Seekers and Suffers in Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s: A New Dominion

Dr. Ankit Gandhi, Vipul Kumar Bhawalia

The novel A New Dominion conveys with astonishing intensity the psychic sum total of

Ruth Jhabvala’s twenty years in exile. It is fraught, even more powerfully than A Backward

Place, with tensions generated in a displaced European sensibility arising on account of the

increasing oppression of an alien culture. The novel was written during a dark phase of the

novelist’s life in India, at a time when she was keenly aware of her condition as an alien. As the

title suggests, India is seen not from within but from without. In consequence, this novel belongs

more recognizably to the tradition of the expatriate writing than A Backward Place is. In fact, the

novel carries the tradition forward by operating within the socio-political context that Forster’s A

Passage to India anticipates- one in which Indians and Europeans can communicate freely.

Apparently, the races do communicate with one another, for the separation created by political

situation have no relevance after twenty five years of Indian independence. The westerners of A

New Dominion pursue their quests with freedom. Lee and Raymond move in and out of every

social class on Indian society, rubbing shoulders with the royalty, the middle class, the workers

and the ascetic with equal ease, unhampered and unprotected by officialdom. The food served at

the supper party hosted by a British High Commission official is, like the guests, “a judicious

mixture of English and Indian” and the host boasts of a “special relationship” between the two

races and speaks in terms of family bonds nd mutual influences quite unlike her predecessors of

the old dominion.

Yet the novel contains many reminders of the separatist regime. The life style of the

embassy official is totally different from that of the mainstream Indian and is comparable to that

of the ruling class before Independence. To Raymond, who represents the authorial point of view

more closely than any other character in the novel, the scrupulous cleanliness of the High

Commission compound seems to mock the poverty and squalor that lie just beyond its walls: “

You can’t help thinking that no place in India has the right to be clean.” (AND 71), he writes to

his mother. In the novel not only the racial distinctions but also the ideal of white superiority is

carefully maintained. A decaying old woman of eighty-ix still thinks it worthwhile to dress up as

a proper memsahib, and is outraged at the rumor that her ancestry is not all white. The charity

home for aged Europeans is in fact, a hot bed of scandalous gossip and intrigue, each member

accusing the other of mixed origins.

Traces of the old dominion, too, remain in the educated Indian’s hatred of the Raj, which

has remained unchanged from the first stirrings of nationalism in India. Deepak challenges his

host’s assumption at the High Commission dinner party that some kind of integration has been

developed during the two centuries of British rule. When his host Gerald points out that the two

races have shared a common language meaning common ideas and values, Deepak retorts that

Indians ‘willy nilly’ learn the ‘language’ of the British but not vice versa (AND 52). This,

however, is only one aspect of the impact of British rule of India. The other is a clear cut

identification with the alien culture. Raymond’s Indian neighbor at the embassy dinner table

boasts about her friends the Haffiners and talks happily about English style cottage in Kasauli, “

so quiet and peaceful like an English village” (AND 54). Both approaches are viewed by the

novelists as out of context with the needs of contemporary India.

But by far the most powerful reminder of the Raj in the novel is the presence of members

of the former royal families who are now stripped off their powers and privileges and forced into

a position of choice between two alternatives- one of an arrogant extinction of royalty and

secondly to develop new forms of royalty. For the first time Jhabvala in her fiction depicts the

ragged bits and pieces of princely India. Ex-royals who are intelligent enough to recognize the

inevitable are quick to seize their opportunity and can exchange one form of kingship for another

while the foolishly arrogant defy the new order and are winnowed out. Jhabvala’s moral

assessment of both types is in the negative. She sees the first as treating irreverentially a noble

heritage in an attempt to worm itself into the favors of a corrupt bureaucracy. The other, by

constantly harping on the past and refusing to recognize reality, is assailed by acute imbalances

and neuroses. In her delineations of Rao Sahib and Asha, the novelist presents the two aspects of

this struggle in the new India.

The invasion of the old by the new is evident in other areas of the Indian landscape,

external as well as internal. The young industrialist Bob, Indian by birth but American by

education and conviction, is clearly a prospective builder of modern India before whose ability

rank and wealth have to take the second place. The old British hospital in Maupur to which the

Raymond takes the dying Margaret is completely overshadowed by a vast modern block built

with foreign aid but “quite empty from inside and smelling of bat droppings” (AND 108).

