Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a twentieth century expatriate writer of Polish-Jewish origins and British upbringing, who chose to make India her home since 1951 for more than two decades, has made her mark as writer of novel, story, screenplay, non-fiction, etc, which have brought her worldwide recognition and prestigious awards and fellowships both in India and abroad. Her work offers a site for the intersection of cultures, especially those of India and Europe/America.
Heat and Dust (1975), Jhabvala’s Booker winning and most well-known novel, which ensured her celebrity status in the literary world, is a delightful interrogation of the imperial and post-imperial discourses vis-à-vis India and England, as presented through the parallel lives of two English women in India, placed in two distinct historical contexts across half-a-century, in which the young narrator is set to restore the lost story of her predecessor from the ‘heat and dust’ of passion and oblivion.
The Atlantic Critical Study of Heat and Dust, which is primarily meant for the students of English literature of Indian universities, is a comprehensive, self-sufficient, and an in-depth study of the text. The present book provides a thorough and illuminating study of the text and examines it from such aspects as race relations, man-woman relations, themes, form, structure, and technique. In addition, it provides useful background materials related to Jhabvala’s life, works, her vision of India, and a detailed critical summary of the entire text, along with a select bibliography and sample questions. The book will be immensely useful for students, scholars and teachers in the area.
I. H-Shihan, a Reader in English, is now professionally attached to an undergraduate college affiliated to the University of Calcutta, West Bengal. As counsellor, he also has part-time association with Indira Gandhi National Open University. He did his Master’s from the University of Burdwan and PhD from the University of Kalyani. For some time now he has been investigating the treatment of human relationship across cultures in fictional works of some Anglo-Indian, Indo-Anglian, expatriate American and Postcolonial writers. His major works include Study Material EEG, Paper II (Thomas Hardy) for Netaji Subhas Open University, Study Material MA English, Paper IV, Option ‘C’ (Ruth Jhabvala) for the University of Burdwan Correspondence Course, Under the Alien Sky: Cross-cultural Encounter and Culture-shock Syndrome in some Novels on India (2001), An Imprint Handbook of Select Literary and Critical Terms (2005), and some articles and contributions to books and journals of great repute.
