mandelbaum, Society in India, I: Continuity and Change (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1970) p. 9.
Richard Nyrop et al., Area Handbook for India, 3rd edn (Washington, D.C., 1975) p. 201.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).
V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (New York: Macmillan, 1964) p. 68.
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924; rpt. London: J. M. Dent, 1957) p. 219.
E. M. Forster, The Hill of Devi (1953);
reprinted in The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, vol. 14, ed. Elizabeth Heine (London: Edward Arnold, 1983).
Richard Cronin, ‘The Hill of Devi and Heat and Dust’, Essays in Criticism, 36 (April 1986) p. 154.
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© 1989 Laurie Sucher
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Sucher, L. (1989). Demon-Lovers and Holy Mothers: Heat and Dust. In: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20239-3_7
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