Jan 11, 1999
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RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA Dull Days in Delhi Indo-Anglia's most well-known chronicler is writing to a formula. By Tunku Vardrajan EAST INTO UPPER EAST What is it with these people! I have just read a review of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's latest book, East Into Upper East: Plain Tales from New Delhi and New York, in The New York Times. The reviewer gushed and gurgled, describing dear old RPJ as "a spellbinding urban fabulist". I have read the book, and spellbinding it is not. So I wish to set the record straight.
But is that so bad? She has a loyal following, raised on Heat and Dust and other weakish books that were also turned into screenplays. These are readers who prefer untaxing tales. Jhabvala is not for the Eng lit types: it is not right to compare her stuff with the intrepid fiction that many post-Rushdie Indians write. Based on one-dimensional juxtapositions -- those of heat/dust and the cold, cultured brown people and cultured white people, millennial India and imperial Britain, the soul and the lucre, the old and the new -- her stories are too formulaic to be taken entirely seriously. In spite of The New York Times' shiver of delight, East Into Upper East is but a book that revisits all the old, familiar signposts of Jhabvalistan. There are westernised Easterners, easternised Westerners, gurus and wide-eyed acolytes, all heaped together in banal proximity, all trying to tell each other something almost profound. The book tries to flesh out the writer's own duality. Born in pre-War Germany, she married a Parsi architect and divides her time between New York and Delhi. The Indian capital has been transformed radically from the gracious place it was when she first came to it, and many of her riffs in the book dwell on how a refined past can turn into an uncouth present. Jhabvala's stories set in Delhi comprise the book's first half and they set the pace for the second half, where she writes of people who lead messy little lives in New York. What do the two places have in common? In her tales, the characters in both cities lead cramped, unprivate lives, yearning always for a change for the better. If there is a strand that runs through the book, it is that of people trespassing on the lives of others, jostling for space in apartments, flats and havelis which have scant room for intruders. There is the "holy woman" from Delhi who comes to New York and distorts the life of her idealistic host. There is the young dance teacher who wins the maternal love of a Delhi dowager, virtually moving into her home before he betrays her confidence. There is the Englishwoman, a diplomat in 1950s Delhi, who falls for a dashing young IAS officer but who is pushed out of his life by an "anti-imperialist" competitor for his affections. Ho-hum. These are all plain tales, often relentlessly so, with harmless riddles at their heart. None is ever resolved and none is ever too chewy. Jhabvala's book is the perfect comfort food for those who want a break from big ideas. But spellbinding? Please, give me a break. |
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In this latest collection of stories,
Jhabvala writes as she has always done. Her prose is elementary, her range of vocabulary
modest. The whole effect is demure and homely. Her observations are quite unliterary. Put
bluntly, there is very little here that is memorable and much, perhaps too much, that is
pap. 
