There are three novels in [A New Dominion], Mrs. Jhabvala's latest tour of the Indian horizon, two of them excellent and the third interesting enough in all conscience. She dances between them in little sketches each with its headline calculated to produce the embarrassing faux-naif effect which one remembers from earlier attempts to introduce us to the charms of undeveloped philosophy….
The first novel concerns two English girls who come to India seeking self-fulfilment. They join the ashram of a guru called Swamiji, who teaches total subservience to himself and is surrounded by acolytes who belong to him, body and soul. One of the girls dies of infective hepatitis while the other, called Lee, who is a girl of sturdy common-sense and sees through the hysteria of the ashram, nevertheless decides to devote her life to serving the Swamiji for reasons which are too complicated and too feminine for me to understand. By the end we accept the Swamiji as a more or less cynical rogue, and so does Lee, but there it is.
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