This book won the author the 1975 Booker Prize. It’s a double retrospective if I can describe it that way. A youngish English woman visits India for the first time in the early 1970s. She’s unmarried and looking for adventure. Specifically, she is interested in tracing the footsteps of an intriguing ancestor – her grandfather’s first wife, Olivia, an Englishwoman who left her husband and ran off with an Indian prince in the 1920s when India was still under British rule.



So we get the young woman’s story through a journal she keeps. And we get Olivia’s story through a collection of letters she sent to a sister in Paris. Those letters are supplemented by information from elderly family members who will finally talk about her, now that they are old and widowed. Olivia had been a forbidden family topic when the girl was young. In addition the young British woman visits sites where Olivia lived and occasionally finds an elderly person in India who knew something of her.

It seems that every story I read lately has as a theme of how we can ‘change the past.’ The past is just our memory of the past, so it’s surprisingly fluid. Here’s what the British woman tells us:

“Fortunately, during my first few months here, I kept a journal so I have some record of my early impressions. If I were to try and recollect them now, I might not be able to do so. They are no longer the same because I myself am no longer the same. India always changes people, and I have been no exception. But this is not my story, it is Olivia’s as far as I can follow it.”

As in all of the author’s books I have read, this story is about Europeans in India, not about Indians themselves. Yes, we occasionally hear of goings-on among the poor or the servants, but the only Indians who actually get into the plot are wealthy upper-class Indians who interact on a daily basis with the British – as was the case with the Indian prince who seduced the Englishman’s wife.



The seduction of Olivia was easy, in a way, even though the young British husband and wife were in love. But Olivia’s husband’s first love was his bureaucratic work. He was chauffeured to his office for long hours each day and she was left at home with the servants to ‘amuse’ herself.  The Indian Prince keeps a British house guest (kind of a ‘house pet’): an older, urbane roly-poly man who is witty and charming. So the Prince sends his car to pick Olivia up to come visit ‘Harry’ at the Prince's house. Or the Prince arrives at her house with his entourage of servants and young Indian men who are his followers. The visits become daily.

The Prince is married of course, but his wife is ‘in the attic.’ She never makes an appearance but we learn she is mentally ill and is kept in a separate household staffed with servants.  which eventually become Olivia’s fate  

One interesting extended piece in the book is about a monograph written by a British Major for his friends, warning them about “loving India too much.” India will “find your weak spot” and pull you over into what he called “the other dimension.” It can “debilitate you or destroy you” if you let it. It is all very well to admire India intellectually and aesthetically, but you must do it “with a measured, European feeling.” Otherwise one is always in danger of being “dragged over to the other side.” “India always remained for him an opponent, even sometimes an enemy, to be guarded and if necessary fought against from without and, especially from within: from within one’s own being.”

What would the Major think of the 1970s when British and American hippie kids of the Beatles era started arriving, dressing in Indian clothing, and living in communes with their swamis? LOL. The young British woman who narrates the story has her own intrigues and, if we asked the Major, he would warn us that she is letting India ‘get to her.’



I enjoyed the story, the characters and the atmosphere, although I think it’s a period piece by now. I have read and enjoyed three other books by her: two novels, Travelers and A Backward Place, and a collection of short stories, Out of India: Selected Stories.



The author (1927-2013) was of British, American and German Jewish ancestry. She married an Indian man and moved to India in 1951. In addition to her novels and stories she was a famous screenwriter, teamed up with Merchant-Ivory. In fact the Wikipedia entry implies that we should call those productions Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala. She wrote the scripts for many of their most famous productions such as The Remains of the Day, A Room With a View and Howard’s End. She wrote the script for this book when it was made into a British movie, Heat and Dust, in 1983.

Top photo: visit of King George V to India, 1912 from edwardianpromenade.com
Photo of Simia where the British built clubs and vacation homes to escape the heat from lib.lsu.edu
Modern Mumbai from Wikipedia commons
The author from thenewyorker.com

[Edited 12/23/23]

I own the epub version of this book. We read this book for our book group - May 20, 2024. The book won the 1975 Booker Prize. I think I saw the movie (1983 - with Greta Scacchi, Shashi Kapoor (and Madhur Jaffrey plays his mother in the movie (she was 50 and he was 46, so she was 4 years old when she had him!!! Per usual - CRAZY! She is still alive (91) and a great writer of Indian cookbooks, we have her cookbook - At Home with Madhur Jaffrey) and Julie Christie at the Orson Wells Theater in Cambridge, MA) but I did not watch the film this time. Not on any of our streaming apps on our Apple TV. I might or might not rent it - $3.99 - it might seem dated. I did not know that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who was German and married an Indian man; her daughter wrote an article in the New Yorker - need to look up) was part of the Merchant-Ivory team. She was the screen writer for many of their movies. So, she also adapted her novel for the movie version.

