Among Indian women novelists Ruth Prawer Jhabvala occupies a distinct stature in view of her assimilating foreign and the Indian experiences in her novels. She has addressed herself to the Woman-Question with unusual preoccupation in her fictional writings. Polish by birth and Indian by marriage, she has brought to bear upon her sensitive mind a unique East-west ethos. Her women-protagonists demonstrate unusual courage while struggling with conservative values but quite often their aggressive postures get diluted in the process. The present volume undertakes to explore the complex intricacy of Jhabvala oeuvre from the feminist perspective.
Sunand K Sinha obtained his M.A. & Ph.D. degrees from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He has published the research papers in various journals and critical volumes. Presently he is working on a book length project on contemporary Indian Writers in English. Dr. Sinha is a lecturer in English in a Govt.College affiliated to Arunachal University, Itanagar..
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is one of the major Indian novelists writing in English today with ten novels to her credit besides short-stories, screen-plays and miscellaneous writings. Her arrival in India in 1951 when this country was engaged in emancipating itself from old conventions and values, was significant in her life as a creative artist. Brought up in European surroundings with diverse religious, ethnic and cultural values in her veins she was the type of a model exile, best equipped by her training and accomplishments to comprehend the contemporary reality. Her marriage with C.S.H. Jhabvala, an architect from a Parsi community with a long history of displacement from Persia further enriched her deracinated sensibility. As a woman she was obviously quick to respond to challenging human situations in a peculiar way. The beginning of her career as a novelist coincided with the emergence of the Feminist movement in the 50s. In portraying her female characters and also in arranging patriarchal situations she shows some affinity with the advocates of feminism. Her response to the new movement has its own peculiarities where she seems to suggest a sense of compromise and understanding between the apparently warring claims of the two sexes. Some significant characteristics of the feminist movement are traceable in Jhabvala's novels and the present work is an attempt to fill-in this gap in Jhabvala scholarship.
This thesis is divided into five chapters followed by Conclusion. The first chapter is Introduction and deals with the significant biographical details in the life of Jhabvala as a creative artist. Her odyssey that started from Germany with her birth in 1927 and terminated in U.S.A. with her migration in 1975 via England where she had her university education and India where she spent the prime of her youth in conjugal bliss for more than two decades, has its own peculiarities and attractions. She has been honoured with several coveted laurels in America including the Booker Prize for her magnum opus Heat and Dust and the Oscar Award for her talent in writing screen- plays, which have of late engaged her potentialities increasingly. The Feminism as a literary movement has been discussed in all its manifestations and characteristics in the second chapter. The development of the chief feminist schools, the Political or the Marxist and the Psychological, their exponents and the major critical texts like Second Sex and Sexual Politics, have been analysed to formulate the obsessive concerns of this movement.
Jhabvala's creative career spans a period of about four decades and records her sensitive response to global problems and her artistic virtuosity is stamped on each work. Keeping in view the aim of the present project her oeuvre has been divided in three phases: The Early (1951-60), The Middle (1960-75), The Recent (1975-till date) and they constitute the three substantive chapters of this work. The period beginning with her arrival in India in 1951 and prior to her short trip to England in 1950 saw the publication of four novels-To Whom She Will/Amrita, The Nature of Passion, Esmond in India and The Householder and they have been analysed from the feminist perspective in the third chapter This phase heralded Jhabvala's infatuation with India and she has drawn characters mostly from Indian origin except Esmond. Her female characters are mild feminists as they finally accept the verdicts of their parents and family elders. They fail to sustain their initial feminist bias and may be dubbed as feminine.
The fourth chapter grapples with Jhabvala's four novels-Get Ready for Battle, A Backward Place, A New Dominion, Heat and Dust-published between 1960 and 1975 when she finally settled down in States. Registering her growing disenchantment with India these novels are peopled with large number of European/non-native characters. Her overtly feminist heroines from the West find it exceedingly difficult to adjust to the new milieu and this failure results in their idiosyncratic behaviour. They can be loosely called feminists with a difference. The last and the fifth chapter studies Jhabvala's the two novels written in American setting-In Search of Love and Beauty and Three Continents. The abundance of erotic details centring in fraudulent activities and sexual perversion demonstrates the novelist's complete submersion in the American openness. Her female characters are victims of inner fragmentation, unable and desperate to envisage any means of redemption. The artist has concentrated pronouncedly on the psychological dimension of female suffering.
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