V. S. Pritchett says that Jhabvala "probably knows more about India and feels it more strongly, in terms of personal conflict, than any other novelist writing in English," and John Updike, reviewing her novel
Heat and Dust (1975) in
The New Yorker (5 July 1978), described her as an "initiated outsider." William Walsh echoes this assessment, saying that her work "combines the unblurred perception of the outsider with the intimate familiarity of the inhabitant." Since moving to America in 1975 she has extended her subject matter beyond the Indian scene although she has continued to address problems of alienation and identity.
Jhabvala, it seems, was destined from the beginning to be a cultural and social outsider. In an interview with Ramlal G. Agarwal that originally appeared in Quest (September-October 1974) and was republished in his Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study of Her Fiction (1990), she observed that "I was practically born a displaced person, and all any of us ever wanted was a travel document and a residential permit. One just didn't care as long as one was allowed to live somewhere." The daughter of a Polish Jewish lawyer, Marcus Prawer, and Eleonora Cohn Prawer, Ruth Prawer was born on 7 May 1927 in Cologne, Germany.
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