Mr. Khushwant Singh in bracketing Mrs. R. Prawer Jhabvala with Mr. R. K. Narayan as the leading Indian novelists now writing in English has suggested that she writes in the main about the "Babbitts" of Delhi. It would be a gross generalization to speak of "Babbittry" as Jhabvala's preoccupation although at least two of her six novels (Get Ready for Battle and The Nature of Passion) explore in depth the lives of the rich and corrupt bourgeoisie of present-day India, while several others have rich bourgeois characters in less central positions. The original Babbitt of Sinclair Lewis was a satirical exposure of American bourgeois society, told not without some ultimate sympathy for the hero caught in the trap of social climbing and conformism, a sympathy which Jhabvala sometimes imitates towards her Babbitts. As a novelist Jhabvala is highly delicate and ambiguous in tone and her satire is only an element (though an important one) in her work. An examination of her Babbitts in fact shows how the Indian tradition and context and related cultural differences have complicated the picture. In this essay therefore the word "Babbitt" will be used to cover a range of Indian bourgeois types, some of which have only a tenuous connection with the Sinclair Lewis prototype. Jhabvala is more essentially a novelist of manners rather than a novelist of ideas; and notions of class and economic conflict are subordinated to her study of family life, marriage and expatriation. Nevertheless I intend to show how the notions of heroic virtue and religious non-attachment in the Hindu context are embodied in key characters in her novels in such a way as to suggest the futility and self-defeat of the Babbitt's pursuit of wealth and power as ends.

The rich bourgeois head-of-family appears centrally in two novels: her second one in order of publication, The Nature of Passion [1956] …, and her fifth, Get Ready for Battle [1962]…. Lal Narayan Dass Verma (Lalaji, as he is called) is a striking and powerful figure, head of a large and turbulent family whose activities provide the story of The Nature of Passion. In some ways he is the crudest kind of Babbitt. He and his eldest son Om are rich, greedy and corrupt; neither, however, aspires to any culture or sophistication. Both are conformist to the Indian tradition without showing any marked piety or awareness of their duties to any principles beyond money and family. Sometimes, as in this novel, money and family loyalties may conflict. Their business ethics are of the most dubious, and at the beginning of the novel Lalaji is in imminent danger of being exposed, prosecuted and ruined for offering bribes in exchange for government contracts for his firm. But Lalaji is first displayed as a family man, the emperor-like head of an "undivided family."… The opening scene of the novel shows the hilarity, excitement and chaos which results when Lalaji, Om and the women of the family pay a visit to Om's wife after the birth of her baby. Jhabvala stresses the tenderness and infectious boyish pleasure with which the old capitalist greets this latest arrival to the clan. Lalaji's role as father of a large and growing family colours the whole of the novel and does much to cancel out the bad impression of his ruthlessness in business. Nevertheless the Babbittry of Lalaji and Om are egregiously displayed in their narrowness and lack of culture…. The conflict between [Lalaji's] indulgent love as a father and his self-interest as a capitalist and old-fashioned family-man provides most of the interest.

Jhabvala enlists our sympathy for the corrupt aging bourgeois by loading the dice against him. From the beginning of the novel he seems to be doomed, not merely because his attempt at bribery is about to be exposed but because three of his children threaten the coherence of his family: Chandra, the western-educated civil servant; Nimmi, Lalaji's beautiful college-educated daughter; and Viddi, a would-be artist in revolt against his father's bourgeois ethos of money and power. Chandra and his wife Kanta are younger Babbitts who aspire to sophistication and culture, conforming in their own way to the government circles in which they move and affecting to despise Lalaji's old-fashioned crude ways. Nimmi rejecting the tyranny of arranged marriages dares to go out with Pheroze, a Parsee playboy, to the scandal of her family. Viddi (presented in some ways more vividly than the other two) dreams of going to England and living the exciting life of an artist, and prepares for it by associating with phoney artists in the cafes and clubs. (pp. 81-3)

In this novel Jhabvala is just as hard on the heartless social-climbing young Babbitts like Chandra and Kanta and the would-be sophisticates like Nimmi and Viddi whom she treats with teasing irony, as she is on the older corrupt tycoons of the new India. The undivided family is not spared some knocks, though the institution survives its stresses and strains. Lalaji emerges shaken but undismayed as the hero of this tale of the modern "rajas" whose nature according to the Bhagavad Gita is the nature of passion and selfish desires.

