Ruth Jhabvala’s Two. Stream Technique in “Heat and Dust”

RUTH JHABVALA’S TWO - STREAM
TECHNIQUE IN “HEAT AND DUST”

            Heat and Dust by European English novelist on the climate and culture of India, acclaimed as a “superb book” moving and profound, is thematically different from the usual fiction and technically an innovation called for by the subject. In a narrative moving and forth between the world of Olivia and that of the narrator-heroine, Mrs. Jhabvala tells not one but two stories and maintains their independent streams throughout parallel to each other with the intervening space of fifty years. Curiously enough, the author has observed here the least important unity of place and done away with the unities of action and time which are essential even to a novel. This, however, is not a defect of the work but a mark of its originality which merits critical consideration.

Crites in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy rightly says that “the poet is to aim at one great and complete action, to the carrying on of which all things in his play, even the very obstacles, are to be subservient; for two actions, equally laboured and driven on by writer, would destroy the unity of the poem; it would be no longer one play, but two: not but that there may be many actions in a play, as Ben Jonson has observed in his Discoveries; but they must be all subservient to the great one, which our language happily expresses in the name of under-plots.....” (Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy, included in English Critical Texts edited by D. J. Enright and Ernst De Chickera, Oxford University Press, London, 1970, P.59). Obviously, without the unity of action a drama or even a novel cannot be one whole work of art. It has to be maintained, however loosely, even through the wandering of a picaresque hero, variety of “by-con­cernments” and superfluities of episodic plot.

The unity of time as the “compass of a natural day” or duration as near to it as possible, is not necessary in a novel which covers larger action than a drama, and could be read at several sittings through many days. Yet a space of time commensurate with action, as a flowing stream not cut off into separate pools, is required. The unity of action, in fact, implies the unity of time in this sense, for the development of plot from beginning to end needs a specific period to move through. Its characteristic is continuity, not also shortness which the nature of dramatic action demands.

            Heat and Dust seems to be the only instance in fiction where the author has waived even the unity of action together with its dimension of time, and virtually told two stories – Olivia’s and the narrator’s – in one single novel. The two are not related as the main-plot and the under-plot, nor are they interconnected even by the loosest link unless, of course, the narrator’s being the grand-daughter of Olivia’s divorced husband could be treated as one. The narrator reconstructs in her journal in the manner of an impartial researcher from Olivia’s letters to Marcia, the story of Olivia’s boredom and longing for excitement under the hot Indian sun amid the small English society suffering from ruler-complex and isolated from the natives, her gradual drifting away from Douglas, a busy Civil Servant whom she loved, her developing romance and final elopement with the manly Nawab of Khatma. In another stream the narrator tells with equal zest of her own experiences in India, and presents her views of the Indian people, their culture, customs, good traits and bad. The two streams run parallel and terminate one after the other.

Yet, remarkably, the novel is one, and has not split into two as Crites quoted earlier suggested it should, if the action were not a united whole. The author has, except near the end, maintained Satipur with frequent excursions to the neighbouring state of Khatma, as the scene of action for both the streams. This unity of place has a different significance here. It turns, in effect, into a superior thematic unity that embraces and unites the two streams as the author presents through Satipur as a sample, India under the British rule and India after independence, India as a kingdom of contradictions that she has always been through superficial historical and political changes with her climatic rigours and natural scenery, authentic spirituality and grinding poverty, royal splendour and wretched misery, saintliness and hypocrisy. More particularly the author presents India as she sees, understands and loves, India as she has fascinated and disappointed Europeans, the way they usually love India and the right way for them to love her.

India has always allured with her promise of spiritual peace the westerners bored with the comforts which the scientific and technological advances have brought them, surfeited with the pleasures of sense which money could buy. But they are sorely disillusioned when they see her closely. They discover here not the land of the Buddhistic or Vedantic wisdom, but a reign of chaos, corruption, robbery and rape. The author writes of a young Englishman and his girl:

“They had been robbed of their watches in a house of devo­tion in Amritsar; cheated by a man they had met on the train to Kashmir who had promised them a cheap house­boat and had disappeared with their advance; also in Kashmir the girl had developed dysentery which was probably amoebic; they got cheated again in Delhi where a tout, promising them a very favourable rate of exchange for their money, disappeared with it by the -door of the coffee house where they had met him; in Fatehpur Sikri the girl had been molested by a party of Sikh youths; the young man’s pocket was picked on the train to Goa; in Goa he had got into a fight with a mad Dane armed with a razor, and had also been laid up with something that may have been jaundice (there was an epidemic); the girl had contracted ringworm.” (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust, Hind Pocket Books (P) Ltd., Delhi, p. 25)

But this does not mean according to the author that what allured them does not exist in India. The Indian spirituality is not just a myth cooked up by the Gurus and godmen who visit western countries to earn money and following. The narrator admires the spiritual attainments of Maji, a true holy woman capable of entering the state of Samadhi:

“To be in that state means to have reached a higher level of consciousness and to be submerged in its bliss. At such times Maji is entirely unaware of anything going on around her. She sits on the floor in the lotus pose; her eyes are open but the pupils turned up, her lips slightly parted with the tip of the tongue showing between them. Her breathing is regular ad peaceful as in dreamless sleep.” (ibid., p. 167) Spontaneous and active compassion towards men, even animals, in distress is the test of true spirituality which Maji displays. That is why her reaction on hearing the fatal illness of Leelavati, the beggar woman, is quite unlike the general apathy of the people who considered Leelavati and her sort “dispensable”.

