A beautiful story about English people living in India in the 1920s and 1970s,their attitudes,how they treat the Indians and their relationships.The main story concerns the reasons for Olivia leaving her English district officer husband for a rich Nawab.Of course it’s more than that.It left me wanting more...more answers,more later happenings but the author just leaves us with little hints and an atmosphere of loss and nostalgia of how life changes,goes on and is indifferent to our desires.

Compares two Englishwomen's early years in India, one in the 1920s (colonial), one in the 1980s (independent). Actually it must have been the 70s; that would explain why the latter character slept with—multiple times, not just a hookup—her married landlord downstairs, and with a grubby religious-nut loser off his meds.

I found this more a look at British spirit and quirky humor, than a look at India. Like n  I Capture the Castlen or n  Diary of a Provincial Ladyn... in India. Good descriptions, witty observations, fun dialog. The two timelines linked to each other quite cleverly.

Someone could argue that cutting off the end is more realistic: the modern woman never finds out exactly why Olivia, her grandfather's first wife, ran off with the Nawab, or what happened to her afterwards. However, all through the book we had access to Olivia's interior mind and thoughts and actions as from a POV narrator, not just research by a character in the book. So why stop and switch to "I walked through the house but would never know what she thought or felt for the next 40 years." I flick page to the next chapter... No more chapters.
If I find that my ebook copy had a section missing and there is actually an ending to this story, I will reinstate the fourth star it deserved until RUDELY stopping.

Booker Prize winner.

Two women, separated by half a century, move from England to India where they uncover new aspects of themselves. I enjoyed the sense of place and the development of the characters.

From BBC Radio 4 - 15 Minute Drama:
A beguiling story of two English women living in India more than fifty years apart. In 1923, Olivia is unhappily married to a civil servant. Her step-granddaughter travels to the subcontinent years later to investigate Olivia's life, which her family regarded as 'something dark and terrible'.

The story centres on the experiences of two very different women in pre- and post- Independence India. One is circumscribed by English mores and the formal social structures of the Raj while the other is free to fall in love, live among Indian people, feel part of the culture. So, it is the story of social change as well as a potent love story.

2/5: Harry comes to stay with the Rivers in an attempt to break free of the Nawab while the narrator visits the Baba Firdaus shrine on the Husbands' Wedding Day.

3/5: Olivia and Douglas hope for a baby.

4/5: Both women visit the Baba Firdaus shrine and make a wish.

5/5: Finding themselves in the same situation, both women must make life-changing decisions.

Today, Olivia meets the Nawab while, fifty years later, her step-granddaughter settles into her new room.

Pianist ..... Laurie O'Brien

Directed by Gaynor Macfarlane.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r4bz1

In the 1970s, many Westerners went to India to escape materialism, a concept insulting to Indians, according to Inder Lal, one of the characters in this book. This search for a simpler way of life felt patronising as most Indians lived in poverty. Inder Lal felt ashamed of the way he lived and could not comprehend who would choose such deprivation over material comforts.

I found this book fascinating and satisfying. I’m not overly keen on the dual time period formula (I feel it’s a bit hackneyed now) but it works well here. The narrator, in addition to telling her own story, relates the story of her grandfather’s first wife, Olivia, who arrived in India in 1923 to join her husband, Douglas. The British community firmly believes that the Indians would not be able to manage their own affairs without them. There are few likeable characters. Despite being on another continent, they are all as class conscious as they would be in England, as we see by Olivia’s disparagement of Mrs Saunders, the doctor’s wife, because she doesn’t have the right accent. There is, of course, a parallel here with the Indian caste system.

Olivia becomes enthralled with the Nawab, a provincial ruler. [I’m more accustomed to seeing this spelled as Nabob but there are many spellings.] He is a complex character and there seems to be some ambiguity around his relationships with all the young men who live in the palace with him, including Harry who becomes Olivia’s friend and who is clearly in love with his host. Olivia is either too naive to see this or chooses to ignore it as it would interfere with what she feels is his romantic allure. She hides many of her visits to the palace from her husband, Douglas, a fact that strains credibility in such a small community. Surely someone would have noticed the chauffeur driven car arriving twice daily? Would Douglas really have believed she was only visiting Harry?

