Tributes of Empathy and Grace Out of India

By Paul Gray

In her introduction to this selection of 15 stories from four earlier books, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala notes the problem that faces all foreigners who settle on the subcontinent: "To live in India and be at peace, one must to a very considerable extent become Indian and adopt Indian attitudes, habits, beliefs, assume if possible an Indian personality. But how is this possible? And even if it were possible--without cheating oneself--would it be desirable? Should one want to try to become something other than what one is?"

Writing about India poses, of course, a similar dilemma. Those aspiring to something beyond costumes and pageantry must try to portray the native inhabitants from within, as they think and feel, to disprove Kipling's saw about the twain never meeting. This task is not only difficult but potentially self-defeating, since the allure of India to many Western eyes lies in the exotic ineffability of its people and spectacles.

Jhabvala, 59, knows more about the challenges of living and writing in India than she ever meant to learn. Born in Germany of Polish parents and educated in England, she married a visiting Indian architect and went home with him in 1951. Except for this accident of the heart, she writes, "I don't think I would ever have come here for I am not attracted--or used not to be attracted --to the things that usually bring people to India." She was not, in short, a do-gooder, a foreign-service careerist or a spiritual pilgrim. But her European background and natural desire to sympathize with her adopted land made her an acute observer. She began turning out novels, stories and a string of screenplays (including Shakespeare Wallah), creating piecemeal a territory that became increasingly familiar to a growing audience as Jhabvala's India.

The dominant figures in this landscape are females. All but one of the stories in Out of India revolve around heroines, and only four of them are Western. The foreign men who appear at all do so as shadowy, straitlaced figures. The narrator of An Experience of India contrasts her expectations to those of her husband: "I had come to India to be in India. I wanted to be changed. Henry didn't--he wanted a change, that's all, but not to be changed."

An Englishwoman in Two More Under the Indian Sun observes, "Indian men have such marvelous eyes . . . When they look at you, you can't help feeling all young and nice." Foreigners succumb to this seductive appeal at their own peril. In Passion, two British roommates take up with men they find "typically Indian." They are, naturally, stark opposites. Christine goes out with a handsome Sikh officer; Betsy has an affair with a scrawny clerk who is married, sensitive to a fault and abusive to her when the mood hits him. "I suppose all passion is unhealthy," she tells Christine, who has begun to worry about her friend's behavior. "Sometimes I tell you I feel insane --and what's more--what's terrible: I revel in it!" When Betsy informs her lover that she wants to give up her job and privileges for him, he reacts with outrage: "You have everything in life and you throw it all away. Aren't you ashamed?"

Jhabvala plays such encounters chiefly for comedy, although her pampered foreign women also face the prospect of paying dearly for their delusions. The stories dealing with Indian heroines are more somber. Westerners can decide to surrender to India; natives do not have the choice. In The Widow, Durga has been left comparatively wealthy by her late husband, an old man whose marriage to her was arranged when she was young. Feeling youthful still and strangely restive, she develops a yen for a neighbor boy, who returns her affectionate remarks with the demand that she buy him a motor scooter. This infatuation comes to nothing, and everyone with a claim on her generosity seems relieved: "The relatives were glad that Durga had at last come around and accepted her lot as a widow."

On Bail is told by an educated Indian woman who has thrown her prospects away on an idler named Rajee. She supports them both by working in a shop, while he makes imaginary business deals in coffee- houses and visits his mistress twice a week. Rajee is arrested for some unspecified offense; the woman's father, who sacrificed so that she might improve her standing in society, mourns loudly over the disastrous course she has chosen. She remembers instead how her father and Rajee agreed to her marriage after she had poured kerosene over her clothes and prepared to set herself on fire: "It is a crude method and perhaps not suitable for a college girl like me, but it was the only way I could think of and also the easiest and cheapest, so I decided on it."

Muffled lives explode in such understatements. Jhabvala adopts the identities of characters from an alien culture without romanticizing or condescending. Her spare prose leaves little room for metaphor; her India emerges out of small specifics, accretions that summon up heat, hope, squalor and a vast expanse of sky. These stories do not demystify India; they pay the place tributes of empathy and grace.