1975 Booker Prize joint winner, and when I started it, the shortest Booker winner I hadn't yet read.
⭐⭐½
An only-just-postcolonial novel about the British in India, by an author who described herself as "a Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis," and who was married to an Indian man.
Some friends will see from that quote why I might have been interested in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but I read this very short book mostly to improve my count of Booker winners (this being only the 14th), as I'm active in a group where many people have read more. That characterisation - along with her scriptwriting work for Merchant Ivory - was pretty much all I remembered about the author at the time I started reading Heat and Dust. (And I only learnt a few months ago that she wasn't, as I'd always previously assumed, Anglo-Indian.) About ¾ of the way through the book, I read more about RPJ and her attitude to India, and this at least partly cancelled out one of the interpretations of the book I'd been building up to that point.
Although I was intensely engaged in note-taking and thinking all through the book, the analysis was almost all I got out of it. I found the prose boring, and the parallels between the two protagonists' stories became heavy-handed.
There are two alternating narratives in Heat and Dust. One is told in the third-person, about Olivia, the bored, naïve and sheltered new young wife of Douglas, a British colonial official in West Bengal; we are told in the book's opening sentence that she ran off with a Nawab in 1923. The other is a first-person narrative contemporary to the book's writing in the 1970s, by the unnamed British granddaughter of Douglas' second marriage (whom I'll refer to as the narrator or the granddaughter.) She is in her late 20s or early 30s and travels to India, with a cache of Olivia's letters, to see the scenes of this family scandal which is now beginning to be talked about, and to experience some of the 'simplicity' of India that attracted young Westerners on the hippie trail.
No less than five of the first ten Booker Prize winners (1969-77) address the British Empire and its end. I haven't read any of the others, but it's clear from these wins that it was a big topic for British literary fiction at the time, and was predominantly written about from the British viewpoint (all the winners other than V.S. Naipaul were British or Irish). I had never been very keen to read these novels, as I expected the writing about India and Indian people would be clumsy from a contemporary viewpoint, and I didn't expect there would be much to learn about the old India hands that I hadn't already seen in old documentaries and light novels read when I was younger. Starting Heat & Dust, I wondered if it might be different because the author had lived in post-independence India for 24 years with her Indian architect husband - surely very a different experience from that of colonial staff or tourists.
Through most of the book, before I'd done more research, I developed a tentative hypothesis that Prawer Jhabvala a was notably progressive and perceptive in her attitudes by the standards of her time, and was subtly critiquing the granddaughter and people of her generation from similar old colonial service families - and the hippies - who thought they were more open-minded about India than they actually were. Thus, the stereotypes in the third-person story about Olivia were present because the granddaughter was telling that story and because that was how she, and the sources from which she got the information, saw the people involved. (The wilful, coercively seductive Muslim Nawab, for instance, seems to fit the old desert sheikh stereotype in romance.) This made it seem like a potentially rather interesting piece of literature for its time, and such layered complexity would explain its Booker win (although some 2010s commentators, such as those who criticise the lionising of sexist or abusive male narrators, e.g in Rebecca Solnit's essay on Lolita, would argue that the widespread critical elevation of such narrators is at best questionable). I was never 100% sure about this analysis, and was planning to write a review in which I outlined both that interpretation and a simpler, less favourable one. 1975 must not have been a great year for British and Commonwealth literature anyway, as the Booker shortlist consisted of only two titles. Even though what I read about Prawer Jhabvala and her feelings about India pointed towards the simpler interpretation - in which the granddaughter's attitudes have a fair bit in common with the author's, and in which the story of Olivia and the Nawab is told straight - one could perhaps argue the book still has something going for it *because* it has the flexibility to be interpreted in more than one way.