Classical music, patronized by princely India, has to give precedence to acutely unmusical

hymns with political affiliations at the Rao Sahib’s party. There is a sustained irony in the

novelist’s observation that the ancient arts, architecture and music of India are being destroyed

by political interference. Raymond is the only person at the Rao Sahib party who sits through the

sitar player’s presentation and it is only foreign tourists like Lee and Raymond who seek out the

places of beauty and take the trouble to reach them. This confirms the author’s conviction that

the only reason for the survival of the old in India is its tourist value. India is depicted in the

novel as a dark continent, mysterious and inscrutable, historically changing but spiritually

unchanged that far from embracing the alien, who approaches her with faith and love, dominates

and destroys him. This picture of India depicted by the novelist is often denounced by Indian

critics as a dodge to attract a western readership.

But the most powerful indictment of India in the novel is the physical and psychic

damage done to the westerners. In this dark phase of her Indian experience the Eats and the West

appear irreconcilable to her. The delineation of the encounter is drawn in terms of a conflict

between affirmation of individualism and fostering of the self and Eastern encouragement of

self-negation in the interest of reaching higher state of being. Thus, the Swamiji’s, doctrine to

belong and to be proves to be a source of degeneration for the westerners who respond to it. In

the ultimate analysis although the East wins in the novel, its values are not idealized as they were

in A Backward Place. Thus, Jhabvala portrays the conflict in the novel as one sided- not a

conflict at all but a frightening assault on western values.

There are two western approaches to Indian spirituality in the novel. One is the old

colonial view of Hinduism as a dark primitive faith into which it is the duty of every Christian to

bring light. This view is represented in the person of Miss Charlotte. This view is seen in conflict

with a new western view. For the young westerns India is a land to which Europeans should

come not to bring light but to seek it. This view is represented by Margaret and it is this view

that predominates in the novel, “people just do not come anymore to India to do any good, those

days are over. What they come for now is- well, to do good to themselves, to learn to take from

India.” (AND 26)

Regarding Indian spiritualism, there are two opposing approaches in the novel- the blind

faith of the East and the rationality of the West. Indians, faced with an identity crisis, fall easily

into the doctrine of blind faith propounded by the pseudo-eremite and give in to his demands of a

total, unquestioned obedience to his will. But the western self seekers voluntarily surrender to the

reason and the sense of proportion and are betrayed by the essential moral weakness in them.

The false guru battens on his weakness. He instill into his disciples a desire to slough off his

existing personality as the first step towards spiritual assimilation with the Guru who will then

lead them to a higher state of existence. The disciple, eager to reach this higher state, allows a

destruction of his identity and believes that the tensions he experiences in consequence are the

pangs of adjustment to a superior identity. In the meantime, the false Guru enjoys his worldly

ambition of commanding wealth and power over human beings. The extreme fraud on innocent

whites prompts Jhabvala to challenge its worth. In this way the spiritual in the novel emerges as

a destructive force.

In one of her autobiographical writings, eight years later, Jhabvala describes her own

initial attraction to the guru cult and the inevitable recoil:

Whenever opportunity came to visit a Swami, I did so. I loved to think I was near

someone holy, within the range of such wonderful vibrations. Of course here was the

richest soil for disillusionment, and I reaped that harvest in plenty. I could not stand those

Swamis anymore, far from embodying human perfectibility; they embodied its

corruption, degradation, lies… I hated them for being what they were and not what they

pretended to be and what I wanted them to be.1

From her bitter personal experience she realized that there were “more charlatans on the

swami circuit than anywhere else in the religious world” and that the “naïve and eager western,

especially the woman, is the guru’s favourite prey.”2

I saw a lot of Western girls come to India…they wore sarees and walked around on bare

feet (and got hookworm)… and meditated on the mantra given to them by their guru.

