QUEST FOR SPIRITUALISM: A STUDY OF JHABVALA’S A NEW DOMINION

Abstract

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a major novelist writing in English today. However, her position is unique. She is not only different from Indo-Anglian novelists like R.K.Narayan. Anita Desai and Kamala Markandaya, but also from Anglo-Indian novelists like Rudyard Kipling, E.M.Forster and Paul Scott because of her cultural segregation. She has been an expatriate right from an early age. She is a Pole by parentage, a German by birth, an English woman by education and an Indian by marriage. At the age of 24 years amid the prime of her youth in the year 1951, Ruth Prawer left Britain for India as the lovely bride of C.H. Jhabvala, a young and youthful architect, stayed here for the next 25 years and made possible the publishing of her early short stories in The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, The Cornhill Magazine and Encounter. She has said, looking back, that “as a writer considers myself exceedingly fortunate to have come here when I did and the way I did” (Agrawal, 36). Her description of this first encounter with India suggests that writing and living blended for her into an intense joy of discovery:

“It came about instinctively. I was enraptured. I felt I understood India so well. I loved everything.” (NYT, p.5)