Pankaj Mishra's 2004 NYT review of another Prawer Jhabvala book refers to a 1980s essay of hers which said "'how intolerable India -- the idea, the sensation of it -- can become' to someone like her… Jhabvala spoke of the intense heat, the lack of a social life and the 'great animal of poverty and backwardness' that she couldn't avoid". (Heat & Dust does contain a lot of hackneyed scenes of vast crowds and poverty - but at the same time everyone here whom I've heard talk about going to India, including British people of Indian descent, has said that it's one of the things you notice at first because of the contrast - so I'm not totally sure what the correct take on that is, except that it's overused while other less stereotypical aspects may go ignored in western writing about India.) I can certainly relate to the dissatisfaction of living in a place you don't like, and to some other ways which Mishra describes her: "the confident exile -- of the much displaced person who, finally secure in her inner world and reconciled to her isolation, looks askance at people longing for fulfillment in other cultures and landscapes", or " When fully absorbed by self-analysis, the perennial outsider usually ends up regarding all emotional and intellectual commitment as folly. Such cold-eyed clarity, useful to a philosopher or mystic, can only be a disadvantage for the novelist, who needs to enter, at least temporarily, her characters' illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page." And these days more than ever, lack of respect for a place where you've spent a lot of time will win you few friends. (IME it takes about as long to wear off as the time you lived there.) I think there may be limited use in reading this novel these days, especially for those who find the writing as uninspiring as I did; to learn about India in the 1920s or the 70s it's probably better to read non-fiction, and its frequently stereotypical attitudes will annoy some readers.
Where there may be interesting things going on are in the cynical caricatures of young British hippies by a westerner who's been in India longer, and in feminism / attitudes to women.
When the granddaughter tries to explain the hippies to her Indian landlord (a few years younger than herself), it sounds as if she has a little affinity with them: "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." [Directly following this is one of the very few occasions in which a convincing Indian voice appears, in his reply, "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? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds."
A hippie couple who came to India after being swept up by a swami's talk in London on universal love can be summarised thus:
"Why did you come?" I asked her.
"To find peace." She laughed grimly: "But all I found was dysentery."
These young travellers don't seem to be particularly well off, so the reader doesn't have to endure the most tedious aspects of the 21st-century "gap yah" caricature. (Some even have regional accents!) This is instead about an absurd gulf between romantic expectation and physical reality, and how some Indian spiritual teachers seem to be either milking a cash-cow, or are just oblivious to realities: e.g. apparently training up a white lad as a mendicant sadhu, when Indian people are unlikely to give money to a white British man begging. Even the 1970s episodes seem to echo the old colonial idea of the 'white man's graveyard': the narrative intimates that the climate and the bugs are even bad for westerners who've been in India for several years, although an Indian doctor argues with the granddaughter that "this climate does not suit you people too well. And let alone you people, it does not suit even us."
One feature of 1960s-70s hippie culture that has emerged from the shadows in recent years is how some women felt exploited because "free love" meant they felt obliged to have sex with men they didn't really want. Heat & Dust contains the first example I remember seeing from something written at the time: the unwantedness is clear, but so is a certain amount of buying-into the spiritual side.
I don't think it's entirely a "white feminist" book, in that nebulous 21st century term on which I will certainly not claim to be any kind of expert. Perhaps there is a certain amount of cheap hippyish respect for natural local medicine and so forth, but there is a theme running through the book being subtly positive about greater solidarity between women. If Olivia had sought a respectable acquaintance with the Begum, or if she had gone to Simla with Beth, perhaps she would never have got into the mess she did with the Nawab. The two Bertha-from-Jane-Eyre figures still don't get a lot to say but they are at least shown to be victims rather than monsters; the granddaughter wants to arrange better treatment for the one in the 1970s, and she seems to be genuinely open to befriending some of the Indian women she meets (though we can't tell what they make of her). Other than a doctor or two, and possibly the Nawab's London-based grandson, the Indian men don't come out of this awfully well, in terms of specific characters or general descriptions. Though neither do most of the white British men, other than possibly Douglas, who had "the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour" (too normie and straightforward for Olivia ultimately?). The granddaughter sounds kind of optimistic at the end, but I felt the author wasn't very convinced by her either; I think RPJ treats everyone with detached cynicism, although some more politely than others.
I'm not sure I'd really recommend Heat & Dust for anything other than some sort of academic project on early British post-colonial literature. I mean, the second I reached the end, I heard myself saying as if by a reflex, "thank fuck that's finished … that was a bit crap" - though hopefully the above paragraphs show it's not quite that simple, and I did kind of enjoy trying to analyse it. It is very short, so at least I wasn't bored for that long. And Booker completists will read it despite its not having aged terribly well.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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