They became vegetarians; they bathed in the holy river; they got jaundice and became

very pale and worn away physically… they had given up their personalities. Their eyes

and thoughts and souls were only for their guru.3

The loss of identity which threatens the western self-seekers in India has been fictionally

represented over and over again in Ruth Jhabvala’s stories in the experience of Daphne of “A

Spiritual Call”, of the narrator of “An Experience of India” and Katie of “How I Became a Holy

Mother”. But her most powerful exposition of the theme is seen in this novel, in the destinies of

Lee, Margaret and Evie who come to India in the hope of shedding inherited norms and neurosis

and acquiring a life’s total view and returning to a life of faith.

In the beginning of the novel we see that three English girls have come to India to free

themselves of the influence of commercialism, pretentiousness and falsity of middle class life in

England. Here in India, they place their faith in a fraud Swami thinking that he would help their

tormented souls and transform them into new unified beings in harmony with themselves and

with the world at large. Contrary to their expectations, they come across a sordid picture of self-

manipulation, sexual abuse and callousness. The Swami treats them as his possessions, his ‘little

mice’ waiting to be developed by him.

The novel published in 1972, is divided into short sections, some narrated by the author

in the third person, other written in first person and ascribed to Lee or Raymond. The novel

opens with the three European girls Lee, Margaret and Evie who have come to India to get

spiritual salvation under the guidance of the Swami, a holy man. Lee, an American girl of

twenty, comes to India “to lose herself in order- as she likes to put it- to find herself”. Like the

other woman, Lee seeks affinity with India by travelling with her rural and urban masses from

one small dusty town to another. Sitting in cheap buses and third class compartments of the

trains, Lee reveals in the sensation that she was “no longer Lee but part of the mass of travelers

huddled and squashed together” (AND 2). In the course of her travels, she comes to Delhi where

the sight of the great domes of Jama Masjid intensifies her “desire to merge with everything… to

become part of it and cease to be herself (AND 39). She surrenders her body to an Indian youth

in the belief that “this was part of the merging she had so ardently desired” (AND 42). In this

mood of yearning for total immersion in something greater than one’s own self she arrives at the

ashram where she meets Evie and Margaret. Both share her yearning for a great spiritual merger.

Evie believes that she has found it and Margaret says that she will find it by living. Life for her

from now onwards is completely determined by the whims and fancies of the Swami. Lee,

however, can’t accept the idea of total obedience as easily as the other two seem to do. She

experiences a conflict between her western upbringing with its emphasis on freedom and the

Swami’s demand for total humility and submission. Often depressed, confused and demoralized,

she attributes these feelings to her own spiritual poverty. This is affirmed by Evie who assures

her that the true joy of spiritual merger will be hers if she could surrender her ego and dedicate

herself to Swamiji- live by his will and not by her own.

The so called Swamiji, here, is a disturbing study of an ascetic who uses his powers to

create illusions of hope and bliss and claims wholly the souls and bodies of his disciples. He is a

hypocrite who enjoys meat and alcohol. He intends to travel widely, plans an air-conditioned

ashram, uses a young girl to help him write a book, subdues his disciples with his hypocrite eyes

and, in an horrid scene, rapes Lee. He seeks to obliterate the personal identities of his followers.

In fact, he is a bogus god man and it is really very difficult to realize how these western girls

could fall a prey to him who are quite rational and clear eyed.

The Swamiji fosters tensions and rivalries among his disciples so as to render himself

invaluable to each as the only man of trust. Swamiji’s strategy is simple and his goal is achieved

in two brisk moves. He first singles out one disciple for his favours and concentrates solely on

her: “At first Lee thought she must be imagining it- after all, there were all these others, all intent

only on him- what was so special about her that he should single her out from among them?”

(AND 67). Then follows a spell of deliberate neglect. These tactics are practiced on each disciple

separately, with the intent of causing jealousies and infatuations among his disciples and thereby,

of drawing each one more securely to himself. Lee’s letter to Raymond describes Margaret’s

state of bewilderment during the period in which she is being neglected by the Swamiji:

Margaret is funny nowadays… Of course she’s studying very hard… [She] spends a lot

of time meditating on her mantra… But it is not making her one bit serene the way it

should. She and I and Evie are in the same hutment, and she’s always picking on us for

nothing…the other day she went for poor Evie- she accused her of using her towel, which

Evie hadn’t done. Afterwards she kept muttering horrid things about her, how she didn’t

trust her one inch, which Evie was smarmy and deceitful and that it was sad to see

