SOURCE: "Jhabvala's Fiction: The Passage from India," in Faith of a (Woman) Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 159-64.

In the following essay, Dudt examines four of Jhabvala's novels—Amrita, Esmond in India, Travelers, and Heat and Dust—and discusses the ways in which her views of India have changed over the course of her writing.

It is a truism that woman today is caught between old strictures and new possibilities. She is well aware of her historical role and, therefore, struggles to establish a consistent, reliable identity as a member of a world which has not yet absorbed her as an integral part. When this struggle with temporal change is compounded with spatial and cultural challenges, what is written must be considered carefully for what it reveals of the struggle itself, and for the end it prophesies. The novels of Ruth Prawer...