The plot of Heat and Dust follows two intertwined stories. The first is set in British India of the 1920s, and deals with an illicit affair between Olivia, the beautiful young wife of a British colonial official, and an Indian Nawab. The second, set in 1982, deals with "Anne" (in the book, she is the narrator, but given no name) Olivia's great-niece, who travels to India hoping to find out about her great-aunt's life, and while there, also has an affair with a married Indian man.

The plot reminded me of other British-Indian novels/movies - A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown. So, not my favorite book or great book - there are many great Indian writers writing today!

I would like to read some non-fiction books about India, the Indian rebellion of 1857. I own the book, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalyrmple. Also, India: A History by John Keay.

Winner of the Booker Prize 1975.

I like this book, but there are too many questions left hanging in the air for me to give it more stars.

The author draws a story of two women and their perception of India. The tale flips back and forth between the two women and their respective time frames set fifty some years apart, one before the independence of India and the other after.

The first woman is the young Olivia Rivers married to a British officer stationed in Satipur. The year is 1923. He’s handsome, she’s pretty and the two are in love, but she can’t seem to get pregnant. She becomes bored by the lifestyle of British expat society. The allure of India pulls her. She runs off with an Indian prince.

The second woman is the granddaughter of the husband Olivia deserted. After Olivia’s elopement her husband remarried another British expat. Fifty years after Olivia’s disappearance, this granddaughter returns to India to find out more about Olivia whom no one in the family speaks of.

In reading the book we compare the experiences of the two women and to what extent India has and has not changed before and after independence. The similarities are striking.

I like how the book captures the feel of India, in a somber, dark and enigmatic way. India has a unique allure. It has also attributes that repel. Who is drawn to it, who is repulsed by it and why are what I thought about. Although I appreciate the ambiance evoked, too many questions concerning the characters’ actions are left unanswered. We are not told enough to understand the choices made by the characters. This is why I cannot give the book more than three stars.

Julie Christie narrates the audiobook well. She switches between English spoken with a British accent and English spoken with an Indian accent. Three stars for the narration—it’s good.

3.5 stars - not because it wasn't well written but because I read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's short story collection, Out of India: Selected Stories, prior to reading Heat and Dust, so the novel seemed less dynamic and compelling to me.

I knew Prawer Jhavbala wrote many of the Merchant/Ivory films, but for some reason I didn't know about her novels and story collections. Somehow this came into my hands and I found it compelling, dark and enigmatic, filled with uncertainty and interesting tensions, as well as a keen-eyed view of the vanished past of the English in India, and of the 1970s where travelers came to India for enlightenment, supplication, etc. It's a short novel, that intertwines the stories of two not-really related English women, Olivia in 1923, new to India, the young bride of Douglas Rivers, the British district officer of provincial Satipur, and the unnamed narrator, in the-then present day of the late 1970s, who has come to Satipur with Olivia's journals and letters she'd written to her sister, in part as a supplicant, in part to learn more about Olivia and who she became after she crossed "over to the other side," meaning never returned to England. Interestingly, I'd mistakenly thought the author was Indian, but actually, she is European, her parents were Polish Jews, she was educated in England, and lived in Delhi for 25 years after marrying an Indian architect. Won the Booker Prize in 1975.

I came to this novel because of the Greta Scacchi/Julie Christie film made in 1983. It has always been memorable and every eight or nine years I put it up on the screen and watch it again. Jhabvala's book, however, doesn't measure up to the quality of the film, whose screenplay she also wrote. It simply falls flat, being far too talky and lacking in all those layers of imagery the film pulled off. The desolate hot plains leading to the Nawab's palace, the enticing sense of comfort of Douglas and Olivia's bungalow, or even the cold snowy inclines of the Himalayas at film's end. Heat and Dust, I think, was the best film that Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala ever produced. Never again would they achieve such formal complexity or avoid the cloying sentimentality that absolutely pollutes films such as Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day.

It is nearing fifty years since Jhabvala published Heat and Dust in 1975. That is almost as much a difference in time as the distance between the book's publication and its "past" setting in 1923. Yet, as the modern story, set in the early 1970s, takes place, it seems much closer and not too much different from today, 2022. So many of its discoveries align with the same situation a contemporary heroine might face. And they seem utterly alien to the 1923 world of the British raj and Olivia and her colonial administrator husband. That world exists in a romantic haze, compared to the dirt and squalor which surround the modern story. And what is the story? Well, it's about the modern quest to discover who you are, where you come from, and how much you have in common with those that precede you. Good and interesting notions. But all done much more successfully in the film than this novel. In another decade or less, I'll probably take out Heat and Dust, the movie, and watch it again. I'll never get the enthusiasm to read once more through the novel.