The narrator is Douglas’s granddaughter and she has come to India to research Olivia’s life and to have an adventure of her own. Unlike Olivia who chooses not to see the poverty just outside the palace walls, she is well aware of it as she lives in a poor community in which she makes many friends. The indifference shown to those who have nothing and no one, the living conditions of the poorest, the miserable lives of disempowered women, are all horrifying to read about. There are no heroes in this story. There is no taking sides. Having said that, the most acerbic observation is aimed at the colonialists: there are British cemeteries everywhere! they have turned out to be the most lasting monument.

For what is really only a novella, this is a complex and powerful story. As I’ve said, the dual time period formula is not my favourite. I dislike the parallels that arise between the two main characters as they seem, at times, too contrived. That is why it’s not a 5 star read for me but easily 4.5 stars.

2.5 stars

Did I like the novel, mostly yes, except that it felt hurried, especially
the end. There is nothing exceptional about the story of Olivia, the
wife of a civil servant, Douglas, who is falling for the small-town
Nawaab. Olivia seemed naive and Nawaab was smart and charming, quite a deadly
combination. And between the two of them, we have the moral and upright
Douglas. Sometimes you felt bad for Olivia and at times you could only be
angry at her for being so foolish. Apart from Douglas, it was Harry whom
I felt more pity for. Couldn't he have warned Olivia a little more? But
then people behave foolishly in love, especially someone as impulsive
as Olivia.

The story is narrated by a woman whose name is never revealed. She is
Olivia's step grand-daughter and has come to India to trace back the
secrets of Olivia's controversial life. In the end, I wonder did she
came for Olivia's story or because she had none of her own. I preferred
Olivia's story compared to the narrator's life. Although there are some
parts of the post-independence era, especially, the one about an old sick
women which does stir something in you. Foreigners wonder how people
in India accept everything and just move on with life and when they live
here long enough, they know why, because, now, they become one of us.

I liked the way the two stories are connected and intregated. Although
the author has written beautifully, the story does not captivate you
enough to be lost into Khatm or Satipur. Maybe the story was short and
as soon as you saw yourself entering their world, you had to come back. Also,
it felt withdrawn and seemed like the narrator felt the same. The story would
have been more rich had it been a little longer.

Made it halfway through when I concluded that this well written but very depressing story was not going to end well for anyone. Had I continued I would have been an angry, frustrated mess looking for my time back. I simply can’t stand it when character development weakens rather than grows as the story moves along. I don’t have the time to read about characters disintegrating into absurdity, no matter how prettily they are written or historical context taken into account.

For instance, in this case, the women become more naive, clueless, make scores of bad decisions – each more worse than the last - until I just stop caring. The misogyny, sexual assault masked and accepted as assertive love, the heinous crimes committed in the name of religion or poverty, the overall description of the times and places. *All Of This* turned my stomach. I could take no more of it.

That all said, I have yet to read a book about India that doesn’t depress or infuriate me (this, no doubt, plays a role in my review...) I am officially tapped out of wanting to read books about India for a while. Need a break. Perhaps I’ll come back to this one when I’m less bitey.

It's a book which will show you how bizarre were the conditions back then in colonial times for India. This book shows you the view of a English lady, of how she viewed the conditions in India.
I personally found it distressing, she is very much ignorant (or just deliberately trying not to see) of the trauma brits are imposing on India.
The book tries to subtly glorify the whites and show pity on trampled Indian.
I would not recommend this one for if you're going for a light hearted read.

After finishing Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 1975 Booker-Prize winning novel set in India during the British Raj, I will admit, I was puzzled at the degree of kudos that this most mediocre novel received. To say that the book was lackluster in its conveyance of colonialism in India is barely hitting the mark in its accuracy. And to put it on the same shelf as A Passage to India is completely laughable, thus illustrating once again that overzealous literary critics are only too eager to press forth onto the public reading material that would not warrant their time nor their effort. If one is inspired by literary prizes, like the Booker Prize that this novel received, I would caution readers to check it out from the library rather than buying the book; you can be your own critic and do yourself a minor economic service.

