Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's stories have been compared to Chekhov's. She is a detached observer of what he called morbus fraudulentus, the comedy (in the sternest sense) of self-delusion which leaves us to make up our minds. Her novel A New Dominion embodies this irony, but one is more struck, this time, by the echoes of A Passage to India. Two generations have passed since Forster. The Westerner is not now in India to rule or give…. But, allowing for this difference, Forster's and Mrs Jhabvala's characters are matched. Raymond, the sensitive English aesthete and inquirer, is another Fielding, plus unconscious homosexuality; his Indian friend, the ingenuous and plaguing student Gopi, is a budding, ill-educated, up-to-date version of Dr Aziz. The disturbance in the mind of the unhappy Mrs Moore becomes bold and explicit in the persons of three English girls who have recklessly gone to India on a spiritual quest. They throw themselves without defence upon India in order to attain their 'higher selfhood' and to find their 'deepest essence'. To these lengths Forster's characters never went, for the girls have come to suffer, to be destroyed so that they can be remade. Times have changed, but the theme is similar: opposites have met.
In one way, Mrs Jhabvala's book is a satirical study of the disasters that overtake those who dabble in the wisdom of the East, and one can think the lesson forced. The girls are rootless, daring, and sexually frigid. One is told little about their background. Under what circumstances in their native land did these virgins, or demi-virgins, pick up the idea of something 'higher' than sexual love? Why, one asks, didn't they become nuns at home? Or are they in some sense hippies? We do not know. And are these three not too alike? The Western characters in A New Dominion are denatured types. (pp. 206-07)
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