Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as a satirist – a critical study of a New Dominion (1972)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has carved a niche for herself in the field of Anglo-Indian Fiction. She is Polish German by birth, English by education and Indian by marriage. Her marriage to an Indian architect and her stay in India made her familiar with the life and manners of her adopted country, India. At the same time her birth and education in West gifted her with western sensibility which endows her with an uncommon insight into the typical traits of Indians, particularly the urban upper and middle classes as they keep undulating between tradition and modernity. Jhabvala's major concern and obsession in all her novels is India. The major themes of Jhabvala's novels are East-West encounter, role of religion in one's life, pseudo modernism, sex and marriage exploitation, and affectation and hypocrisy in Indian middle class people. Being a European writing about India she observed all the Indian characters objectively and depicted them in all her novels as a detached observer. Her literary career is divided in three phases. In the First phase of her writing career she depicted India which enchanted her. The second phase of her literary career portrayed India which was beyond her tolerance and naturally made her bitter and critical about India and its people. In the third phase of her writing career she wrote about India as a promised land which has scope for reconciliation of East and West. Jhabvala's A New Dominion (1972) is written in the second phase of her writing career. In this novel, she launches a severe attack on westernized Indians and their shallow hypocritical attitude to even pressing Indian problems. This novel is a satirical portrait of Indian inconsistency, selfishness, and false and moral degradation. It depicts the brutality and corruption prevalent in the so called religious centres in India. The purpose of this paper is to study A New Dominion from a satirist point of view.