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The Householder by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: book review

 




The Householder by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1960) is set in New Delhi, India. 

 

Prem, newly arrived in New Delhi, is a poorly-paid Hindi teacher at a local college and his wife Indu is pregnant. Prem has recently become a householder and finds these responsibilities challenging. He wants to ask his landlady Mrs. Seigal for a reduction in rent but is afraid to do so. 

 

Prem befriends a German boy, Hans Loewe, wearing the traditional lederhosen – leather shorts – who rents a room from his landlady Kitty in ‘the best part of New Delhi’ where he is studying to reach ‘the spiritual greatness of the Indian yogis.’ Prem is a little envious. Then he sees his room that: ‘It was the untidiest room Prem had ever seen.’

 

Prem’s mother comes to visit and although he is happy about that, ‘the atmosphere in his small flat became rather strained’ and his wife retires to bed earlier and earlier. His mother is not impressed and offers to stay with him permanently to look after the household. He wondered what it would be like to live with her again, being ‘looked after by his mother and with no responsibilities … Yet he knew he did not want that at all.’ Besides, his sisters need her too. 

 

When Prem visits his landlady, he realizes that her life is not as happy as he had imagined and feels sorry for her: ‘How little one knows of other’s sorrows, he thought.’ Everything was an illusion. Was his life an illusion too? Perhaps his own life wasn’t as bad as he had imagined. Everyone has worries.   

 

Yes, everyone has worries. While Prem aspires to be like the European people of privilege, they too have their worries. This is a comedic, well-written view of a slice of life in New Delhi in the late 1950s by German-born British-American Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013) who married an Indian architect in 1951 and moved to New Delhi. She is the only person – male or female – to win the Man Booker Prize for literature (for Heat and Dust in 1975) 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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