This study attempts to place in a critical perspective Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's exploration of cross-generation, cross-familial and cross-cultural assimilations in India as manifested in her fiction written between 1955 and 1975. An examination of her work of these two decades reveals certain shifts in the nature and scope of this exploration. These shifts are seen as linked with the social and industrial development of India as well as with her self-confessed changes of response to India during the twenty-three years of her stay. At the same time her observations are identified as part of a literary tradition with which she has close connections-that of the fiction written by European expatriates in India.
Aruna Chakravarti took her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She has held the post of Reader in one of the affiliated Colleges of the University for many years and is, at present its Principal.
She is also an author and translator of repute. Among her published works the most significant are Tagore: Songs Rendered into English (1984) which received the Vaitalik Award for excellence in translation, Sarat Chandra: Rebel and Humanist (1985), Srikanta (1993) (Sahitya Akademi Award winning book) and Those Days (1997). The last two are translations of works of the great masters of Bengali Literature: Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay.
This study attempts to place in a critical perspective Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's exploration of cross-generation cross-familial and cross- cultural assimilations in India as manifested in her fiction written between 1955 and 1975. An examination of her work of these two decades reveals certain shifts in the nature and scope of this exploration. These shifts are seen as linked with the social and industrial development of India as well as with her self-confessed changes of response to India during the twenty-three years of her stay. At the same time, her observations are identified as part of a literary tradition with which she has close connections-that of the fiction written by European expatriates in India.
The Expatriate tradition evolved out of Britain's encounter with India and found its most powerful expression in the genre of fiction. Through the two centuries of British rule fiction writers have analysed this encounter. Though some have supported and others criticised the Imperial policy of separatism with regard to India, nearly all the writers have raised significant questions about its validity. Being in a state of exile themselves, the possibility and desirability of assimilation in an alien land was a dominant concern in the writing of the expatriates. India became independent in 1947, but the concern persisted. Writers like Paul Scott, Philip Mason, Jon Godden and Rumer Godden continued to question the ideology that had kept the two races apart for two centuries and to analyse its effects on both.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is one of the European writers currently writing about India. Born in a Jewish family, she was aware, from her childhood, of her racial history of rootlessness, and having married a Parsee was exposed to a racial history of exile. She has also been an expatriate thrice over.
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