Heat and Dust

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's powerful and beautifully written novel of an "outrageous" Anglo-Indian romance in 1920s Khatm and Satipur won the Booker Prize in 1983. The author has crafted parallel tales of two young women, distantly related and separated by two generations. Anne, the story's narrator, travels to India to discover more about the mystery surrounding her grandfather's first wife, Olivia.Douglas Rivers, an upper echelon English civil servant, married and brought his adored wife, Olivia, with him to India in 1923, during the British Raj. She was a beautiful, spoiled and spirited young woman, who found it difficult to adjust to life in the British colonial community of Satipur. Feeling suffocated by the inbred group she was forced to socialize with, Olivia longed for independence, intellectual stimulation and a more passionate life. She hoped that a baby would solve her problems but found it more difficult to become pregnant than she had thought. Shortly after their arrivel in India, Douglas, Olivia and some of the more important members of the community were invited to the palace of the Nawab of Khatm and she was immediately intrigued by the handsome, charismatic prince. He courted her friendship aggressively and then the friendship turned passionate. When faced with a crisis Olivia was forced to make life altering decisions which would have far reaching effects and cause scandal throughout British India and England that would last for generations.Anne stays in the town where her grandfather and Olivia lived fifty years before. Trying to piece together the puzzle that was Olivia and discover what motivated her to change her life so drastically, Anne visits the places her "step-grandmother" frequented and interviews people who knew her or knew of her. She also reads the letters and journals that Olivia wrote so long ago, and oddly enough, Anne ventures into experiences similar to Olivia's adventures, but more acceptable in our modern time. Anne's spiritual and sensual journey in the 1970s parallels Olivia's as the color, heat, exotic landscapes, and people of India penetrate her western upbringing. Anne writes in her own diary: "Fortunately, during my first few months here, I kept a journal, so I have some record of my early impressions. If I were to try and recollect them now, I might not be able to do so. They are no longer the same because I myself am no longer the same. India always changes people, and I have been no exception."This short and delicately written novel packs a powerful punch and paints an extraordinary portrait of British colonials in India, with their sense of cultural and moral superiority over the local population. However, even more compelling and unusual, is the story of two women, generations apart, who follow similar paths under the spell of India.JANA

“ Heat and dust,” centers around two women several generations apart. The narrator travels to India to investigate the scandalous past of her step grandmother Olivia who came to India during the time of the time of the British Raj.Ruth Prawer Jhabvala does an excellent job with the storytelling- the book won the Booker prize. We get to know the main characters really well. The pace of the book is slow and even though much of it deals with the day to day and the mundane,it held my interest.

Enjoyed the author's depiction of life in India at two distinct periods in its history - the twilight of British rule and more modern times- as seen through the eyes of privileged British citizens, a minor local nobleman and ordinary Indians. The characters from diverse backgrounds in each period draw us in. I do wish, however, that the author had not ended the story as quickly as she did. I wanted to learn more about the characters and what happened to them.

Well written and interesting, but after all the build up, I was disappointed by the ending, which didn’t seem to address the entire context of the plot.

I liked the parallel stories recounted in the same place but different timing. It's has allowed me to have a view of India and the life under the colony. The weather conditions are hard and affect people's moods. That is described in detail with a very nice prose.

A wonderful book, beautifully written. I already had this book as I had given it when I was teaching a Cambridge Proficiency in English class. I bought a copy for myself to read again and this copy has been sent to a friend who is on a cruise and wanted an interesting book to read at night. I am waiting to hear from her but I am sure she will enjoy it as much as I have.

There is hardly anything here in this book that I could recommend. I was bored from the first page and found my boredom increasing as I continued reading. Indeed, this read was painful. However, tastes differ and I dare say that some may find this a revolutionary piece of work, deserving of accolades even.

Jhabvala is a master of evocative writing that you can feel in your bones. This book is a masterpiece not only in evoking the complex English-Indian interaction but also the way it is told and the convergence of the past and present.Read the book and watch the movie - available on YouTube. Or do it the other way round. Delightful!!

