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She would sweat in a heat-hazed and dust-blurred afternoon, feel the breeze before a monsoon, sifting and soughing through the peepal trees, as she would amble soft-footedly on the tiles, gowned in a sari, raising her daughters, writing her books in a room from which the sun was shuttered out. In those days she lived in India.
She was unusually mobile over her eighty-plus years. Jewish by birth, she was a child of the 1920s, and born into Germany. As the simian-minded men of the Nazi Party rose to power she fled with her family to Britain in 1939. Others of her clan were starved to rot and gassed at Auschwitz. Learning of his mother’s murder, her father, Marcus Prawer, committed suicide.
But the end of wartime would herald kind days for Ruth. Stranded in London, she buried herself in books as a student at Queen Mary College. In her Master of Arts in English Literature one essay was: “The Short Story in England.” She was thriving in her twenties. For a student from Germany, tantalised by the words of Britain, an interest had formed, and the subsequence of which was that of her choosing a life as a woman-of-letters. A vocation, a higher calling, had vocalised – had called out and she had answered. At interview she unfolded, “I think in English. For me it’s a first language.”
At university in London she married another student. He was Cyrus Jhabvala, a chap of Parsi origin, a rose-sniffing romeo from India, who took his European bride with him on his return to Delhi in 1951. And Mrs Prawer Jhabvala would nest in the East till 1975. Jewish by culture, German by birth, educated by Britain, married into India. It was a cross-cultural melange. It was as if she were a righthander, insofar as being European, but by necessity became a lefthander when she found herself in a civilisation of the East. Her husband, “Jhab,” was an architect, and when motherhood ensued she bore him daughters.
Locked into another culture, Ruth, basically a European, but also a writer, lived observantly in India from her twenties to her forties. These were the 1950s to the 1970s when a post-colonial India was finding her feet. The imprints of the British were everywhere. Someone with the name Jishnu wanted to be Johnny and a South Indian like a Balasubramaniam was a Bunty. Yet there was interpenetration of cultures, too, with the Beatles, the mop-haired louts of British music, aviating to India in the 1960s for spiritual refurbishment. They were hankering after the soi-disant godmen of the East.
Even after she left India in 1975 out of a redoubling irritation––the backwardness of the place was no longer tolerable for her––she remained mentally latched to India, for when her body sat in New York her brain would refer often to her two decades in the hot and dusty howls of New Delhi.
“There is a cycle that Europeans – by European I mean all westerners, including Americans – tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm – everything Indian is marvellous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvellous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I'm up and sometimes I'm down.”
––from the essay “Myself in India” (1971)
In 1975 she absconded to America. Discommoded by the exit of his wife, her husband, Jhab, would fly seven-thousand miles from New Delhi to New York to see her. It was the price of being married to a vagrant. Itinerancy appealed to Ruth, who was uprooted from Germany as a child, and uprooted traumatically. She could never settle anywhere. But she had a man who was unfalteringly reliable.
Puny though she was, cylindrically thin, five-foot tall, there was no puniness in her writing. Her novel, “Heat and Dust,” was sufficiently praiseworthy to steal the Booker Prize of 1975. Writing for the screen elicited an Oscar in the mid-1980s, when she brought to the cinema the Forster novel, “A Room with a View.”
Because she migrated from Europe to Asia, and from Asia across to America, as a writer Ruth sallied forth into the topic of the encounter between cultures. With the springing urge of a frog she leapt from Germany to Britain to India to America, simmering in each society for years and decades at a time. She was perennially an outsider. In her fiction she charted the European in America, but where she excelled, particularly, was in assessing the European in India.
Another facet of India was rotated into view by Ruth. Her novels were a microscopy on the middle-class of the continent. Prior to her, the literature of India, as written in English, portrayed a land of poverty and rug-adorned elephants. Ruth told the English-reading world that India was a continent which had millions who were as sniffily fussy as any in the West. Married into a middle-class, she was qualified to comment on its attitudes.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died a couple of years ago in 2013. In the second breath of each obituary it was said that she was the writer of “Heat and Dust.” She was indeed, and in that novel she made a connection between the two ends of life :
“Maji sat down under a tree and took the old woman's head in her lap. She stroked it with her thick peasant hands and looked down into the dying face. Suddenly the old woman smiled, her toothless mouth opened with the same recognition as a baby's. Were her eyes not yet sightless – could she see Maji looking down at her? Or did she only feel her love and tenderness? Whatever it was, that smile seemed like a miracle to me.”
