Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I try to find an explanation for him. I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life. This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything--motor cars, refrigerators--come here to such a place where there is nothing?

Heat and Dust is the story of Olivia, the wife of a young English administrator during the Raj, who leaves her husband for the charismatic Nawab, a minor prince. This momentous act serves as the book's climax, but it's explained at the very beginning, so this is one of those books who makes the reader ask the question, How did we get here? For Olivia, her personal motivations intersect with the great forces that push and pull between the British and their Indian subjects. The Nawab is very charming and magnetic, though flighty: he lives with another young British man whose ardor for the Nawab approaches, or simply is, homosexual obsession, and he charms Olivia, too. In fact, the Nawab--powerful but jealous of the more powerful English, sneaky, needy, selfish--is the book's most interesting character; he seduces us, too, though we might flatter ourselves that we have better judgment than Olivia.

But Olivia, too, sees in the Nawab an escape from the stolid, condescending British empire, whose worst qualities soon become apparent in her apparatchik husband, Douglas. As Douglas and the other colonials talk smugly about the Indians as if they were unruly children, Olivia finds herself identifying with the Nawab's rebellious and, to her, exotic spirit. Their first dalliance occurs at a shrine famous for its association with suttees, wives who ritually throw themselves on their husband's funeral parlors. At a party, Olivia unnerves everyone by insisting she would commit this most romantic of acts for Douglas, but soon it becomes clear to her that Douglas neither wants nor deserves this. Yet perhaps the Nawab, and India, are worthy of that kind of passion, which the British have meticulously repressed.

Olivia's story is told by her step-granddaughter who, fifty years after Olivia abandoned her husband, has gone to India to understand why she did what she did. She arrives in a 1970's India that is quite different from Olivia's time; the British have left, and the Nawab's palace is in ruins, as are the palaces of many minor princes who were essentially propped up by the British regime. Westerners no longer come to India for their political ambitions but, like the American Buddhist sage she begins sleeping with, spiritual ones. Somehow, even though the context has changed completely, she finds herself retracing Olivia's steps almost exactly, becoming pregnant--not by a prince but by her landlord--and heading up into the mountains to have her child. Prawer Jhabvala seems to suggest that, even as the world changes, the anxious interdependence of the Western World and India persists, both beguiling and repelling those whites who long for something they believe India can provide.

Heat and Dust has an obvious analog in A Passage to India, but it also reminded me quite a bit of W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil, a novel set not in India but in Hong Kong, but whose central character--the wife of a diplomat whose exposure to a foreign culture transforms her--is much like Olivia. I didn't know until reading this that Prawer Jhabvala was not Indian--she took her husband's last name--but I also didn't know that she was a vital third partner in Merchant-Ivory Productions, and wrote nearly all of the director-producer's novels for decades and decades. Heat and Dust, which became a Merchant-Ivory movie in the 1980's, fits really neatly within that universe.