“Staying on”: Abortion and Narrative Silence in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust
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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 novel Heat and Dust poses the problem of Westerners or the West “staying on” in India long after the official departure of the British Raj. The novel juxtaposes the story of Olivia Rivers, the newlywed bride of an English civil servant recently moved to India and set in 1923, with the story of her English step-granddaughter, the unnamed narrator who returns to India some fifty years later, in the 1970s, to find out more about her scandalous predecessor. Heat and Dust belongs to a tradition of British literature, emerging out of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which predicates a sexual relationship between Englishwomen and Indian men on an assumption of rape. Jhabvala’s novel follows the tradition of predecessors such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown in revising this trope to include voluntary sexual relationships between Englishwomen and Indian men. In this novel, both Olivia and her successor choose to engage in adulterous affairs with Indian men, and both women also choose to “stay on” in India at the end of the novel. Olivia rejects/is rejected by English society following the abortion of her baby, while the narrator decides against abortion and retreats to the mountains to give birth to her baby. Meanwhile, the scene of Olivia’s abortion, a scene of collective female violence, takes the place, figuratively, that rape occupies in the post-Rebellion narrative. The abortion causes scandal, dissension, disruption in the Anglo-Indian community, all of which are aftereffects of the traditional trope of rape. As both Olivia and the narrator “stay on” in India, they lapse into a self-censoring, self-censuring silence which questions the very possibility of “staying on.”
Abstract
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s 1975 novel Heat and Dust poses the problem of Westerners or the West “staying on” in India long after the official departure of the British Raj. The novel juxtaposes the story of Olivia Rivers, the newlywed bride of an English civil servant recently moved to India and set in 1923, with the story of her English step-granddaughter, the unnamed narrator who returns to India some fifty years later, in the 1970s, to find out more about her scandalous predecessor. Heat and Dust belongs to a tradition of British literature, emerging out of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which predicates a sexual relationship between Englishwomen and Indian men on an assumption of rape. Jhabvala’s novel follows the tradition of predecessors such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown in revising this trope to include voluntary sexual relationships between Englishwomen and Indian men. In this novel, both Olivia and her successor choose to engage in adulterous affairs with Indian men, and both women also choose to “stay on” in India at the end of the novel. Olivia rejects/is rejected by English society following the abortion of her baby, while the narrator decides against abortion and retreats to the mountains to give birth to her baby. Meanwhile, the scene of Olivia’s abortion, a scene of collective female violence, takes the place, figuratively, that rape occupies in the post-Rebellion narrative. The abortion causes scandal, dissension, disruption in the Anglo-Indian community, all of which are aftereffects of the traditional trope of rape. As both Olivia and the narrator “stay on” in India, they lapse into a self-censoring, self-censuring silence which questions the very possibility of “staying on.”
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