Heat and Dust continues the early Booker fascination with post-colonial Britain. ‘Losing’ the Empire must have been more traumatic than we now realise looking back from the perspective of the twenty-first century: the novels of the time suggest that there was a lot of processing to be done to come to terms with the trauma involved. Was colonialism really such a damaging, dehumanising process for both the peoples being governed and the generations of British men and their families who served overseas?
Told in alternating chapters the book moves between the 1920s and the 1970s as the unnamed narrator recounts the scandalous history of her step-grandmother and her own parallel experiences in India either side of independence. In the 1920s thread of the novel, Olivia, a young and rather vacuous English bride, becomes bored with the narrow life of a imperial civil administrator’s wife, and seeks adventure in the company of the Nawab, a dangerously charming minor royal, described as “the worst type of ruler – the worst type of Indian – you can have“. Their relationship leads to a scandal that echoes down the decades to the narrator’s generation. She sets out to explore the places where the family secrets were first played out, armed with some papers and letters from Olivia to her sister Marcia, letters which are retold as the earlier part of the story. As she does so she shares some of Olivia’s experiences, and makes some of her own mistakes.
I must admit I made the rookie mistake of assuming that the author was from India due to her name. In fact Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was European, but married an Indian man and lived there for 25 years. Does that matter? Very much so as it happens. The novel’s entire point of view is that of the white settler. It concerns itself with the problems of living in a hot and dusty country when one is not used to the weather, the food, the religion or the customs. The focus is on the impact living in India has on the English men and women in the country, rather than the impact of being governed by Englishmen has on India and Indians:
“Although the Major was so sympathetic to India, his piece sounds like a warning. He said that one has to be very determined to withstand–to stand up to–India. And the most vulnerable, he said, are always those who love her best. There are many ways of loving India, many things to love her for…but all, said the Major, are dangerous for the European who allows himself to love too much. India always, he said, finds out the weak spot and presses on it. …Yes, concluded the Major, it is all very well to love and admire India–intellectually, aesthetically, he did not mention sexually but he must have been aware of that factor too–but always with a virile, measured, European feeling. One should never, he warned, allow oneself to become softened (like Indians) by an excess of feeling; because the moment that happens — the moment one exceeds one’s measure– one is in danger of being dragged over to the other side. … He who loved India so much, knew her so well, chose to spend the end of his days here! But she always remained for him an opponent, even sometimes an enemy, to be guarded and if necessary fought against from without and, especially, from within: from within one’s own being.”
Of course there are Indians in the novel, and they are given voices, but they are almost all secondary characters, and mostly remain enigmatic. The women in purdah in the Nawab’s palace are almost entirely voiceless. But the essential theme of the novel is the question of what it means to be a white colonialist woman in India, not what it means to be Indian. Jhabvala wrote several screenplays for the film directors Ivory and Merchant, who are notorious for their sanitised, romanticised portraits of colonial India, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the picture we are shown here is of an India that is unthreatening, picturesque, at times almost quaint.
I suspect that the narrative technique of telling essentially the same story twice, once in the 1920s and again in the 1970s, is intended to invite the reader to consider what has changed. The narrator is unmarried, and her discrete affair with a local married man does not seem to cause the scandal it once had done. (I am not sure why English authors found sex between Indian men and English women so fascinating) But any connection between the Englishwomen and their Indian lovers remains unconvincing. There’s a suggestion of sexual tourism in the relationships. The end of empire allows the narrator to embrace India in a way Olivia was unable to – for example she sleeps outside at night because of the heat, which for Olivia would have been unthinkable.
‘I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually. I have never known such a sense of communion. Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space – though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping all around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my own walls to look at and my books to read.’
This is progress of sorts, but I don’t think we ever forget that the narrator character is living off savings (presumably) and will leave India as soon as she either gets bored or runs out of money (there’s no suggestion she ever considers getting a job).
Jhavbvala drops some heavy hints that the Nawab is bisexual. He certainly exerts a powerful influence over Harry, a young Englishman who forms part of the Nawab’s entourage. The Nawab treats Harry like a pet – “he is like a child that doesn’t know what it wants! We others have to decide everything for him’ . This and his involvement with the local dacoits makes the Nawab a sinister character. We are constantly reassured of his seductive charm but I was completely immune to it personally. Harry’s equivalent in the 1970s narrative is Chid, a young English man in search of enlightenment in India, who moves in with the narrator and
“needs sex very badly, and seems to take it for granted that I will give it to him the same way I give him my food. I have never had such a feeling of being used…I don’t know why I let him go ahead. I’m much bigger and stronger than he is and could easily keep him off…But he has constant erections and goes to a tremendous size”.
I genuinely have no idea if this image is more disturbing or hilarious.
When the Guardian revisited this novel as part of a review of the Booker prize winners it described it as
“the literary equivalent of Coldplay; securely pedestrian, slightly patronising, tinged with the exotic, referencing far better work, but ultimately dull and pointless. It is, in short, literature for people who hate literature.”
Harsh words, and not entirely fair. I am quick to judge novels that ignore the diversity of voices (see here for example) but for all its faults Heat and Dust was not a travelogue. It doesn’t romanticise India and attempts to describe the impacts of colonialism, even if the perspective remains solidly that of the colonial power. I have never seen the film adaptation of Heat and Dust, but instinctively it seems a better medium for capturing the scale and beauty of India compared to the restrictive pages of this novel.
The Reading Bug 