A Cross-Cultural Encounter in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s: A Backward Place

Dr. Ankit Gandhi, Vipul Kumar Bhawalia

Ruth Jhabvala’s novel A Backward Place, published in 1965 is significant for it anticipates the

change in the sensibility of the novelist as admitted by the author herself in the essay “Myself in

India”. In the essay published a year later after the publication of the novel, she says:

I must admit that I am no longer interested in India. What I am interested in now is myself in

India, which…I tend to think of as my survival in India.

As mentioned by Jhabvala, the novel marks her shift from the Intra-Indian context to the East-

West encounter as experienced by her characters in India. Her growing awareness of herself as

an exile finds a perfect expression in the depiction of cross-cultural clashes in this novel. The

same issue has been dealt with at length in the two novels that follow- A New Dominion (1972)

and Heat and Dust (1975). The subject of this study is to show how in these novels Jhabvala

explores the consciousness of the Western expatriate in India and his/her struggle to effect or

resist assimilation.

In the novel, Jhabvala’s efforts are primarily directed at transmuting her own complex response

to India into the varied responses of her European characters. Her statement that her interest is

now centered on herself in India doesn’t indicate a simplistic identification with her European

characters. The novel portrays Jhabvala’s conflicting and intellectual responses to India by

means of her characters during this phase of her life. The responses are sometimes affirming,

sometimes negative and at others ambivalent. But each response is recorded and assessed

without bias.

The novel shows how the three western women, Etta, Clarissa and Judy react to life in India. Etta

has come to India in account of her sudden impulsive marriage. It is followed by her numerous

marriages and illicit sexual relationships with others. Later she finds it harder and harder to catch

young and wealthy admirers to keep her going due to her growing age. In the mean time she

finds herself performing mischievous things. Although she tries to expose herself to be charming

and sprightly at all times yet is able to please only old men like Guppy. Thus, Etta who declares

to be submerged in a lower culture, flatters and wheedles money out of men from India’s least

cultured section- the baniya or business class. Clarissa has come to India in her so-called quest

for spirituality. She professes her devotion to Indian spiritualism when she doesn’t even vaguely

feel the same. One sympathizes with her when one recalls, “how valiantly she tries to keep up

her quest, or at least the pretence of it, though she was getting older year by year, and lonelier

and more ridiculous, and soul and God perhaps no nearer.” (ABP 117) Judy, according to

Clarissa is not to be pitied at all: “She is doing very nicely. She had the good sense to realize that

the only way to live here was to turn herself into a real Indian wife.” (ABP 25) Thus, Jhabvala

unmasks her European characters as pitilessly as she unmasks their Indian counterparts in her

earlier novels. Although her European characters share some of her attributes, enthusiasms,

desperations and intellectualizing tendencies yet she is impartial in dealing with them at length.

As already mentioned in this second phase of her life, Jhabvala develops an enormous guilt

complex towards the poverty and misery of India. How this poverty and misery affects even the

wealthy and privileged few in India also becomes perceptible in the novel. To the handful of

foreigners living an artificial life in Delhi, India is not urbane but poor and backward in every

sense. Poverty and backwardness are so predominant that it is impossible to pretend that they

don’t exist. Clarissa, the Hochstadts, Juddy and Etta feel the agony when confronted with the

miseries of life in India, though not in the same way as Mrs. Jhabvala seems to have felt:

The most salient fact about India is that it is very poor and backward. There are so many other

things to be said about it but this must remain the basis of all of them. We may praise Indian

democracy, go into raptures over Indian music, admire Indian intellectuals - but whatever we

say, not for one moment should we lose sight of the fact that very great number of Indians never

get enough to eat….Can one lose sight of that? God knows, I have tried.1

Life in India for her and the Europeans in her novel becomes a distressing and unforgettable

chore. Transients like Hochstadts have an avenue of escape. As the assignment at the university

gets over, they are happy to go back to England. They justify their presence in India by

pretending to advance the cause of East-West synthesis. Jhabvala states scornfully: “But what a

store house of memories they would be taking with them. How greatly they felt themselves

enriched by their contact with this fabled land.” It is really marvelous to have the Hochstadts

talking about the “all embracing love” that India teaches to the Europeans. From the point of

view of the novelist, they can afford to do so because they are looking through the amused eyes

of a visitor on a short stay. The novelty of the situation pleasantly excites them. Etta seems to be

summing up the novelist’s view:

Etta hated to hear Mrs. Hochstadt talk like that. It was the way people who were for only a short

time and had all their comforts and conveniences laid on, so often talked. As if India ever gave

anyone anything (except of course germs and diseases). What had it given Etta, after all these

years, taking her youth, her looks, her buoyancy and charm?

Like E.M. Forster’s India, the India of A Backward Place is a place where the alien spirit is put

to test. Indi trap, rejects or embraces her aliens as they deserve- assimilating the worthy and

expelling or destroying the unworthy. The ideal of worth as it is presented in this novel and in

Heat and Dust is derived from Forsterian ideology. Forster describes the worthy as possessing

four leading characteristics- “curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste and belief in the human

race.”2 “Curiosity” obviously denotes a perceptive eye for the distinctive features of an alien

ethos. “A free mind” indicates an ability to rise above convention and put new ideas and ideals to

test. “Belief in good taste” implies a faith in the value of discrimination; meaning that the true

humanist recognizes the varying needs of diverse individuals and groups. “Belief in the human

race” implies a rejection of racism and a respect for human beings under all circumstances.