The novel is about how social constraints can lead people to actions that are less than desirable, and the main character, Olivia, makes many undesirable choices, the paramount one of them being that she aborts the baby of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince (in the territory) whom she has befriended and unexpectedly fallen in love with, despite the fact that she is happily married to Douglas, a junior British officer and bureaucrat. In the novel, there is really no inking that the marriage is cracking up and splitting Douglas and Olivia away from each other, and it is that deliberate ambiguity that makes the work not fully fleshed out and believable. The only hint that the marriage is not as solid as it appears is that Olivia wants a baby and Douglas holds off. But that is speculation, at best. And if that is indeed the case and thus the causal effect for Olivia's later actions, it puts an extreme negative spotlight on her. Understanding the social constraints of a specific milieu or period is one thing but compounding that with a British aristocratic sauce is just highly not credible, no matter what literary devices and creative liberty are executed upon the story as a whole. It does not make the plot a success. In fact, it barely rises to that bar. The reasoning given for Olivia's predicament almost borders as an experience on the Magic Carpet Ride after an LSD trip, for being in love with India is a dangerous thing for the European mindset. People let their cares down and in one fell swoop nonstop unwanted pregnancies occur, for it correlates to the woman's desire to experience love, lust and motherhood. But, naturally, due to socioeconomic constraints, the latter is never followed through with. Heat and Dust is extremely one-sided, and a worldview of options is not available, much less pondered.

Heat and Dust is primarily two stories that are interwoven to create one novel. The first story, as indicated, revolves around Olivia, a bored British officer's wife who longs for motherhood and is somewhat coming to grips with the exotic locations of her husband's assigned posts, for where ever he is assigned, she too is there. She has a conventional view of herself, and in turn, expects a kind of orthodoxy for the whole of her life. Considering the times that she is living in, that is a facet of her life that is truthful. Unfortunately, it is the only truthful element to the whole book. Olivia is not a particularly bright woman with any sense of foresight and intuitiveness. She is absolutely a stunted character, who, like her dim-witted husband, can not see the forest through the trees. Their limitations and or flaws just do not seem credible. Or perhaps it is the fault of the magic of India? Give me a break! The second part of the novel, though minor, deals with a female relation of Douglas's who also visits India and in turn winds up in a similar position that Olivia was herself once in. There is an emotional connection that the relation feels for Olivia, especially when she reads old letters and journals belonging to the Scarlet Lettered mythical woman. The letters and journals are used almost as survival how-to guides for getting along in India - definitely a warped view of things. Yet, they are somehow sisters or feminists-in-arms. Though the relation is more emancipated than Olivia ever was, she too is a flat and distantly written character; she almost gets her rocks off by Olivia's experience, which (I am only assuming) she deems as compelling and empowering. Yet, there no true elaboration as to why she feels the way that she does. I can only surmise that she is viewing Olivia and her actions from a historical context, that women like Olivia just don't do what she did. In the whole picture, it really was not all that great and admirable. Religiously, Olivia could be compared to the Eve of the Old Testament and the cousin who keeps her baby could be considered Mary in the New Testament. But that would be a huge stretch based solely upon interpretation.

For me, what I did not like overall about Heat and Dust is that women often have to be placed in the worst case scenarios and have to make truly horrific actions against themselves in order to be deemed heroines for future generations. It is such a predictable and overused plot in fiction nowadays. The work was just bland and the plot was ridiculous. While the writing was technically good, the book overall belonged in the bucket of Booker-Prize bummers.

Започна много интересно, но ентусиазмът ми бързо “увяхна”. Не ме докосна с нищо, направо ми беше скучна. Някои от персонажите ми се сториха категорично излишни.

[2.5] An only-just-postcolonial novel about the British in India, by an author who described herself as "a Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis," and who was married to an Indian man.

Some friends will see from that quote why I might have been interested in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but I read this very short book mostly to improve my count of Booker winners (this being only the 14th), as I'm active in a group where many people have read more. That characterisation - along with her scriptwriting work for Merchant Ivory - was pretty much all I remembered about the author at the time I started reading Heat and Dust. (And I only learnt a few months ago that she wasn't, as I'd always previously assumed, Anglo-Indian.) About ¾ of the way through the book, I read more about RPJ and her attitude to India, and this at least partly cancelled out one of the interpretations of the book I'd been building up to that point.

Although I was intensely engaged in note-taking and thinking all through the book, the analysis was almost all I got out of it. I found the prose boring, and the parallels between the two protagonists' stories became heavy-handed.

There are two alternating narratives in Heat and Dust. One is told in the third-person, about Olivia, the bored, naïve and sheltered new young wife of Douglas, a British colonial official in West Bengal; we are told in the book's opening sentence that she ran off with a Nawab in 1923. The other is a first-person narrative contemporary to the book's writing in the 1970s, by the unnamed British granddaughter of Douglas' second marriage (whom I'll refer to as the narrator or the granddaughter.) She is in her late 20s or early 30s and travels to India, with a cache of Olivia's letters, to see the scenes of this family scandal which is now beginning to be talked about, and to experience some of the 'simplicity' of India that attracted young Westerners on the hippie trail.

No less than five of the first ten Booker Prize winners (1969-77) address the British Empire and its end. I haven't read any of the others, but it's clear from these wins that it was a big topic for British literary fiction at the time, and was predominantly written about from the British viewpoint (all the winners other than V.S. Naipaul were British or Irish). I had never been very keen to read these novels, as I expected the writing about India and Indian people would be clumsy from a contemporary viewpoint, and I didn't expect there would be much to learn about the old India hands that I hadn't already seen in old documentaries and light novels read when I was younger. Starting Heat & Dust, I wondered if it might be different because the author had lived in post-independence India for 24 years with her Indian architect husband - surely very a different experience from that of colonial staff or tourists.

Through most of the book, before I'd done more research, I developed a tentative hypothesis that Prawer Jhabvala a was notably progressive and perceptive in her attitudes by the standards of her time, and was subtly critiquing the granddaughter and people of her generation from similar old colonial service families - and the hippies - who thought they were more open-minded about India than they actually were. Thus, the stereotypes in the third-person story about Olivia were present because the granddaughter was telling that story and because that was how she, and the sources from which she got the information, saw the people involved. (The wilful, coercively seductive Muslim Nawab, for instance, seems to fit the old desert sheikh stereotype in romance.) This made it seem like a potentially rather interesting piece of literature for its time, and such layered complexity would explain its Booker win (although some 2010s commentators, such as those who criticise the lionising of sexist or abusive male narrators, e.g in Rebecca Solnit's essay on Lolita, would argue that the widespread critical elevation of such narrators is at best questionable). I was never 100% sure about this analysis, and was planning to write a review in which I outlined both that interpretation and a simpler, less favourable one. 1975 must not have been a great year for British and Commonwealth literature anyway, as the Booker shortlist consisted of only two titles. Even though what I read about Prawer Jhabvala and her feelings about India pointed towards the simpler interpretation - in which the granddaughter's attitudes have a fair bit in common with the author's, and in which the story of Olivia and the Nawab is told straight - one could perhaps argue the book still has something going for it *because* it has the flexibility to be interpreted in more than one way.

Pankaj Mishra's 2004 NYT review of another Prawer Jhabvala book refers to a 1980s essay of hers which said "'how intolerable India -- the idea, the sensation of it -- can become' to someone like her… Jhabvala spoke of the intense heat, the lack of a social life and the 'great animal of poverty and backwardness' that she couldn't avoid". (Heat & Dust does contain a lot of hackneyed scenes of vast crowds and poverty - but at the same time everyone here whom I've heard talk about going to India, including British people of Indian descent, has said that it's one of the things you notice at first because of the contrast - so I'm not totally sure what the correct take on that is, except that it's overused while other less stereotypical aspects may go ignored in western writing about India.) I can certainly relate to the dissatisfaction of living in a place you don't like, and to some other ways which Mishra describes her: "the confident exile -- of the much displaced person who, finally secure in her inner world and reconciled to her isolation, looks askance at people longing for fulfillment in other cultures and landscapes", or " When fully absorbed by self-analysis, the perennial outsider usually ends up regarding all emotional and intellectual commitment as folly. Such cold-eyed clarity, useful to a philosopher or mystic, can only be a disadvantage for the novelist, who needs to enter, at least temporarily, her characters' illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page." And these days more than ever, lack of respect for a place where you've spent a lot of time will win you few friends. (IME it takes about as long to wear off as the time you lived there.) I think there may be limited use in reading this novel these days, especially for those who find the writing as uninspiring as I did; to learn about India in the 1920s or the 70s it's probably better to read non-fiction, and its frequently stereotypical attitudes will annoy some readers.