Another Babbitt is Gulzari Lal, a Punjabi businessman in Get Ready for Battle [1962]…. Like Lalaji he is ruthless and his chief exploit is to employ his power and influence in sinister alliance with the government and "do-gooders" to evict a settlement of wretched refugees from a piece of land he wants for development. His activities are much more starkly selfish than Lalaji's; and Jhabvala stresses the human misery he causes. He is less developed as a character and is overshadowed by the more strongly delineated characters of his wife and son…. In Gulzari Lal we have a bourgeois upstart who lacks the warm heroic qualities of Lalaji. He has no family to fight for (except his son) and seems a hollow man in all his social and business relationships. There is some social criticism in the way Jhabvala shows the Indian government and progressive enlightened people calling themselves reformers, advocates of birth-control and socialism, helping Lal to evict poor refugees. Ironically no force is needed; Lal simply bribes the refugee leader. (p. 84)

Jhabvala puts the Yogi in his various manifestations at the other end of the spectrum from her Babbitts…. The Yogi is traditional to the Indian scene; but is of course only one example of the disinterested spiritual man. Hinduism traditionally recognizes four stages of human life: student, householder, hermit, ascetic. Ideally one moves from stage one to stage four. The good Hindu hopes to spend his last years when his family has grown up in some form of meditation and disinterested existence. The Householder [1960] … takes its title from the second stage and is indeed a serio-comic analysis of a young man's uneasy settling down to the life of husband, householder and expectant father. Prem, the hero, is tempted to give up the difficulties of being a good husband, teacher and householder and to follow instead in the footsteps of two men who have no such responsibilities, an Indian Swami who has found the peace of God and lives in almost perpetual ecstacy, and Hans Loewe, a likeable but ridiculous German tramping about India looking for his "Guru" (teacher) whose face he has once glimpsed in a dream. Whereas the laughing, singing Swami who spreads infectious joy around him has reached the goal, Hans is very much a beginner, portrayed almost as a caricature of the religious seeker. It seems to Prem that Hans has chosen a path which he too should take. But in the end he goes back to the job of being a householder. The moral is that Prem must be a householder first before he can be a holy man; he must not use religion to cloak his failure as a citizen. This is essentially orthodox Hindu teaching. In fact however, the real cause of Prem's re-conversion to materialism is his gradual falling-in-love with his girlish but delightful wife, Indu. Sexual attraction proves too powerful for the forces of religion and renunciation—a wry if not unusual comment on human nature. A different form of renunciation from the Swami's is shown by Sarla Devi in Get Ready for Battle. She once suffered an unfortunate arranged marriage with the minor Babbitt, Gulzari Lal, whose dubious activities have already been discussed, but wisely left him to follow her vocation of selfless social service…. She throws herself into lost causes with a quixoticism which never diminishes…. In championing the unfortunate refugees of Bundi Busti she finds herself locked in battle with her husband and the official "do-gooders." When this cause too is lost (the leader of the refugees is bribed into acquiescence), she refuses to give up and turns to the reclamation of prostitutes from the red-light district of Old Delhi. A ridiculous but noble figure, Sarla Devi gets ready to do battle once more, and we know she will lose this one too. But good action must be done regardless of failure for the sake of humanity, love, God. In Jhabvala's novels (as often in real life) the Sadhu, the Yogi, the holy man, are slightly comic figures: the singing, smiling Swami and the grotesque figure of Hans in The Householder. Sarli Devi is like them, a slightly comic crusader. Yet the last laugh is theirs as they go on with the lonely, unlucky business of religion and selfless good works, leaving the Babbitts and the sophisticates to their dubious victories of money and influence.