Basically all books about India by westerners are the same — India seduces the European and then perverts them — and this was a worthy addition to that literature

"I kept a journal to have a record of my early impressions. If I were to try to remember them now I might not be able to do so. They are no longer the same because I myself am no longer the same. India always changes people, and I have been no exception. But this is not my story, it is Olivia's."

************

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a German Jew whose family fled the Nazis, moved to London just in time for the Blitz. Marrying a prominent Indian architect, she lived in Delhi for 24 years. Prawer considered herself a lifelong refugee from Germany. She is likely most well known as the screenwriter of many Merchant-Ivory films, and movie adaptions of Ishiguro and Forster novels, which won multiple academy awards. This novel won the 1975 Booker prize, about a woman who goes to India to learn about a grandmother involved in a scandal.

The narrator, Anne, begins on her arrival in Bombay in 1982 with a stack of letters grandmother Olivia wrote in 1923. She settles into Satipur, a city between Delhi and Lucknow. Olivia had went there to join her new husband Douglas, a British tax collector. Anne visits the abandoned palace of a prince Olivia met at a party. The Nawab was fabulously wealthy, highly intelligent and handsome, and spoiled his guests. Drawn to Olivia, he began to visit her during the daytime, while Douglas was away working long hours at the agency.

Olivia had difficulty adjusting to her new life in India, as did Prawer. Both had followed their husbands there. Anne feels ambivalent towards the natives as well as the foreigners who visit. In the rundown Raj residency British hippies camp out. They had come in search of enlightenment but found only dysentery. The caretaker refuses to unlock their bungalow without a bribe. Anne observes: "I suppose we look strange to them, eating their food and wearing their clothes". Prawer later wrote the poverty and backwardness were intolerable.

The houses where Olivia and the British had lived are now a ramshackle collection of civil offices. Anne slowly becomes accustomed to the culture, learning to speak Hindustani, sleeping outdoors in the hot season and dressing in a sari. She describes personal relations in her landlord's family, an arranged marriage, son and daughter-in-law living with his mother. Spending time with widows from around town, she visits suttee shrines and royal tombs. The writing is like Jane Austin spiked with cyanide, a satire of social conventions.

A family who had forced a mother to burn herself with her dead husband was arrested by Douglas. His dinner guests discussed the custom with paternalistic disapproval. A riot began at a Muslim shrine where Hindus had taken over and the Nawab is suspected by Douglas. Anne rescues a British ascetic who fell ill on pilgrimage. He stays in her room, eats her food and steals her money. Her landlord is incredulous there could be a white sadhu. The events alternate between 1923 and 1982 but the voice is consistently that of Prawer.

Most of the British enclave had decamped for Simla, the hill station resort, but Olivia and Douglas stayed behind in the heat and dust. Olivia visited the Nawab's palace every day. There was trouble in the countryside with a bandit gang, the Nawab probably implicated. Before Anne left London she had met the Nawab's nephew and heir, and his cosmopolitan expatriate friends. In contrast to the beggars and crippled in Satipur, they lived in luxury from treasures smuggled out of India, complaining the government made life unbearable.

Anne visits a shrine with her landlord where women pray to get pregnant. It is the same one where Olivia had gone with the Nawab. Olivia was anxious for a baby with Douglas that didn't seem to come and was willing to test the legend of the shrine. E. M. Forster suggested in 'A Passage to India' that the ways of the east would never be understood by the west, echoed by Prawer's colonists. But when the expectations of either society are transgressed both Indians and the British shared similar ideas of how women could and should act.

'Heat and Dust' is well written, full of wry humor and dry wit. Descriptions of people and places are three dimensional and explain why Prawer was so successful as a screenwriter. Her complex and conflicted relationship with India began during the early years of independence, spanning to a period when there was renewed interest in the Raj among readers and film fans. She used the award money from this novel to buy a condo in Manhattan, in the same building as Merchant and Ivory, and felt more at home on the Upper East Side.

This is a very odd, Booker-winning book. Even the title is provocative. The heat is procreation, the dust death. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s unnamed narrator, referring to her alter-ego and ex-great aunt, puts it this way:

The rest of the time Olivia was alone in her big house with all the doors and windows shut to keep out the heat and the dust. [p.17]

So what Olivia at first shunned – the crush of humanity in India – the narrator embraces from the start, being, you see, more modern. Let all the birthing and dying with all their human convulsions in!

This is the fifth book on India I have read this year, due to one of my current projects, and the most puzzling. Given that I have slummed around India myself and lived the ex-patriate experience for a decade or two in another enigmatic foreign behemoth, I should have appreciated Jhabvala’s insights on these themes, but didn’t really.

