SOURCE: “Time and Scriptable Lives in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust,” in World Literature Written in English, Spring, 1992, pp. 55-65.

In the following essay, Kitley examines a number of literary elements present in Heat and Dust, including intertextuality and narrative structure.

In 1973 Ruth Jhabvala visited, with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, the palace at Jodhpur. This visit, though none of those involved knew it at the time, was to culminate two years later in the release of the film Autobiography of a Princess and in the publication of Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1975.

Autobiography of a Princess began with an idea Ivory had to produce a film about Indian palaces. As Ivory and his team toured various palaces they discovered that many of the former royal families had preserved in their private archives footage of all sorts of ceremonial...