Amazon was the only place I could acquire a copy of this book. My "used" edition lacks its dust jacket but is otherwise in excellent condition.It took me a few days, after reading Heat and Dust to formulate my thoughts. Haunting, enigmatic, spellbinding, are adjectives critics use when they don't understand what's in front of them, and they don't apply here.I admit to not having heard of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala until the summer of 2019 when I embarked on buying and reading all the Booker Prize winnners. Heat and Dust was one of a mere two books shortlisted for the prize in 1975; although just one year earlier, judges had been spoilt for choice and shared out the prize for the first time.Scouring shops for a second-hand copy of Heat and Dust, I spotted a few Ruth Prawer Jhabvala titles, but my first sample of her work was watching Merchant Ivory Productions' Remains of the Day for which she wrote the screenplay (after it too had won the Booker Prize). Yet the novelist with whom she is perhaps most closely associated is E. M. Forster, having adapted several of his books for the silver screen; and like him she takes foreigners adrift as a theme in this novel.Most of the English characters in Heat and Dust are on journeys of self-discovery. All of their quests, however, appear to have seized up in the heat and dust of the title. Chid is a Hindu convert whose experiences in India lead him back to Western values and a retreat to England. Harry, likewise, is physically ruined by India and is drawn home. Two female characters ultimately stay on the subcontinent but voyage north, high into the Himalayas – an ascension from the world below, particularly the heat and dust.The novel consists of two interrelated plots, which are easily followable, the narrative being split between 1923 (principally concerning Olivia) and the present-day, presumably the 1970s (involving the unnamed female narrator).I heard echoes of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, with its unchristened narrator who is intrigued – not to say haunted – by the memory of the dead first wife of her English (and here the parallel comes to an abrupt end) grandfather, her name being not Rebecca but Olivia.There are many points of similarity in Olivia's and the later female narrator's journeys. The way each chooses to handle the contrasting circumstances of the India in which she finds herself (pre- and post-independence), and the way the author subtly points up these parallels simply by juxtaposing them, strengthens the novel.Disturbing relationships arise throughout both time frames: between the Nawab – a minor prince – and his homosexual house "guest" of three years, Harry; between the Nawab and Olivia; between the present-day narrator and her married Indian host, Inder Lal, and also with her extraordinarily endowed roommate, Chid:"[Chid] also needs sex very badly and seems to take it for granted that I will give it to him the same way I give him my food. I have never had such a feeling of being used.Every now and then he gets those monstrous erections of his and I have to fight him off (quite apart from anything else it's just too hot)."Such scenes of casual – verging on abusive – sex with Chid were, as I understand it, excised from the author's own screenplay to the 1983 adaptation (another Merchant Ivory Production). Her filmic counterpart is thus saved the ignominy of conducting affairs with two men interchangeably, sometimes in the same room:"After Chid moved back in again, Inder Lal at first felt shy about his nightly visits. But I have assured him that it is all right because Chid is mostly sleeping. He just lies there and groans and it is difficult to believe that it is the same person who performed all those tremendous feats on me."Here and elsewhere the narrator's privacy (and morality) apparently deteriorate to nothing – this is a world where onlookers and midwives know the inner workings of a woman's body before she knows herself.Is the ending, then, an attempt to reestablish privacy? Escaping from the heat and dust, Olivia and the narrator are similarly - and, certainly in the latter case, willingly - exiled to the mountains. But when does privacy become imprisonment and defeat? The final pages were strongly reminiscent of the alpine climax in D H Lawrence's Women In Love, with the prospect of death unspoken but inescapable.In the end, India cast its spell over Olivia and her proselyte, in a way that it didn't quite for Chid or Harry or this reader.

I opened Heat and Dust hoping that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 1975 Man Booker Prize winning novel would provide a fresh take on a theme explored by Paul Scott in The Jewel in the Crown (the first book in his Raj Quartet series) and of course that classic of the cultural divide; E M Forster's A Passage to India.In many of the tributes written about Jhabvala on her death in April 2013, she was described as a "cold-eyed observer of people and places" and a writer whose status as a non-native inhabitant meant she could view the country with unemotional detachment.Detached and unemotional are indeed good descriptions for this tale of the cultural divide between colonisers and the natives they govern and of those who try to break free from conventions and restrictions.The story is that of an un-named woman who travels to India in an attempt to unravel the mystery of her step grandmother Olivia during the rule of the British in the 1920s. She deciphers the story mainly from letters Olivia wrote to her sister and by visiting places where her grandmother lived. Gradually we learn that Olivia's story is one of disgrace and scandal Feeling smothered by the restrictions of the British way of life in India, she fell under the spell of a Nawab (an Indian prince) for whom she abandoned her husband . Fifty years later her grand-daughter, though more independent and less naive than Olivia similarly becomes seduced by India. She too crosses the divide.The novel has none of the tension found in Scott's novel nor does it have the subtleties of A Passage to India. It doesn't so much end as simply peters out inconclusively leaving me feeling decidedly underwhelmed. It's not what I expect of a prize-winning novel.

I read this book as it was on a recommended reading list given by my tour company prior to a recent visit to India. I could recognise so many features of the places I visited and also the descriptions of the Indian people and their ways in this book. However, I found the story line uninspiring and a little disappointing. How did Olivia end her days? Was she happy? What of Douglas? What was his reaction to her leaving? What was the princes reaction? There were no winners in this sad tale it would seem apart from the princes mother.

This is my favourite 'colonial' novel set in India from all the Booker Prize novels set in India (The God Of Small Things being the ultimate Indian booker prize winner by Arundhati Roy). It's such a pleasure to read and quite short so you can get through it in a weekend. I just re-read it whilst travelling in India on my own and found it to be the perfect companion for a female traveller. It's non just about the liberation of India but the liberation of women. The prose is easy-to-read but stunning in parts, a real must read.

Wasn’t quite what I espected and whilst a good read, took ages to get going. Then seemed to end abruptly.