The narrator also admires Chid’s sincerity in spiritual pursuit and single-minded devotion to the goal he has set before himself. His aspirations even his mystical experiences as far as they go and the powers that accompany them, are genuine. Certain equanimity of the Geeta-concept towards honour and insult, pain and pleasure, is evident in his conduct. Even his tantrik disci­pline making use of the sexual intercourse as a ladder to reach a higher state of consciousness has, the narrator feels, some truth in it:

“I have never had such a feeling of being used. In fact, he admits that this is what he is doing – using me to reach a higher plane of consciousness through the powers of sex that we are engendering between us.I don’t really know why I let him go ahead......But it seems as if there really is something, some emanation, that does not come from him but from some powers outside himself.........At such times it seems to me that his sex is engendered by his spiritual practices, by all that chanting of Mantras he does sitting beads in hand on the floor of my room.”
(Ibid., P. 69)

The Nawab of Khatma is truly a prince, manly, romantic, adventurous, wanting and not finding opportunity for action suitable to his status and personality. In loving him Olivia was allured by the sensual in India as surely as Chid was by the spiritual. Her sense of guilt in this was rather Victorian, for, the author feels, situated as she had been alone at home all day or in the midst of a circle of snobbish English sahibs and madams when she moved out, it was only natural for her to crave for pleasure, excitement, excursions with someone like the Nawab, in order to shake off her ennui. But she broke away from Douglas when the surreptitious affair could be carried on no longer, and eloped with the Nawab. She stayed in India per­manently estranged and away from her class and country.

Lured by a particular point of attraction both Chid and Olivia decided to give up their own native land and culture for good, and to live as Indians in India with all her other innumerable ills. That is where, according to the author, they went wrong. India as she is as a whole is welcome to Indians who have nowhere else to go. But a European who has a foothold elsewhere must not try to be one of them. That is not the way either to enrich his own mental or spiritual life further with eastern wisdom, or to love India better. Mrs. Jhabvala advocates through the narrator love of India from a distance to maintain its romance. She asks Europeans to enjoy the best things that India has to offer, but also to fight off warily her infectious evils that out-­proportion the good side. Dr. Gopal’s saying that we have our germs reserved for Indians only just as during the British rule there were clubs reserved for Europeans, is a jest with a sane advice asking Europeans to “keep out”.

The author near the end of the novel sums up her views of the way a European should love India, through the narrator’s comment on Major Minnies’ monograph regarding “the influence of India on the European consciousness and character.”

“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–the scenery, the history, the poetry, the music, and indeed the physical beauty of the men and women–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......But whereas for Dr. Saunders it is something, or someone, rotten, for the Major this weak spot is to be found in the most sensitive, often the finest people – and, moreover, in their finest feelings. It is there that India seeks them out and pulls them over into what, the Major called the other dimension. He also referred to it as another element, one in which the European is not accustomed to live so that by immersion in it he becomes debilitated, or even, (like Olivia) destroyed. 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.”            (ibid. pp. 174-75)

Chid’s love of India was well-founded. But when it led him to cross the forbidden frontier and to plunge into the heat and dust and pollution of India in the manner of one born to her, he suffered not only physically but also spiritually. He had to return home chastened abandoning all his mystical discipline and practices.

It is not necessary to become a Hindu monk to love Indian philosophy. Max Muller and Paul Deusen did not settle down in India as monks. Aldous Huxley loved the Vedantic wisdom from abroad, Christopher Isherwood follows the teachings of Rama­krishna Paramahamsa without entertaining the idea of moving about as a mendicant in the land of the great master, and Agehananda Bharati, a German sanyasin, had to leave the country repelled by the dirt, stupidity, arrogance, sloth and vanity of her people. But this does not reduce in the slightest their love of the Indian mysticism. Mrs. Jhabvala does not contradict them in her creation of Chid. She only lends support to their feelings and practice in elucidating his error.

Olivia in leaving her society and country for staying per­manently with the Nawab as his concubine, also illustrates the wrong way of loving India. The rectification of her error is exhibited in the conduct of the narrator who freely gives herself to healthy Inderlal without emotional entanglement and is deter­mined to return to England on completion of her self-assigned research mission. She does not exceed her measure and carefully shuns the “other side”.

Ruth Jhabvala is a European, not an Indo-Anglian, novelist in spite of her marriage with an Indian, and she candidly, con­sciously tries to remain one. Her Heat and Dust is a novel on India from a foreigner’s point of view, addressed to the readers in England. Its motif that lends unity to the two stories running almost independent of each other, is the correct approach for Europeans to this country which has much to charm them, more to betray, now as before.