Bookmarked Musings: The Artless Art of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Short Stories by Dr. Ramlal Agarwal
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In this essay, Dr. Ramlal Agarwal attempts to take a fresh look at Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s short stories.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has been highly regarded by the Western literary world. However, she has been severely criticized and badly neglected by the Indian literati. C. Paul Verghese and Meenakshi Mukherjee did not consider her an Indian writer in English and did not discuss her work in their studies of Indian writing in English. However, C. Paul Verghese, in a short note on Esmond in India published in The Journal of Indian Writing in English, commented, “I am certain that Mrs. Jhabvala’s understanding of India is not deep, and she just skims over the surface of urban life in India.” He further says, “Her preoccupations are only with superficial concepts of Indian life.”
Verghese further says that Jhabvala suffers from a lack of empathy and an inability to get inside the skin of her Indian characters owing to the linguistic and cultural gap between them and her. Dr. V.A. Shahane, Prof. and Head, Dept. of English, Osmania University, says in his monograph on Jhabvala (Arnold-Heinemann), “In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the bushes are neat and green, but they do not burn.” The most vitriolic attack came from some of the most prominent literary critics, Eunice de Souza, Meenakshi Mukherjee, and Nissim Ezekiel.
