Deterioration of Morality in Jhabvala's Heat and Dust

Abstract

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013) is a well known name because her elaboration of experiences in India and writing novels and tales on Indian subjects. Heat and Dust (1975) is a very well known novel by Jhabvala. It was the novel which brought the Booker Prize in 1975, the year of its publication, was something of a watershed for this expatriate novelist.  This most celebrated novel came at the end of a series of three novels which dwell upon the dilemma of western women living in India. More strikingly after this novel Jhabvala took her final flight for the United States after living in India for 25 years of her married life. Heat and Dust is again a sordid tale of misadventures of the Europeans coming to India either on administrative task or for spiritual enlightenment or on some other adventurous mission. Jhabvala presents the European individuals especially women suffering from the agony of a tragic obsession with India-the country that metamorphoses every being and everything. In Heat and Dust, the British individual identity was tarnished by a married English woman, Olivia Rivers. Olivia got exploited by a fading bankrupt dynamic ‘Nawab’ in whose pursuit she became the fallen Eve of the high English moral society. The bridge between the two societies widened as this kind of a relationship was not accepted, especially in the rigid Indian society, where marriage held certain ‘moral values’.