A Study of Postcolonial Society in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has as a literary artist. She is a European. Her novels deal with the themes like love, sex, and marriage in the bourgeois society, East-West encounter, pseudo- modernism in Indian society, the post-independence Indian ethos, affectation and hypocrisy in the Indian middle-class society. Jhabvala’s literary works are concerned with the postcolonial situation of the lives of Europeans. Her novel Heat and Dust presents outrageous human relations through the power of romance set in two distinct eras, colonial India of the 1920s, during the time of Raj and the independent, freewheeling India of the 1970s. The human relations can refer to at least two groups of people: those with mixed Indian and British ancestry. The rst story is about Olivia. Olivia Rivers is a young lady from London who has accompanied her husband to British colonial India. The second story is that of the narrator, a descendant of Douglas, and his second wife. The novel deals the story with enough romance, political, and history. We have encountered the characters - the heat, dust, poverty, superstition, British postcolonial administrators. Thus, it explores human relations through the power of romance in postcolonial society