Adding honesty and intelligence to this list of qualities completes Ruth Jhabvala’s criterion of

worth. Although Jhabvala herself realizes that she doesn’t possess all the qualities required for

being worthy of assimilation in India yet she respects them in others. In this novel, Judy who is

least like her creator in character and spirit affirms all experience. In fact, her voice is Jhabvala’s

voice in A Backward Place. Vasant Shahane’s comments on this aspect of A Backward Place

are noteworthy:

The most significant aspect of A Backward Place, which strikes me as a major element of

Jhabvala’s thought process, is the dominant voice of affirmation which rings true and clear in the

various chambers of its structure. Judy seems to me the central character in the novel that says

“aye” to all the challenges that her life and experience present to her. More than Etta, more than

Clarissa, Judy represents the authentic voice, the dominant note of this international orchestration

in A Backward Place.

The most deadly attack on India’s backwardness and the most determined resistance to

assimilation come from the neurotic aging beauty Etta. She fights a losing battle against

alienation and old age. Her buoyancy and youth have left her by the time we get to know of her

in the novel. She had once been young, vivacious and pretty enough to have a number of

admirers around her:

Starting with her first husband, who had brought her out to conquer and charm this virgin

territory, where lively blondes such as she were few and far between enough to be at the highest

premium. There had been a succession, which in the folly of her youth she had thought

inexhaustible, of young Indians: all with this in common that they were, on the one hand

fascinated with and completely uncritical of the ways of blondes and on the other, were all well-

born, well-bred, charming, slender, athletic with black eyes and black hair and strong white teeth

forever at the ready to flash at all her witty sayings. At that time all had been as wonderful as she

had a right to expect; and yes- when India; had appreciated her and she had been able, with a

fully and generous heart, to return the compliment. (ABP 167)

This is Etta’s past history. She is now conscious not only of the ravages of time but also of the

effects caused by a cruel harsh climate. She is ageing fast. She is also aware that her admirers are

getting fewer and fewer and she can’t afford to pick and choose her company. She feels trapped

in India. She would love to go back, at least for a brief spell but lacks the resources to do so.

Although she is not as poor as Clarissa yet she appeals to the generosity of crude, newly rich

hotelier Guppy, who ironically regards her with a sort of easy, good- natured contempt. When he

tells her that he is going to Cannes for a hoteliers’ conference, she pockets her pride and begs

him to take her along on the trip:

As soon as she had spoken, she heard the much too naked appeal in her own voice, so she

quickly tried to cover it up. “I’ll make my hair in a bun and buy a shorthand note book and I’ll be

a super secretary for you”- enables him, if he so chooses, to take it as a joke. And that was how

he did choose to take it. (ABP 123)

Etta is weary of India, its heat and dust, its germs and diseases. Like Jhabavala, she longs to free

herself, to escape from the awful squalor all around her. The reader never really sympathizes

with her plight because she overstays her hospitality in India. At the end, we have a clear view

into her psyche when she ponders on her fate: “She lays on her bed and smoked and thought

about Europe. It was infinitely distant and infinitely desirable. But she was afraid of it too. Here

at least she had her personality; she was Etta, whom people knew and admired for being blonde

and vivacious and smart. In Europe there were many blondes…” She knows that she is no longer

young and may not be as acceptable there. Now she realizes that she is woefully out of date:

She no longer knew the way they dressed there, or the way they talked, or the fashionable food

they ate and the drinks they drank, the books they had read, the conversations they had held with

one another while she was out here.” (ABP 213)

Etta has, in fact, become the “no where” person of the expatriate fiction who rejects the East to

be rejected by the West. In fact, Etta’s life in India is, with some differences, a conscious

mirroring of the novelist’s vision of her own destiny. Though Jhabvala presents Etta as a

character of little worth and one who comes out to India for all the wrong reasons, an element of

genuine sympathy has gone into her making for she closely represents the novelist’s own

impulse towards exclusion at this point of her life in India. In “Myself in India”, Ruth Jhabvala

describes her life style in terms that bear an uncanny resemblance to that of Etta’s:

I have a nice house, I do my best to live in an agreeable way. I shut all my windows, I let down

the blinds, I turn on the air-conditioner….All the time I know myself to be on the back of this

great animal of poverty and backwardness. It is not possible to pretend otherwise… Even if one

never rolls up the blinds and never turns off the air-conditioner, something is bound to go wrong.

People are not meant to shut themselves in rooms and pretend there is nothing outside.

Thus Jhabvala’s A Backward Place is a study of how these western women react to the

life in India. Except Judy, India has no place for any of her expatriates who are either expelled or

left to stagnate and even decay. The Hochstadts leave India and are soon forgotten. Clarissa’s

mental confusion and self-delusion remind her of the meaningless of her life in India. Etta has

come close to destruction. This is the final impression registered in the pages of Backward

Place. In all these reactions we get a glimpse facet of Jhabvala’s own experience of India.

Notes

1. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Myself in India”, An Experience of India, p.8

2. E.M. Forster, “Gide and George”, Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 231.

3. Vasant A. Shahane, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1976), p.72.

4. Shantha Krishnaswami Glimpses of Women in India (Delhi: Ashish Publishing House,

1983), p. 316.