––from the novel “Heat and Dust” (1975) by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Competing interests:
No competing interests
20 November 2016
Jagdeep Singh Gandhi
Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
Worcester Royal Eye Unit
Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Worcester, UNITED KINGDOM
The writer as outsider –– Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
She would sweat in a heat-hazed and dust-blurred afternoon, feel the breeze before a monsoon, sifting and soughing through the peepal trees, as she would amble soft-footedly on the tiles, gowned in a sari, raising her daughters, writing her books in a room from which the sun was shuttered out. In those days she lived in India.
She was unusually mobile over her eighty-plus years. Jewish by birth, she was a child of the 1920s, and born into Germany. As the simian-minded men of the Nazi Party rose to power she fled with her family to Britain in 1939. Others of her clan were starved to rot and gassed at Auschwitz. Learning of his mother’s murder, her father, Marcus Prawer, committed suicide.
But the end of wartime would herald kind days for Ruth. Stranded in London, she buried herself in books as a student at Queen Mary College. In her Master of Arts in English Literature one essay was: “The Short Story in England.” She was thriving in her twenties. For a student from Germany, tantalised by the words of Britain, an interest had formed, and the subsequence of which was that of her choosing a life as a woman-of-letters. A vocation, a higher calling, had vocalised – had called out and she had answered. At interview she unfolded, “I think in English. For me it’s a first language.”
At university in London she married another student. He was Cyrus Jhabvala, a chap of Parsi origin, a rose-sniffing romeo from India, who took his European bride with him on his return to Delhi in 1951. And Mrs Prawer Jhabvala would nest in the East till 1975. Jewish by culture, German by birth, educated by Britain, married into India. It was a cross-cultural melange. It was as if she were a righthander, insofar as being European, but by necessity became a lefthander when she found herself in a civilisation of the East. Her husband, “Jhab,” was an architect, and when motherhood ensued she bore him daughters.
Locked into another culture, Ruth, basically a European, but also a writer, lived observantly in India from her twenties to her forties. These were the 1950s to the 1970s when a post-colonial India was finding her feet. The imprints of the British were everywhere. Someone with the name Jishnu wanted to be Johnny and a South Indian like a Balasubramaniam was a Bunty. Yet there was interpenetration of cultures, too, with the Beatles, the mop-haired louts of British music, aviating to India in the 1960s for spiritual refurbishment. They were hankering after the soi-disant godmen of the East.
Even after she left India in 1975 out of a redoubling irritation––the backwardness of the place was no longer tolerable for her––she remained mentally latched to India, for when her body sat in New York her brain would refer often to her two decades in the hot and dusty howls of New Delhi.
“There is a cycle that Europeans – by European I mean all westerners, including Americans – tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm – everything Indian is marvellous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvellous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I'm up and sometimes I'm down.”
––from the essay “Myself in India” (1971)
In 1975 she absconded to America. Discommoded by the exit of his wife, her husband, Jhab, would fly seven-thousand miles from New Delhi to New York to see her. It was the price of being married to a vagrant. Itinerancy appealed to Ruth, who was uprooted from Germany as a child, and uprooted traumatically. She could never settle anywhere. But she had a man who was unfalteringly reliable.
Puny though she was, cylindrically thin, five-foot tall, there was no puniness in her writing. Her novel, “Heat and Dust,” was sufficiently praiseworthy to steal the Booker Prize of 1975. Writing for the screen elicited an Oscar in the mid-1980s, when she brought to the cinema the Forster novel, “A Room with a View.”
Because she migrated from Europe to Asia, and from Asia across to America, as a writer Ruth sallied forth into the topic of the encounter between cultures. With the springing urge of a frog she leapt from Germany to Britain to India to America, simmering in each society for years and decades at a time. She was perennially an outsider. In her fiction she charted the European in America, but where she excelled, particularly, was in assessing the European in India.
Another facet of India was rotated into view by Ruth. Her novels were a microscopy on the middle-class of the continent. Prior to her, the literature of India, as written in English, portrayed a land of poverty and rug-adorned elephants. Ruth told the English-reading world that India was a continent which had millions who were as sniffily fussy as any in the West. Married into a middle-class, she was qualified to comment on its attitudes.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died a couple of years ago in 2013. In the second breath of each obituary it was said that she was the writer of “Heat and Dust.” She was indeed, and in that novel she made a connection between the two ends of life :
“Maji sat down under a tree and took the old woman's head in her lap. She stroked it with her thick peasant hands and looked down into the dying face. Suddenly the old woman smiled, her toothless mouth opened with the same recognition as a baby's. Were her eyes not yet sightless – could she see Maji looking down at her? Or did she only feel her love and tenderness? Whatever it was, that smile seemed like a miracle to me.”
––from the novel “Heat and Dust” (1975) by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Competing interests: No competing interests