Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

I've still only read two novels by R.K. Narayan. My first encounter with him is described here, and whilest I certainly enjoyed it and liked many things about it, I don't think I was quite as taken with it as I thought I might be when I sat down to read the opening pages. My second encounter, The Man-eater of Malgudi, was read in India, at my in-laws' flat in Bombay, last Easter. I don't really imagine that it was the experience of reading him in India that made the difference. After all, the suburbs of modern bombay are a world away from the sleepy small town in Southern India where most of Narayan's fiction takes place. And it's basically the same plot, with a 'weaker', gentler character been taken advantage of by a more aggresive character before the status quo is restored. Of course, I don't mean to underplay the subtlety and depth of both books.

Something that struck me in the appreciate introduction from Pico Iyer (wonderfully, and cheekily titled 'Midnight's Uncle'), and which will explain why I've started this post by refering to a different writer from the post's title, was his joky aside that Narayan was writing 'Long before the Booker prize seemed to be an Indian colony...', an assumption about the Booker which I'm sure I've seen elsewhere. Only, if you look at the actual list of Booker prize winners, after the epocal victory of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, we had to wait over 15 years until 1997 for the next Indian winner, since when, we've had two more. It's certainly an impressive number if compared to the literatures from the rest of the Commonwealth, and in fairness to Iyer, he appears to have written his piece in 2009, when there had been two Indian winners in three years, but four winners out of 30 years still sounds a little like hypobole.

Interestingly, if we look at the list of winners before Rushdie, from 1969 to 1980, there are three winners which are works by 'British' authors set in India, and concerned with the legacy and the realities of British colonialism in India. No wonder the prize aquired something of a reputation for indulging in post-colonial guilt and self-flagellation.

Heat and Dust. It's a marvelously evocative title, isn't it? The coupling of those two elements conjours up a hazy image of India's past under the British Raj, an image which is assisted by my edition through the choice of period photograph for it's cover illustration. Of course, this is an historical fiction which has now itself been historicised, the mid-70s vantage point from which it is told now as much a part of history as the 1920s it looks back upon. In it's confrontation of the clash between India and Britain in the context of the Empire and it's aftermath, it's twin narratives clearly intended as a microcosm of wider relationships, it's perhaps a little unfair to say that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala gets around the difficulty of avoiding privilaging one culture over another by making nearly all of her characters equally unlikeable. So, most of the Indians appear to be fraudulant and coniving, the English characters either arrogant or gullible.

Yes, it's a little unfair, but not entirely inaccurate. In a nice note, our unnamed narrator, visiting India to trace the history of her step-grandmother who absconded with an Indian Nawab back in the 1920s, acknowledges that there wasn't actually anything particularly special about Olivia. Superficially, she might appear more sympathetic than the other British inhabitiants of 1920s Satipur, able to see through the lies the British characters use to justify their pressence in the country, but ultimately she is little more than a rather spoilt, bored young woman. Only I'm not sure that our nameless narrator is really much more appealing. Mirroring her grandmother's story, she also falls pregnant, following an affair with Inder Lal, an Indian clerk whose house she rents a room from, and who struggles with his mother's choice of a wife who is somewhat less deucated than him. Despite his betrayal of his wife in their affair, he actually remains one of the more appealing characters in the book. At least he has some life to him, with his worries about his work and his marriage, in contrast to the books rootless cosmopolitan narator, who lacks not only a name but also any visible means of economic support, and who views everyone she meets with the same kind of mildly patronising superiority. It's also not entirely clear why it's so important for her to be in India, since it appears that she learns all of her Olivia's story from her grandmother's letters and ends by acknowledging that there's no way she can learn of what happened to Olivia after she left her husband for the Nawab's court and family.

As evocative as it is, is the title entirely fair? Googling for information about Amit Chaudhuri a while back, I came across an interview in which he complains about this very title as representative of a totalising, even patronising view of India in historical fiction about the Raj, whereby this huge country, containing a vast range of different landscapes and cultures within it's borders, is reduced to a few comfortable cliches. He has a point. India in this novel is a land of widow burning and fraudulant gurus. Satipur may be a real place, but the choice to set the narrative their (literally, the town's name is 'place of Sati', the custom of widow burning which wasn't very widespread until the british decided they needed to suppress such a barbaric custom). It only seems to emphasise Prawer Jhabvala's attempts to produce a story which is emblamatic of both India as a whole and of the colonial relationship between Indians and the British.

In which case, I can't help feeling the story is perhaps to slight, too glib, to support such a metaphorical weight. True, she has no time for cliches. There's nothing romantic or enobling about the cross-cultural relationship. For the Nawab, it's just the actions of a bored, spoilt young man who is used to always getting what he wants. A point which is underlined by the pressence of another Westerner, the homosexual Harry, who is unable to adjust to the climate, also present at the Nawab's court. He's also a prolifigate bankrupt, whose small kingdom is ultimately taken under British control. The young man following the hippy trail in the 1970s whom the narrator also becomes involved with in India ends up hating the country and everything he feels it represents. Beneath the elegantly written surface, there's something really quite savage here, close to misanthropy even. Which is bracing, and does perhaps capture something of the Raj and its legacy quite effectively.

I certainly don't regret reading it, even if the writing does contain such inanities as 'India always changes people', a cliche about India which I think has been held by many British over the years (see Black Narcissus for another example), one which was at the heart of the hippy dream about India in the 60s and 70s and which is skewered mercilessly along with everything else. It's difficult to know how to take this, since it occurs within the main text. Does Prawer Jhabvala intend her readers to find her nameless narrator contemptible? I don't think all readers would find her so unsympathetic as I do, and there's little to indicate this narrator should be taken as unreliable. It's not that kind of book. But not only does she lack a name, we actually learn very little about her. She tells us about the people she meets and places she visits, but little about herself beyond the bare fact of her family relationships. Consequently, she comes to feel as though she's a partial stand in for her creator, her opinions on India derived from her, an author who can presumably tell us about the country with authority, married to an Indian and living in Delhi for so many years. Like I say, ultimately, I found I wasn't entirely convinced. It's picture of the country feels a little too pat in it's unrelenting negativity, as bad in some ways as the colonial mindset Prawer Jhabvala is trying to critique. It's not that she describes anything which couldn't, or hasn't occured, just that it seems to leave a little too much out.