Portrayal of India in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust

Abstract

R.P. Jhabvala tried to provide a representative picture of the country through her novel Heat and Dust. With her keen insight she had portrayed two different points of time, one of colonial India and the other of after Independence. She described Indian society and culture with her poverty, superstitions, illiteracy, dirt and squalor, food habits, customs like sati, the condition of widows and the role of females in the family. She had also highlighted the problem of fake spiritualism in the country. She tried to highlight how freedom from foreign rule could not bring the desired changes in the realities of the country. She also talked about the traditional taboos of Indian society. Each and every aspect of reality is caught quite convincingly by the author. This paper is an attempt to discuss the portrayal of India by R.P. Jhabvala in her Booker Prize winning novel Heat and Dust. The research being qualitative in nature, the researcher has used descriptive, analytical and interpretive methods in his research.