Thoughts on Heat & Dust

Heat and Dust is one of those novels that defy easy representation. It is about the history of colonial India, the vivid depiction of place and time, and the situational constraints of imperialism upon the governors as well as the governed. Then modern visitors to India try to submerge themselves in the culture but flounder about, engaging in questionable behaviors. The reader is invited to observe, without ready identification with a single character in the story, and still the ambience takes hold.

The character study of a rather shallow woman, who nevertheless wants more from life than she can derive from her immediate circumstances as a colonial wife in 1923, is oddly compelling, not in the person of the protagonist but in the snapshot of historical moment. The narrator in the present is trying to make sense of her own experience, and her attempts at contextual understanding are naturally influenced by what she is reading in the colonist's letters. The interplay of the two consciousnesses, past and present, appears to the reader as a seamless continuum.

The past is present, not a very profound insight, but one profoundly observed and explicated by Jhabvala.

--Fay Sheco

http://historicalpresent.blogspot.com/2007/11/heat-and-dust-by-ruth-prawer-jhabvala.html

Explain/Agree/Disagree/Comment:

1. “The past is present”

2. “the situational constraints of imperialism upon the governors as well as the governed”:

3. “The reader is invited to observe, without ready identification with a single character”: