SOURCE: “Time and Scriptable Lives in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust,” in World Literature Written in English, Spring, 1992, pp. 55-65.

In 1973 Ruth Jhabvala visited, with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, the palace at Jodhpur. This visit, though none of those involved knew it at the time, was to culminate two years later in the release of the film Autobiography of a Princess and in the publication of Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1975.

Autobiography of a Princess began with an idea Ivory had to produce a film about Indian palaces. As Ivory and his team toured various palaces they discovered that many of the former royal families had preserved in their private archives footage of all sorts of ceremonial and family events from years past. Ivory handed the archival material to Jhabvala and suggested that she write a screenplay that would allow them to integrate the documentary footage they had shot over the years with the archival film, to which would be added fictional sequences with Madhur Jaffrey playing an Indian princess. When Ivory and Merchant returned to New York, they had come to the view that the film should be set in London and should involve an English male character as well as the Princess.¹

While writing the screenplay for Autobiography of a Princess, Jhabvala began work on a novel that she was to publish as Heat and Dust, the story of a young woman who travels to India to gain an understanding of the life of Olivia, her grandfather's first wife who lived in India in the 1920s. Olivia Rivers, married to Douglas, a district officer in the Indian Civil Service, scandalized the British community by eloping with an Indian Nawab and then remaining in India for the rest of her life. The narrator gains some insight into Olivia's life and feelings from an inherited collection of letters written by Olivia to her sister and from information provided by her family and by Harry “Something,” who had been the Nawab's house guest and a confidante of Olivia's. These letters and conversations are the literary equivalent of the documentary and archival footage that formed the basis of Autobiography of a Princess. The influence of the film extended even to the way Jhabvala wrote the text of her novel:

I wrote [Heat and Dust] rather differently from the others. I wrote great blocks of present time and then great blocks of 1923. Then afterwards I cut them up and put them together to set each other off. So I have learnt a lot technically from film. (Rutherford 377)

In Autobiography of a Princess, the raking over of old memories is an annual event centred on a memorial tea party held to celebrate the Princess's late father's birthday. One has the feeling that for the Princess, her nostalgia for the old days is more or less a permanent condition. For Cyril Sahib, the late Maharaja's tutor, remembering is painful, and even the once-a-year get-together, despite the Princess's charm, seems to fill him with fears and memories he would rather leave buried. It is only his constitutional weakness and inability to say “no” to the Princess that bring him up to London from Turton-on-Sea, where he labours diffidently on a historical study of a British district officer whom he admires for his energy and administrative ability!

For the Princess and Cyril Sahib, the past is lived at a distance, mediated through memories and stories, albums of faded photographs, films, garlanded portraits, and newspaper clippings, historical research, girlish reminiscence, and upper-class style supplied by Fortnum and Mason. But in Heat and Dust, the narrator's exploration of past time and place is direct and adventurous, not vicarious. Perhaps it is a reflection of the adventure Jhabvala herself took when she “blindly and fearlessly” left England with her husband to live in India (Jhabvala, “Disinheritance” 8). There still are distancing elements in the novel Heat and Dust (Olivia's letters and reported conversations with Harry, and the narrator's journal), but it seems that Jhabvala's understanding of the “presentness” of past fictive time in film, undoubtedly reinforced by working with the archival film, prompted her to use a montage technique in the verbal narrative and in this way to create two parallel plots that have an intense present, here-and-now quality about them.

INTERTEXTUALITY, TIME, AND SCRIPTABLE LIVES

Intertextuality, time, and the Barthesian concept of the scriptable text² are complexly entwined in Heat and Dust, Jhabvala explores these interrelationships as a way of reflecting on the nature of individuality and dependence and on the freedom, the pleasures, and the risks that might be involved in taking charge of our own lives. In Barthes's concept of the scriptable text, the reader takes charge and produces the text in a way that gives the reader access to the pleasure of co-authorship and the realization of the unfixed, open, plural nature of the signification of the text.

The concept of intertextuality also recognizes the openness of the text. All texts are taken to be appropriations of prior texts, which are themselves open to being appropriated in as-yet-unwritten, future texts. This concept of the intertextuality of texts thus positions any text in a process of becoming. It recognizes the debt a text owes to other texts and assumes the debt will be repaid in the future. Understood in this way, the idea that a text is an “original” cannot be sustained, as intertextuality acknowledges an infinite regress to other texts that are the original of the original. But the impetus is not only backward; the play of difference in the given text sets up the conditions for further play, and thus the present text must be understood as being in the process of being inscribed in future texts. There is no sharp boundary that can be drawn to mark off this text from its antecedents nor its progeny, and thus the tendency to privilege the present form of the text and consider it as authoritative, as “correct,” as the definitive version, ignores the becoming nature of the text.

In Heat and Dust, intertextuality is explored in two principal ways. First, and most directly, Jhabvala draws on “the literature” of the Raj, and the impact of that literature on the structure and even on characterization will be taken up in detail below. Secondly, the narrator's response to Olivia's letters (themselves a personal and informal part of the literature of the Raj) and her impulse to live out the letters by traveling to India and writing about her experiences are extended illustrations of the appropriation of Olivia's text by the narrator's journal. But before the narrator can appropriate the letters as a writer, she must first read them. Her subsequent decision, not to put them aside but to take them back to India and explore their references and resonances in her own life, deftly links Barthes's concept of the scriptable text with the practice of intertextuality. The narrator as reader becomes, literally and figuratively, the writer. Then, as readers, we too are invited to share the narrator's fortunes and to have the freedom in the last phase of the novel to begin writing our own reflections. At the end of the novel, the narrator's climb up the mountain may be read as every person's journey into the unknown and as the challenge that faces the individual who chooses to live life in an uncompromisingly “writerly” way.

Time is used to connect the structural elements of intertextuality, articulated through the notion of a literary and cultural heritage, with the idea of the scriptable text, which is articulated through the choices characters and readers have open to them in the narrative. It is time that places one in the position of inheritor and also positions one as a shaper of the future. Like Barthes's concept of the “classical” text, which denies³ the reader the opportunity of rewriting, the past may constrain our response to the present and limit our future. But what I understand Jhabvala to say in the way both Olivia and the narrator make choices that are their own and are not simply imitative or conventional is that the past can be transcended by the fearless “writerly reader.”

THE STRUCTURE OF THE VERBAL NARRATIVE

The events related in the verbal narrative of Heat and Dust extend over a period of approximately seven months. The narrator's journal of her stay in Satipur begins on February 2, some time in the 1970s, and entries cease in September. On Page One we are told that it was in September 1923 that Olivia “went away with the Nawab.” The narrator and Olivia thus spent exactly the same amount of time in Satipur. Olivia's letters, most of them written while she was in Satipur, are echoed across time in the narrator's journal entries.

Jhabvala divides the narrative equally between the events of 1923 and the present and alternates the events of the two periods over 22 segments. The discourse time of the alternating segments becomes increasingly shorter as the narrative proceeds. Long, self-contained periods concerned with present or past fictive time give way to shorter segments that naturally shift the reader more quickly from one time frame to the other and suggest that the distinctiveness of the periods is lessening all the time as the narrator's experiences more closely resemble Olivia's. Towards the end of the narrative, the practice of differentiating diegetic time by writing either “1923” or a journal entry date such as “31 July-15 August,” which has been consistently used from Page Two onwards, lapses, and the shift from the events of 1923 to the present is marked by asterisks and a double paragraph space. From this point on, the past and the present blur and are not related separately, but are related by the narrator as a mixture of reported speech, reminiscence, and historical reporting.

Olivia's time and the narrator's time have merged; the present has assimilated the past, has made it its own, and is now preparing for the next phase—significantly, the birth of a new generation that will in turn have to assimilate its forbears' pasts. This cyclical (samsarik)⁴ interpretation of the entanglement of one generation's lives in those of the past is formally reinforced in the novel by the reference to Douglas's death on the first page and to the birth of the narrator's child on the last page, by the decreasing length of discourse time given to the different time frames that I have noted, and by the sense of merged time that extends for 13 pages from the point where time is no longer marked. This narrative time corresponds exactly to the space given to the 1970s fictive time in the beginning of the book, formally superimposes one cycle of time on another, and “rounds off” the narrative structure of the text.⁵

The cyclical interpretation of time is also a feature of Autobiography of a Princess, where it is articulated in ways that closely match the life-cycle imagery of Heat and Dust. The nostalgic, annual observance of the late Maharaja's birthday is itself an echo of other, seemingly endless, indulgent celebrations that the Princess's family staged at the height of its power. The birthday party for a father who has died re-creates the past as the present, compresses the span of one man's life into its beginning, and, through the jerky, flickering images, brings him and his era into the present. At one point, Cyril Sahib, trapped by the Princess into sitting through scene after scene of elaborate state anniversaries and ceremonies, says that, after a time, he found the events being celebrated blurred into an endless round and that what appeared to be a distinct moment in an individual's life could also be seen as part of other, more extended rhythms and cycles:

Although in the beginning I was excited by all the processions and ceremonies, after a time they all seemed the same. The weddings. The birthdays. The funerals. … One would have thought that, as the years went by, all these ceremonies would become more familiar to me. Not at all. They became more mystifying. More mysterious. I was able less and less to keep them apart, or to know what was going on. Somehow it all ran together—being married, dying—it was all part of the same process … (Ivory 148)

The implication of time in Heat and Dust is complex and may be analysed from three points of view. First, and most obviously, there is the interleaving or structural mapping of one historical period onto another, which we might interpret first as a textual or graphic metaphor of a cyclical interpretation of chronological time. Jhabvala's technical expertise is evident here as she manipulates discourse time as well as diegetic time and as she links the periods together, which will be discussed further.

The second issue is the way time is mediated, the way time is distanced from human beings: it is only accessible in letters and diaries, and even more abstractly, in places. The narrator's present-day experience in India is available to the reader only through her diaries, not directly. It is significant that for both Olivia and the narrator the shift away from Satipur to a way of life that is shaped more directly by them coincides with an end to writing about life, an end to a mediation of life through others' values and assumptions. Towards the end of the narrative the narrator says that the only way she can come to understand how time changed Olivia will be to put herself through the same process—that is, to stay on (160). Finally, we can understand time as a social construct, a network of values and attitudes and conventions, of relationships, of knowledge, of alliances, prejudices, and enmities that for individuals make up the historical context of their lives and shape their hopes and opportunities. This third concept of time is of central thematic importance in the novel, as it provides the context in which Jhabvala can explore the possibility of changes in patterns of dependence and individuality—particularly for women in their relationships with men, something that most critical discussion has not understood.

I will comment on this third concept of time first of all. The social construction of time in Heat and Dust is developed in the language and narrative events of the text itself, but is supported by direct and indirect reference to the English literature of the Raj, the only inheritance that Jhabvala stored up for the journey “she didn't know she had to make” (Jhabvala,“Disinheritance” 8). The direct references to the literature of the imperial period are obscure. On pages 58 and 59, Dr. Saunders makes reference to an English Member of Parliament who visited Satipur a year before and whose views had annoyed the old India hands. It is likely that Saunders was referring to A. E. W. Mason, who visited India as a Member of Parliament and later recorded his experiences in the novel The Broken Road, in which he questioned the wisdom of a western education for the Indian Princes. Jhabvala includes reference to another volume of English comment on Indian cultural life when her character Major Minnies refers to Colonel Sleeman's experience of a voluntary suttee in the early 1820s.⁶ The third explicit reference is not to a book but to a print, “Mrs Secombe in Flight from the Mutineers,” which Harry recalls in describing Olivia's flight from the British lines to Khatm. These texts are analogues of Olivia's (and the narrator's and Jhabvala's) writings about their experience in India and remind the reader that “literature,” more generally and more publicly than private letters and journals, contributes to our knowledge of ourselves and, in this case, of other times, cultures, and places. The choice of texts—one the locus classicus of the heroic myth of the Raj, the other two more sympathetic to Indian views—reminds us that literature is deeply penetrated by the values and attitudes of the culture that produced it. The imperial myth, with its inscribed values of dominance, superiority, and conventional wisdom, so well reflected in Douglas and his kind, may be read as denying the possibility, pleasure, and risks of choice and change—the two factors that are so significant in the narrator's and Olivia's lives. In choosing from the rich storehouse of British memories of the Raj two commentaries sympathetic to an Indian perspective, attention is focused on Olivia's, and by extension, the narrator's ideological position, alerting the reader to the possibility of a plurality of interpretations of the classical myth.

The structure of Heat and Dust owes a debt to Forster's record of his travels in India entitled The Hill of Devi. The Hill of Devi is based on a series of letters written by Forster while traveling in India, interspersed with commentary and essays also written by him, but considerably later. It is a patchwork of immediacy and reminiscence, of the past refracted through the present. It is also the record of a journey, and a record of Forster's experience as private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas State Senior; as such, it may be read as a possible source for the character and situation of Harry in Heat and Dust and of Cyril in Autobiography of a Princess. The Maharaja may have been the model for Jhabvala's Nawab: R. Cronin has drawn attention to a passage in Forster's description of the Maharaja's jumbled treasure that is echoed by Jhabvala's inventory of the Nawab's extravagance, down to the detail of two pianos, one a grand, “with their notes sticking and their frames cracked by dryness” (Cronin 143). Both the Nawab and the Maharaja promise to summon a piano tuner from Bombay.⁷

MONTAGE IN THE VERBAL NARRATIVE

We might turn now to consider how Jhabvala manages the montage effect of shifting from one time period to another. Jhabvala has noted that her strategy owed much to filmic practice, and the careful bracketing of fictive time in the novel suggests that she has fully absorbed the lessons of shifting time in a medium in which all events, past, present, and future, seem to be narrated in a “perpetual present,” to use Bluestone's apt phrase.⁸

It has already been noted that Jhabvala signifies temporal shifts in Heat and Dust by introducing the segments by dates—just “1923” in the case of segments of Olivia's story—and by noting days and months for the segments that are presented as extracts from the narrator's diary. The 1923 segments are narrated by Douglas's granddaughter, who, it seems, has thoroughly assimilated details of Olivia's life. This fiction, however, is not maintained beyond the introductory paragraphs of the 1923 sections. After the introductory paragraphs the temporal orientation of the section becomes that of 1923, and the narrator becomes an impersonal, omniscient narrator, a narrator whose privileged knowledge of not only Olivia but of Douglas, of the Nawab, and of the other characters makes it impossible for the reader to identify as Ms Rivers. These segments are thus literary equivalents of the flashback and have all the “present” quality of filmic action.

Jhabvala has used a variety of techniques to bridge the cuts from the events of one time frame to events in the other. I have identified five strategies that cue the reader for narrative events following. One device used throughout the text to link events across time is the setting of them in a common spatial location. This is the technique used in the first temporal shift in the narrative. The narrator and Inder Lal visit Khatm and tour the Nawab's palace, finding it an empty shell, neglected and lifeless. The opening line of the following section locates the past fictive action in the same place Inder Lal and the narrator were last seen: “Olivia first met the Nawab at a dinner party he gave in his palace at Khatm” (14). In addition to this spatial link there is also a metaphoric link. The narrator leaves the palace at Khatm clutching some rock sugar and a few sweet-smelling flowers that the palace watchman had given her when she visited his puja shrine in the palace.⁹ As she drives home, she throws away the offerings, but finds the petals and sugar leave “… the palm of my hand sticky with a lingering smell of sweetness and decay that is still there as I write” (14). The association of the decaying palace and the sweetness that Olivia once found there in her love for the Nawab is clear. The scent recalls, too, Olivia's letters, which, after more than 50 years, the narrator tells us, still hold a delicate scent of lilac.¹⁰

Spatial links are used in three other shifts from one time frame to another. When the narrator meets the would-be sadhu (‘religious mendicant’) Chid for the first time, it is on the verandah of the house that was once the Saunders's. She realizes while standing there that the house looked directly onto the cemetery. This reference is taken up in the following 1923 segment in the opening line—“Olivia had always been strongly affected by graveyards” (24)—and establishes the graveyard and its location, which will be returned to throughout the novel. The linking of space across time is used again on Page 55 to introduce the suttee shrines in Satipur and to introduce the annual pilgrimage of expatriate women to the hill stations for the summer.

The abruptness of the shift from one period to another is moderated in other sections of the text by the linking of the time periods with reference to events in common. Jhabvala does this skilfully when she makes an annual ritual, the Husband's Wedding Day procession to the shrine of Baba Firdaus, the common element linking the narrator's and Olivia's experience in Satipur. Later in the narrative, the linking across periods becomes more complex and is achieved by a dense entanglement of time and place. The narrator and Inder Lal return to Baba Firdaus's grove “shortly before the beginning of the monsoon” and make love in the cool shade. The next segment from 1923 provides the historical precedent for their dalliance. The segment ends with Olivia and the Nawab locked in each other's arms, thus repeating the pattern of the previous narrative segment. The outcome of the love-making in the grove rebounds across time in the sections that follow, as Jhabvala moves swiftly from period to period, grafting the experience of one woman onto the other. The segment following the love-making between the Nawab and Olivia begins with the news that the narrator is pregnant. In perfect symmetry, the shift to 1923 also records in the first line that Olivia is pregnant. The resolution of the shared experience is brought about by Olivia's abortion in the back lanes of Khatm and by the narrator's decision to not go ahead with an abortion but to keep the child, a decision that introduces the major break between the lives of the two women.

A qualitatively different link occurs when Jhabvala reveals parallel character traits between Olivia and the narrator and makes these traits the motivation for a shift from the fictive present to the fictive past. Through Maji, the narrator has met a beggar woman called Leelavati. One day she discovers that Leelavati is critically ill and rushes about trying to see what can be done. It seems that nothing can be done and the narrator comes to accept Leela's death with Maji in a very tender scene. Immediately following this moment, Jhabvala shifts the diegetic time to 1923 and introduces Olivia's concern about Harry's health, which she feels is deteriorating rapidly.

The final temporal-montage technique examined here reveals a very sure grasp of both filmic and literary technique. It is a remarkable example of a literary voice-over or a dissolve. At the end of the picnic that Olivia, the Nawab, and Harry enjoy out near Baba Firdaus's shrine, the Nawab manages to win the game of musical cushions in which he and Olivia had been the last contestants. In the journal entry that follows immediately after the usual asterisks and date, the narrator writes in a way that suggests that she is still in the 1923 time frame. The tense of the verbs used and the use of “this” in the opening line rather than “that,” which would have a greater distancing effect, combine to maintain for two paragraphs the narrator's voice as a voice-over from 1923. In the third paragraph the tense of the verbs brings us clearly into the present, and the narrator's comment, “I have laid Olivia's letters out on my little desk and work on them and this journal throughout the morning” (48), reminds us that Olivia's time is a mediated experience, something that happened long ago. The reference to the letters reminds us that the narrator is simultaneously reader and writer. For an instant, Olivia and the narrator have merged, and we seem to be present at the moment when the narrator appropriates Olivia's text and produces it as her own.

The alternating temporal structure Jhabvala has inscribed in Heat and Dust creates a textual artefact organized as layers of time. Taking up Michel Butor's comments about the spatial qualities of books, we can see that Jhabvala's text impresses one period upon another, binding them together and bringing them within our reach. Reading blurs the differences from page to page until the two periods seem to fuse together, almost in the same way that flip-card projectors blurred differences between individual illustrations into a smooth sweep of narrative action. This illusion is completed in the final 13 pages of the book, where the marks of the periods are erased. At the same time that the text builds its midden of memories layer upon layer, it superimposes one space upon another, an intriguing metaphor of the links between Satipur and Khatm in the 1920s and today. The shift from one time to another in the book also involves a concurrent displacement of the reader as we journey, shadowing the narrator, through the fictive spaces of the narrative. At the end of the journey we find that the paths of Olivia and the narrator have come together in space, high in the Himalayas, far from the heat and dust, at a point that affords a perspective on what has gone before, and is, at the same time, a starting point for further journeys:

I'm impatient for it to stop raining because I want to move on, go higher up. I keep looking up all the time, but everything remains hidden. Unable to see, I imagine mountain peaks higher than any I've ever dreamed of; the snow on them is also whiter than all other snow—so white it is luminous and shines against a sky which is of a deeper blue than any yet known to me. That is what I expect to see. Perhaps it is also what Olivia saw: the view—or vision—that filled her eyes all those years and suffused her soul. (180)

At the end of Olivia's story, as we know, Olivia wrote less and less. In the end, then, there is nothing for the narrator to write over; any record must now be her own addition to the album. Her life leads out and on from Olivia's. This must surely be the point of the narrator's comment on Page Two that “… this is not my story, it is Olivia's as far as I can follow it” (emphasis added). Having followed Olivia to the hills, the narrator makes a decision to go higher up the mountain and to prepare for the birth of her child.

The points above may be linked to Jhabvala's theme of inheritance and heritage, which she explored in her unusually personal and revealing Neil Gunn lecture delivered in April 1979. The lecture, entitled “Disinheritance,” is an account of an absence, of a lack of heritage, of her feeling of a lack of rootedness in place, a lack of ancestry, language, and artefacts, which, Jhabvala explains, the circumstances of her life denied her. Jhabvala describes how as a student she absorbed the world and landscape of writers such as Eliot, Hardy, and Dickens because she did not have a world of her own. Olivia's husband Douglas is proud of his family's long association with India. But Olivia did not share Douglas's Anglo-Indian background and left no children whom she might have seen as adding something of herself to the British tradition in India. Olivia did leave something of herself for later generations, however, in her letters, which the narrator has come to treasure as her inheritance. The narrator orders and protects the memories and brings them to life in her trip to Satipur.

In the Neil Gunn lecture Jhabvala talks enviously of Neil Gunn's inheritance, which she describes as “… his rootedness in tradition, landscape and that inexplicable region where childhood and ancestral memories merge …” (4). Perhaps the merging of Olivia's and the narrator's time at the end of Heat and Dust, high up in the Himalayas in an unnamed town, is the “inexplicable region” where the generations and heritage of Olivia, the narrator, and the child come together; the lack that Olivia felt so keenly is eliminated in a place where time and space seem to have become one.

Aesthetically, then, the temporal structure of Jhabvala's novel may be read as an exploration of the concept of heritage and inheritance, of time in the culture of individuals, and of the way time shapes our decisions. An individual's heritage, like a scriptable text, is both a constraint and an opportunity for change. The implication of a shared history or an emotional bonding shapes our values and guides our actions, but never totally, for the opportunity for individuals to “rewrite” their heritage is always available.

Notes

1. See James Ivory, comp., Autobiography of a Princess.

2. The concept of a scriptable or writerly text is from Roland Barthes's S/Z. The reader of a writerly text produces the text. The reader is invited, as T. Hawkes has noted, “… to join in, and be aware of the interrelationship of the writing and the reading, and which accordingly offers [the reader] the joys of co-operation, co-authorship (and even, at its intensest moments, of copulation)” (Hawkes 114). See Hawkes and Barthes's S/Z.