A form of Babbittry which brings acid to Jhabvala's pen is that represented by a succession of bossy progressive women through all her novels. We encounter it first in Lady Ram Prashad in To Whom She Will [1955]…. She is an energetic prosecutor of "good works" in post-independence India, a formidable figure of the Indian establishment…. Apart from being a busybody and a snob of a particularly unpleasant kind, Lady Ram Prashad is not shown doing much specific harm in this novel. Not so Mrs. Bhatnagar in Get Ready for Battle…. This energetic pursuer of high-sounding "Causes" plays a sinister role as the ally of ruthless Babbitts and helps with pious phrases on her lips to evict the wretched poor from Bundi Busti. Jhabvala brings the true humanitarian (Sarla Devi) face to face in militant confrontation with the phoney one (Mrs. Bhatnagar). In this novel too Jhabvala suggests ironically that the young westernized sophisticates who dance and drink in their ultramodern flats, like the smart Toto Saxena and the mildly nymphomaniac Gogo, will turn into fat future Bhatnagars and Ram Prashads. Both culture-pursuing and energetic "do-goodism" are bitterly satirized in the figure of Mrs. Kaul who presides over the "Cultural Dais" in A Backward Place [1965]…. (pp. 84-6)

Jhabvala shows how the world of the Babbitts in contemporary India attracts to it predatory animals in search of prey, and some of these are more dangerous and despicable than the Gulzari Lals, Bhatnagars and Kauls. One such is Esmond, the villain-hero of Esmond in India [1958]…. As a character he is so outrageous as to strain credibility particularly in the context of Jhabvala's cast of "normal" characters. An Englishman of considerable outward charm and good looks, suave and cultured, he is revealed from the outset as inwardly rotten. He is a philanderer with an Indian wife (Gulab) and an English mistress (Betty) apart from the succession of middle-aged women whom he preys upon as official guide and unofficial gigolo. Sexual promiscuity is the least of his vices which extend to sadistic persecution of his wife; he slaps and pinches her, jeers sarcastically at her old-fashioned Indian ways and restrains her from coddling their child, whenever he can drag himself away from his activities as Hindi teacher and cultural adviser to the wives of Indian Babbitts and to wealthy European expatriates and tourists. It is typical of the Babbitts that their vanity and social-climbing prevents them from seeing through Esmond and people like him. The chief exemplar of Babbittry in this novel is Har Dayal, a subtler and more cultured Babbitt as opposed to the cruder Lalaji and Gulzari Lal…. The pride of his life is his pretty, idealistic young daughter, Shakuntala, newly graduated B.A. who worships him, completely taken in by his cultured charm. He introduces her to the rich cosmopolitan circles in which he loves to exhibit his unctuous culturizing. His love of Shakuntala is at least sincere which is more than can be said of his political and cultural posing. His pose as cultured man of letters and progressive thinker is ill matched by his conformism to the bourgeois materialistic values of his wife, Madhuri, and his daughter-in-law, Indira. Yet Har Dayal unlike other Babbitts in the novels of Jhabvala is secretly tormented by feelings of shame and guilt, especially when he compares himself to his friends, Ram Nath and Uma…. Har Dayal's conscience is disturbed even more acutely when Ram Nath suggests a marriage between his idealistic son Narayan, a doctor working among the poor, and his beloved Shakuntala. He knows that his wife Madhuri will treat with brutal scorn the idea of allying their daughter with an impoverished doctor. Har Dayal may have profound doubts about the values of the Babbitt's life; his wife has none. While he is worried over conflicting loyalties to Ram Nath, Shakuntala and Madhuri, he is ignorant of the fate his social climbing and posturing has brought upon Shakuntala. He has introduced her to Esmond. Shakuntala, a naive, self-willed romantic with her head turned by her father's flattery and her illusion that he and his smart friends are in the van of freedom and enlightenment, succumbs with pathetic ease to Esmond's experienced charm. Temporarily dropping his cynical hard-boiled English mistress, he seduces Shakuntala on a trip to Agra. Here, as with Lalaji, though more tragically, the Babbitt suffers through the child he loves. The novel ends in mid-air however, before the disillusionment is complete. Esmond has not decided whether to go back to England with Betty (at her expense) or to stay with Shakuntala who is in love with him. He has been deserted by his wife and little son. The implication is that he will abandon Shakuntala for Betty, since she offers him escape from the India which he hates. The novel ends before we learn of Har Dayal's reaction to his daughter's corruption. Though heroic idealism represented by Ram Nath, Uma and Narayan, is still impotent (as in other novels) to change Har Dayal and turn him from his materialistic ways, it can at least give him an uneasy conscience. Really severe punishment has already been meted out by the gods through Esmond's villainy and Shakuntala's folly and innocence. Posing and conformism have brought their own destructive fate upon the poseur and his family. The hollowness of the Babbitts' life is cruelly exposed.

