Ruth Jhabvala's tryst with India and how it works itself out in her fiction has been a matter of critical concern for long. But barring occasional heretical voices, the established critical canon has always treated her as 'an adopted daughter of India' and her work as part of the Indian-English corpus of writing. Lately, working from the 'orientalist' perspective, critics have started exploring her work as a literary embodiment of post-colonial consciousness. They have also begun discovering post- modernist themes and issues hidden underneath her deceptively simple narrative concerns. This shift of perspective has aroused new interest in Ruth Jhabvala's fiction. The present work is the first full-length study of Ruth Jhabvala's image of India as embodied in her entire body of fiction. It analyses Ruth Jhabvalav's oeuvre from her first novel To Whom She Will to the last one to date Shards of Memory and traces her image of India as embodied in these novels. The image, as it turns out, has been quite objective and sympathetic in the first flush of Ruth Jhabvala's romantic tryst with India. But with each succeeding novel, it gets more and more negativity reaches its crescendo in Heat and Dust, Ruth Jhabvala's tour de force in many respects. In her recent phase of fiction writing emanating from New York, where she is presently settled, India has ceased to be a palpably visible protagonist but continues to impinge on her consciousness as a brooding metaphor. Though essentially a work of literary criticism, Ruth Jhabvala's India should be of interest to students of sociology, indology. politica, in fact to all those interested in exploring India and what it stands for.
PANKAJ BHAN (b.1951) works as a Reader in the Department of English in a Delhi University college. Holding a Master's from the University of Delhi, he did M.Litt. both in English Literature and in English Language Teaching from the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad. He capped it all by completing Ph.D from Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut. As part of in service training, he participated in British Council sponsored Summer School for Teachers of English in Chester (UK) in 1990 and British Council Workshop on Developing Language Learning Materials in Liverpool (UK) in 1992. Pankaj Bhan has been writing, editing, reviewing and also translating literary texts from Hindi into English. With Ajeet Cour, noted literary figure, he has co-edited two volumes on South Asian literature - Voices of Asia: An Anthology of SAARC Fiction and Shamsur Rahman: A Witness of His Times-both published by the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, New Delhi. His first ever translation of Hindi classic Chandrakanta into English has been widely appreciated. Pankaj Bhan has been active on the human rights front too. As a human rights activist, he has been participating in session of UN Commission on Human Rights held every year at Geneva and raising human rights issues of national and international import.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has emerged as a major novelist writing in English in post- independence India. She started writing in the fifties (her first novel To Whom She Will was published in 1955) and continues to write even now. To date, she has written 12 novels and 5 collections of short-stories besides a number of semi-autobiographical sketches, film screenplays and literary pieces. Both in terms of the quantity as well as the quality of her literary work, she can undoubtedly be ranked as a major English novelist of the 20th century. In terms of popularity as a fiction writer too, Ruth Jhabvala enjoys an enviable record. There is hardly a book-store in India (or may be even abroad) which does not stack her works as they have always proved to be a quick sell. If in spite of Ruth Jhabvala's huge corpus, literary merit and popularity, recognition to her as a literary writer has come slow, it is because critics have been unsure how to respond to her as a writer. This diffidence has basically emanated from their inability to 'place' her in a literary tradition - something that gives them a set of references useful for the critical evaluation of a writer. Somehow, Ruth Jhabvala's peregrinating course of life (she having migrated from Cologne to London to New Delhi to New York) and also the elusive quality of her art defies easy categorisation. While evaluating her work, critics have gone from one extreme to another. While some have hailed her as a 'daughter' or 'daughter-in-law' of India (e.g. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Khushwant Singh) others have categorised her as anti- India and dismissed her work as a prejudiced response to India (e.g. Nissim Ezekiel, Eunice D'Souza). Both these responses have been narrow and straitjacketed. Also, critics who have taken these stances have not substantiated these with a close evaluation of her work. My first impression of Ruth Jhabvala's work convinced me that her image of India, the place of her domicile after her marriage with an Indian for 24 long years, has been basically a negative one. This impressionistic response spurred me on to read her works more closely and critically and come out with a more substantiated response to her. My further readings have confirmed my initial response to Ruth Jhabvala, especially in relation to her stance on India. But saying that Ruth Jhabvala has a negative image of India does not take us very far. While arriving at this conclusion, one must also be able to say whether the image has been a consistent and static one or it has evolved and changed over a period of time. One should also be able to locate, if possible, the likely sources of this negative image in the social or literary background of the writer. One must find it quite intriguing that in spite of her conscious attempts to identify with the land of her long domicile, this essentially negative image has been able to hold sway over her and lead her to the final abandonment of her place of domicile and also the social, cultural and partly emotional links she had developed with it.
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