3. The denial is never absolute. Barthes suggests “classical” or “readerly” texts are best thought of as more parsimonious in the plurality of their signification than scriptable texts. If this were not so, Barthes could not have performed his inventive re-writing of Sarasine in S/Z.

4. Samsara is the Hindu concept of the bondage of life, death, and rebirth. Connected with this concept is the concept of karma, which, in Max Weber's words, proposed that “… man was bound in an endless sequence of ever new lives and deaths and he determines his own fate solely by his deeds …” (Weber 120). R. C. Zaehner defines karma as “… the law according to which any action whatsoever is the effect of a cause and is in its turn the cause of an effect” (Zaehner 4).

5. See Gooneratne for a similar analysis of the segments in the verbal narrative (218f).

6. See W. H. Sleeman's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (60).

7. Forster's influence may be more pervasive still. In Autobiography of a Princess Cyril tells the Princess that the British administration had not been pleased with the late Maharaja's decision to appoint him as his tutor, but that the Maharaja had demanded it and in the end got his way. This story prompts the Princess to accuse Cyril of a lack of loyalty to his late benefactor and friend when he had fallen foul of the law in London. These two issues—one, a matter of fact, and the other, a question of values—tie in closely with Forster's own experience and value system. Forster's appointment as tutor in Dewas was resisted by the British, who considered that he was a coward and a sexual pervert. In his 1938 essay “What I Believe,” Forster presents his credo that in turbulent and violent times it is personal relationships and the values of loyalty and love that ultimately matter. In Heat and Dust these same issues are revived. The British in Satipur disapprove of Harry, describing him as a “hanger-on,” and do all they can to arrange for his return to England. The Nawab also accuses his friend of a lack of loyalty:

   He turned on Harry: “You can take them back to him. You can fling them in his face and say here is your answer. But I suppose you would not like to do it.” He turned his fierce gaze on Harry who looked down. Olivia also did not like to look at the Nawab just then.

   “I suppose you are afraid to do it. You are afraid of Major Minnies and other creatures of that nature. … Oh both of you are the same, you and Major Minnies. I don't know why you stay here with me. You want to be with him and other English people. You only feel for them, nothing for me at all.” (144)

   Finally, we note that Forster's essay concludes with the view that as humans, we all share the memory of birth and the expectation of death, and it is these existential realities that provide the only sure ground for understanding between different individuals, a view that would find nothing strange in the narrator trying to discover from the life and letters of Olivia some insight that would be of value in her own life.

8. Note that Barthes argues that the scriptable text involves the reader in producing the text as “a perpetual present” (5).

9. Puja means worship. Many Hindus maintain shrines for daily devotions in their homes.

10. Gooneratne draws attention to this same passage, but draws a different point from it (286).

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Butor, Michel. “The Book as Object.” Inventory, Essays by Michel Butor. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Johnathan Cape, 1970: 38-56.

———. “The Space of the Novel.” Inventory, Essays by Michel Butor. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970: 31-38.

Cronin, E. R. “The Hill of Devi and Heat and Dust.” Essays in Criticism 36.2 (1986): 142-59.

Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile and Cunning. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1983.

Hawkes, T. Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Methuen, 1983.

Ivory, James. Comp. Autobiography of a Princess by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. “Disinheritance.” Blackwoods Magazine 326 (1979): 4-14.

———. Heat and Dust. London: Futura, 1976. All references are to the Futura edition.

Mason, A. E. W. The Broken Road. London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1907.

Rutherford, A., and K. H. Petersen, “Heat and Dust: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Experience of India.” World Literature Written in English 15.2 (1976): 373-78.

Sleeman, W. H. Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. London: Oxford University Press, 1915.

Weber, Max. The Religion of India. Trans. H. Gerth and D. Martindale. New York: The Free Press, 1958.

Zaehner, R. C. Hinduism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.