Where there may be interesting things going on are in the cynical caricatures of young British hippies by a westerner who's been in India longer, and in feminism / attitudes to women.

When the granddaughter tries to explain the hippies to her Indian landlord (a few years younger than herself), it sounds as if she has a little affinity with them: "I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the-East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life." [Directly following this is one of the very few occasions in which a convincing Indian voice appears, in his reply, "This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything -motor cars, refrigerators - come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds."

A hippie couple who came to India after being swept up by a swami's talk in London on universal love can be summarised thus:
"Why did you come?" I asked her.
"To find peace." She laughed grimly: "But all I found was dysentery."
These young travellers don't seem to be particularly well off, so the reader doesn't have to endure the most tedious aspects of the 21st-century "gap yah" caricature. (Some even have regional accents!) This is instead about an absurd gulf between romantic expectation and physical reality, and how some Indian spiritual teachers seem to be either milking a cash-cow, or are just oblivious to realities: e.g. apparently training up a white lad as a mendicant sadhu, when Indian people are unlikely to give money to a white British man begging. Even the 1970s episodes seem to echo the old colonial idea of the 'white man's graveyard': the narrative intimates that the climate and the bugs are even bad for westerners who've been in India for several years, although an Indian doctor argues with the granddaughter that "this climate does not suit you people too well. And let alone you people, it does not suit even us."

One feature of 1960s-70s hippie culture that has emerged from the shadows in recent years is how some women felt exploited because "free love" meant they felt obliged to have sex with men they didn't really want. Heat & Dust contains the first example I remember seeing from something written at the time: the unwantedness is clear, but so is a certain amount of buying-into the spiritual side.

I don't think it's entirely a "white feminist" book, in that nebulous 21st century term on which I will certainly not claim to be any kind of expert. Perhaps there is a certain amount of cheap hippyish respect for natural local medicine and so forth, but there is a theme running through the book being subtly positive about greater solidarity between women. If Olivia had sought a respectable acquaintance with the Begum, or if she had gone to Simla with Beth, perhaps she would never have got into the mess she did with the Nawab. The two Bertha-from-Jane-Eyre figures still don't get a lot to say but they are at least shown to be victims rather than monsters; the granddaughter wants to arrange better treatment for the one in the 1970s, and she seems to be genuinely open to befriending some of the Indian women she meets (though we can't tell what they make of her). Other than a doctor or two, and possibly the Nawab's London-based grandson, the Indian men don't come out of this awfully well, in terms of specific characters or general descriptions. Though neither do most of the white British men, other than possibly Douglas, who had "the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour" (too normie and straightforward for Olivia ultimately?). The granddaughter sounds kind of optimistic at the end, but I felt the author wasn't very convinced by her either; I think RPJ treats everyone with detached cynicism, although some more politely than others.

I'm not sure I'd really recommend Heat & Dust for anything other than some sort of academic project on early British post-colonial literature. I mean, the second I reached the end, I heard myself saying as if by a reflex, "thank fuck that's finished … that was a bit crap" - though hopefully the above paragraphs show it's not quite that simple, and I did kind of enjoy trying to analyse it. It is very short, so at least I wasn't bored for that long. And Booker completists will read it despite its not having aged terribly well.

I expected to like this book more. There really weren't any super memorable characters. The story fell flat for me. I usually like the parallel story lines, but the two in this book were just not distinct enough for me.