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Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: book review


 

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1976) is set in India during the 1920s. 

 

The story is narrated by the granddaughter of Douglas Crawford, an English civil servant in India. He married Olivia, the sister of Beth, both beautiful Englishwomen. The narrator, growing up, was not allowed to talk about Olivia, her grandfather’s first wife. The narrator’s mother was Douglas’ second wife, Tessie, and her father was their son who moved to England with Tessie when he was 12 years old. In Surrey, Tessie and her son lived with Olivia’s sister Beth – Tessie and Beth were now both widows.

 

Fortunately, the narrator kept a journal that begins in February 1923 when she leaves England and arrives in Bombay – now called Mumbai – as a married woman with children, remembering her first impressions of her grandparents in India. But this is not the narrator’s story – this is the truth about Olivia and that scandal. 

 

Olivia met the Nawab, an Indian prince (‘just a minor prince’) who was fond of entertaining Europeans, at one of his dinner parties and was instantly intrigued and smitten. At the same time, an Englishman named Harry was admiring her husband, Douglas. Four days later, the Nawab and Harry visit Olivia’s home. She was so excited that her husband thought she had a fever. The Nawab stayed all day; Harry stayed longer – months longer. 

 

The Nawab woos Olivia aggressively. Pregnant, her unknowing husband thinks her nausea is a result of the heat. Olivia does not know the child’s paternity. What is she to do? Aware of the scandal that it could cause, she had to make a rapid decision. No matter what she would do, the memory of it would outlive her and create a great deal of dust – as much as the infamous dust storms of India. 

 

Far from her initial comedic novels of India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes a turn at courting controversy in this story, with great acclaim, as Heat and Dust is her most successful novel, winning the Man Booker Prize for literature in 1975. 

 

German-born British-American Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013) who married an Indian architect in 1951 and moved to New Delhi is the only person – male or female – to win the Man Booker Prize for literature and two Oscars (for best adapted screenplay of E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View in 1986 and E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End in 1992). She was nominated for a third Oscar and won many other literary awards. She died in her home in New York at the age of 85. 


 






 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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Martina Nicolls is an Australian author and international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, and foreign aid audits and evaluations. She lives in Paris.



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