‘East into Upper East’
From East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s collection of Delhi-New York stories:
When Farid found her, Farida really was sitting under a tree. She was in a pure white sari, and she looked the way she always did: supremely elegant…
They had always had showdowns… In their youth these upheavals had ended in excited lovemaking… They lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from their English neighbors’ cooking… the odors of Farida’s scents and lotions and of the dregs of Farid’s drinks… he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way…
When they had been in London… she decided to organize a line of… samosas, pakoras, kebabs to be sold in the delicatessen departments of leading London stores… She had bought a wholesale supply of cardboard boxes…. packed them with delicacies she had fried, and spent the rest of the day delivering them to the stores… she was exhausted from her hours of cooking, and from her slow and expensive delivery rounds… the cost of the ingredients, the packaging and the taxi were destroying the profit she had expected… [Farid] seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet…
The next moment — well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image — there she was, holy under a tree…
I’m just at the beginning of the book, but so far Jhabvala’s style is quiet and controlled, with greater emphasis on novel situations than characters. She tells more than shows, choosing sweeping summary over conversations which flesh out motivation and backstory.
Jhabvala won the Booker in ‘75 for Heat and Dust:
She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany to Marcus who was Polish-Jew and Eleanora Prawer who was German Jew…She… married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect, in 1951. The couple moved to Delhi… and they had three daughters: Ava, Firoza and Renana… Jhabvala, unlike Naipaul, wasn’t drawn to India by ancestry or, as in Forster’s case, by a desire to move beyond a complacent Western liberalism. She was in Delhi, as she wrote, only because her husband was there, and she was interested not in India but in herself in India. [Wiki]
on Friday, April 17th, 2009, 7:00 am in Literature › 
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got that impression when I read Heat and Dust.
Where do you stand on Jhabvala, in general?
Haven’t read any of her other work yet. You?
She is more annoying than the mother india bitches(both movie and book)
Read her if you are interested in that psyche and want to take notes and be ready for a response.
O/W if you think she has any insights forget it.
I have a complicated relationship with Jhabvala.
Her voice is always foreign, but she is intimately familiar with the Indian upper classes. She has often nailed descriptions of Indians with accuracy and insight you would think only Indians were capable of. There is none of the cringe-inducing self-deprecation, patronization or moral zealousness of all the other bored, book-writing, do-gooder white wives in India over the past century. Jhabvala didn’t have a political agenda and didn’t care to claim a place in the pantheon of writers on India. She truly was only interested in herself in India. And whatever you might call her (self-absorbed, elitist) she has explored herself in her surroundings with far more honesty and originality than any of the other white wives. It has something to do with the fact that she isn’t a textbook representation of white privilege. As a Holocaust escapee who grew up in England, she’s been a foreigner/refugee/outsider-looking-in her whole life, no matter where she happened to be. Living in India for so long was just coincidental for her.
And yet, I’ll never really like her because while she’s not an Orientalist, she is an old white liberal. She writes with a detachment that reaches the level of irresponsibility. I guess I’m just a firm believer in the idea that privilege + power of influence = moral obligation to deconstruct both those things. When she was criticized for her depiction of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in Jefferson in Paris, she said something to the effect of “Slavery was a horrible institution, but it’s not hard to imagine that it also created [master-slave] families.” I can’t find the quote anymore, but I swear she said something along those lines. If you’ve seen the film, you know what an egregious cop-out that kind of rationalization is for being so insensitive in treating such a loaded topic. She has the same attitude towards Indian life and history.
I think more than Jhabvala herself, I’m frustrated with the audience that has, over the years, turned her into some fucking unicorn of film and literature. Though it’s important to always be mindful of foreign perspectives, Indians shouldn’t set any bars with the work of a foreigner who doesn’t really give a shit about them. In one Hansal Mehta’s words:
Shruti said: She truly was only interested in herself in India.
I don’t really see anything wrong with that, artist-wise. It’s totally valid.
I love her writing, or at least, I did years ago when I first discovered it. There is a devastating short story, the name of which escapes me, about an upper class Indian woman who loves this man that completely uses her up, she follows him, he’s kind of a loser, but her fascination is too strong. She captures the mental, well, space for lack of a better word, of someone who is in that kind of relationship with such cutting truth, it’s hard to read. I don’t give a darn about politics when it comes to writing. I only want to be transported.
That was precisely my point. I listed it as one of her pluses.
Her forthrightness about it, I mean. Her contemporaries throughout the ages have written about India with airs of morality. Though she never much cared about India, she did not have pretenses about herself either.