Ruth Jhabvala A Backward Place Analysis

The Britishness of Anglo Indians in Ruth Jhabvala’s A Backward Place Displacement characterizes the life and writings of Ruth Jhabvala. Her Jewish ancestry and sojourn in three countries – Europe, Asia and North America got her the much theorized label “diasporic” to her subjectivity and oeuvre. Unlike many diasporic writers Jhabvala does not reconstruct a Europe she had lived in as an imaginary homeland or a delineation of the community of her ethnic origin (Jewish) in her adopted homeland, India. Indeed it is India which primarily occupies the writer’s imagination.
Viewing the country from the standpoint of an outsider among India's bourgeoisie, Jhabvala creates archetypal characters, both Indian and European, who have an upset relationship with their cultural heritage. Jhabvala's novels are often compared to those of Jane Austen, citing her tendency to creating middle-class characters excessively concerned with social status and tradition—thematic points that have given her a reputation, like Austen, as a social …show more content…
Jhabvala is also critical of the validity of the westernized Indians' attitude to the problems of their country, in fact of their whole way of looking at life: "Everything they say, all that lively conversation round the buffet table, is not prompted by anything they really feel strongly about but by what they think they ought to feel strongly about." While Jhabvala seems dissatisfied with this unreality in the sophisticated, westernized Indians' attitude to India, she feels more at home with the semieducated, but deeply involved Indian joint families which breathe a genuine gettogetherness. Members of such families have their joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds, cunning and compassion—but what is more important is that they feel they form a family, a social unit in which individuals either conform or