Oddly, the narrator’s first encounter upon arriving in India is with an unnamed missionary, presumably from England too, but already 30 years in India’s heat and dust, who counsels:

Oh but I’ve seen some terrible sights in India...And through it all I’ve learned this one thing: you can’t live in India without Jesus Christ. If He’s not with you every single moment of the day and night and you praying to Him with all your might and main – if that’s not there, then you become like that poor man with the monkey taking lice out of his hair. [p.11]

This is a cheap opening shot, for the rest of the narrative is set up to prove the missionary wrong.

And an interesting narrative it is: the narrator is on a quest to understand her grandfather’s first wife who, boring of her memsahib role as wife of a British Colonial administrator, elopes with a local Muslim Prince. The narrator is obviously taken by Olivia – who was subsequently a persona non grata to the family– so much so that, in an overused literary trick, Olivia and the narrator start to meld, having the same experiences and reactions. Overused, for instead of jarring us once with the overlap, we are subjected to a number of them before the inevitable divergence occurs. (The novel continuously jumps from “present” to “past” stories. While the analepses, or flashbacks, are written conventionally by the narrator doing her research and fictionalizing what she finds, the narrator’s story is told unrealistically in elaborate journal entries.)

What was scandalous in Olivia’s time – not only did she become pregnant by the Prince while still married, but chooses to abort, a worse crime in the ex-pat community – by the narrator’s era is almost banal. The narrator invites in another English wanderer, this one a bedraggled ascetic named Chid who, having renounced all earthly possessions takes possession of his host repeatedly:

But he has constant erections and goes to a tremendous size, so that I am reminded of the Lord Shiva whose huge member is worshiped by devout Hindu women. [p.55]

But that is not all. The narrator, a tall, strappling English woman who is jeered at as eunich-like by the neighborhood kids, seduces and beds her married landlord from downstairs, a struggling Indian whose wife is ill.

By this time I am completely in favor of the Colonial Raj’s moral code, including the closing of the shutters against the heat and dust, versus the narrator’s faux humanity – though, I suspect, this is not how Jhabvala intended me to feel.

Olivia’s tale ends in a kind of feminist auto-da-fé; after fleeing the hospital (recovering from the abortion’s after-shocks) and her marriage, she retires to the Himalayas where she lives alone in a house put up and kept by the Prince for the rest of her life.

The narrator ends up pilgrimaging to the same hill top village where she – well, we don’t know what she does. The divergence had already occurred: when the narrator’s pregancy is about to be aborted by Maji (the town’s sorceress/wise woman; John Fowles’ The Magus comes to mind), using truly evil spiritual powers, the narrator yells “No please stop!” The narrator’s one truly good act, to not abort, is done for mystic reasons (she claims Maji’s “supernatural powers” [p.132] had willed it). After this, she runs pregnant to the hills where, presumably, she has the baby Olivia never had, and from the looks of it goes native – living out the family life that Olivia couldn’t – in an ashram.

I couldn’t but think back to the ridiculed missionary woman from the book’s first pages. While she had exaggerated, saying “Because you see, dear, nothing human means anything here. Not a thing” (a straw woman if there every was one), I had to wonder if that bedraggled missionary, despite or perhaps because of her healthy distance from such an alien culture, would have done more good than a character like the narrator ever could.

Then again, I’m just a contrarian.

(Quotations from Heat and Dust, 1975; First Counterpoint paperback edition, 1999; paging from eBook.)

Booker Prize Winner 1975

Heat and Dust is a look at two cultures : Imperial Britain and India through the eyes of two white women from England. But really, Olivia and our un-named narrator, despite different times are quite similar to be one person.

In 1923, Olivia is married to Douglas, a dashing civil servant who works in Sitpar under British rule. There is a scandal that arises with their divorce and Douglas ends up remarried. The narrator is Douglas’ grand daughter from that second marriage. Like Olivia is enticed by India, and decides to move there.


If I could summarize this book, it seems to be that of an outsider who is enticed by India but can never fully integrate. The poverty, the scant disregard for life, the religious practices, the languages form an insurmountable barrier. But they will be sure to try to cross societal expectations to achieve their assumed bliss, or a way of life that is wholly of their own making. And I ask: how is this any different from what Britain did in the past and made it seem romantic or a great adventure. Maybe that’s the point.

very well integrated narratives of 2 generations with synchronicity between two women of different generations. the pressures and demands of living in India upon a person of non Indian origin are very well captured without being overly critical.

Absolutely loved everything with the main character and her diary, yawned at the Olivia stuff. Really great dreamlike ending too.
Mathematically confirms my hypothesis that The House of Doors could have been half the length.