A Backward Place [1965] … is a novel graphically exploring the problems of three expatriate European women in India (the "backward place" of the title) but the Babbitt and the Yogi appear here too. The most tragic of the three women, a Hungarian blonde, Etta, is seen growing older and plainer under the hot northern Indian sun, having come to India many years before as the wife of an Indian student. The marriage has failed and Etta has lived on as mistress of a succession of rich protectors, hating India and longing for the receding sophisticated Europe of her memories. She encounters the fickleness and gross selfishness of the Babbitt in her relationship with the hotel tycoon, Gupta ("Guppy"), a sensualist, though easygoing and amiable, who abandons her for his "niece," an Indian girl…. Guppy is too thoughtless and selfish to gauge the effect of this betrayal. When Etta hears that he is flying to Europe with his "niece" instead of with her as he has promised, she tries to kill herself and death is narrowly averted. In absolute contrast to this are the actions and attitudes of old aunt Bhuaji who lives in the undivided Indian family of Bal, an unemployed actor, and his English wife, Judy. Judy loves the promiscuous warmth of the large noisy Indian home after her lonely upbringing in England. Though not pious herself, Judy is instinctively drawn towards Bhuaji's Hindu piety, her life of prayer, detachment and love. (pp. 86-8)

Finally, A Backward Place has a character who after a period of cynicism turns back to his former ideals and like Sarla Devi chooses a life of heroic virtue. This is Sudhir, the Bengali Secretary of Mrs. Kaul's "Cultural Dais." (pp. 88-9)

In the main Jhabvala's writings about the Babbitt and the Yogi are comments on men and women in society and on their adjustment to social demands and expectations. She is not really a novelist of ideas (unlike Raja Rao) and does not attempt to analyse her themes and characters in political or philosophical terms. She does not, for example, suggest that all Babbitts are detestable because they are Babbitts, or all religious idealists wonderful because they are religious idealists. Her satire is sharper at the expense of the hypocrites, the pretenders, the false romantics, the self-appointed busybodies and callous planners. Her tone is one of disillusionment. The collapse of illusions is most marked in Esmond in India and A Backward Place which all strike a note of anguish and defeat and suggest the constant frustration of heroic idealism and romantic exultance by money, power and the dead weight of tradition. Esmond in India also shows a change of emphasis to exploration of the human soul, an examination of motives and conflicts, deep drives and compulsions, such as Esmond's sadism and Shakuntala's willingness to be seduced by him. A Backward Place is a study in disillusionment, Jhabvala's blackest novel in spite of its comedy, partly because of the absence of a fully developed idealistic character of the stature of a Swami or a Sarla Devi, partly because of Etta's despair and attempted suicide. In all the novels betrayal is a constant element. The Babbitts betray and are betrayed: Lalaji betrays his son Chandra by asking him to abuse his power as a civil servant and is nearly betrayed to ruin by his own wayward children; Gulzari Lal, the refugee leader, and the "do-gooders" betray together the refugees of Bundi Busti; Vishnu betrays his mother's ideals; "Guppy" betrays Etta. The holy men and the disinterested lovers of men and God seem unable to deflect the Babbitts from their selfish courses. The tragedy of modern India as depicted in Jhabvala's novels is the total failure of communication between the Babbitt and the Yogi…. [However, there is a sunny], and uniquely Indian solution of the problem of reconciling the demands of the world and the spirit in The Householder where Prem is persuaded to return to his wife and family duties after flirting with Yogistic aspirations; here it is the importance of priorities in relation to the four stages of life which is emphasized with some wit and irony. One of the short stories in Jhabvala's collection, Like Birds, Like Fishes [1963] … pinpoints the tragic split of Babbitt and Yogi. In "My First Marriage," a Director of Education's daughter who has finally conformed to her Babbittry parents' bourgeois values, recalls her first "marriage"—a hectic liaison with a mystic she calls "M." In one sense M. is a useless man, a loafer, an idle dreamer, a superfluous character. In another sense, as she realises in the depth of her being, he is a holy sage, consulted and even worshipped as a guru. Though she has left him, fleeing from the spiritual disturbance and social disorder he appears to generate into a life of conformity and comfort, she feels fundamentally dissatisfied. M., the holy fool, has shown her a glimpse of a higher life. Like Har Dayal's in Esmond in India her conscience is incurably uneasy. (pp. 89-90)