Swamiji so taken in by her… (AND 74-75)

Raymond recognizes the same symptoms in Lee when Swamiji’s work on Margaret is

done and it is Lee’s turn to suffer his callous indifference. Margaret’s will is broken and she is

physically and mentally shattered by the time Swamiji has finished with her. His triumph over

the forces of western rationality is complete when Margaret, having contracted jaundice, refuses

Raymond and Miss Charlotte’s offer of taking her to a doctor. She still harbours on Swamiji

power of restoration. Thus, the disintegration of Margaret who had come to India in the hope of

acquiring “a pure heart untainted by modern materialism” is the full measure of Swamiji’s

success.

Over Evie’s soul the battle has already been fought and won. Evie glories “in being

nothing in herself and living only by his will” and “like nothing too”.4 She is also physically

worn and emotionally denuded. Love, hate, anger, jealousy, tenderness and sympathy have all

been drained out of her. As told it is an example of criminal desensitization. It is illustrated by

Evie’s communication to Lee during their vigil at Margaret’s death bed:

She said we’ll go back together, you and I, won’t we, we’ll go back to him where he’s

waiting for us…She said ‘we’l go soon now. As soon as Margaret’s dead.’ She added in a

joyful voice” ‘How happy he’ll be to have us back!’ (AND 97-98)

The three girls are unaware that they are being manipulated on a very physical level.

Mistaking “what is lower in them for a higher manifestation” Margaret and Evie lay themselves

open to Swamiji who leads them “very far, right to the end” – one to the physical and the other to

psychic death.

Lee who feels suffocated by small things in English society comes to India and reaches

the point of no return soon enough in er relationship with the Swami. She, however, is a tougher

proposition and Swamiji knows that over her he’ll have to wage a fierce battle and use all his

weapons. He woos, scorns, neglects and hypnotizes her in succession, continually testing her

strength and assessing her potential for rebellion till she succumbs. Ultimately, Lee obeys the

Swami in the foolish belief that it is prompted by love and pity for her suffering. Lee’s

experience of sexual intercourse with the Swamiji at midnight is really frightful and sordid. Yet

Lee’s western conscious is never quite buried. She somehow manages to break herself of

Swamiji’s magnetic spell and runs under the protective umbrella of rationalists like Raymond

and the missionary lady Charlotte. But her escape from Swamiji is all too brief. He tells

Raymond with pompous assurance: “And I will take her, and we shall start again from the

beginning. But this time we shall go further. I will take her far, right to the end if need be- and

this time there will be no running away.” (AND 179). At the end Lee reaches a point of no return

and prepares a way for her final regression.

In the ultimate analysis it can be said that the tree girls who believe that they are on the

right path are actually caught in the trap laid by a fake Swami. The Swamiji’s ashram that bears

the grand name of Universal Society for Spiritual Regeneration in the Modern World, serves as a

den in which he can destroy innocent white women on the pretext of leading them to a higher

state. Evie seems mindless in her faith of merging completely with the Swamiji. Magaret’s will

is broken mainly because of her ill health. She harbors her faith on the holy man’s powers of

rejuvenation and refuses Raymond’s offer of hospitalization and treatment, which is purely a

rational approach. Lee’s relationship with the Swamiji is one of a continuous struggle. Although

she is aware of the sensual and materialistic aspects of Swamiji’s life, she still feels drawn

towards him. At the end of the novel we see that Margaret dies a slow painful death, Evie lives in

a mindless stupor and Lee is struggling hard to resist her temptation to go back to the so called

Swamiji. Thus, the novel is a pitiable study of the three English girls who are tormented by their

love for such a manipulator of women.

The novel also conveys the novelist’s recognition of moral vacuum in the Swami’s

conquest of the three white girls. This recognition, however, doesn’t reduce her hatred to the

remedy offered by the East to her refugees. The guru has often been represented by Indo-Anglian

and criminal. But no one except Jhhabvala delineates the destructive process employed by the

false guru. Such a one sided picture of Indian gurus often forces her Indian critics to comment

that she writes only for her western readers. Her Swami is an embodiment of criminal

exploitation. The collective faith of his disciples does not inspire him to transcend his earthly

aspirations even momentarily. His indifference to the suffering of others is couched in

philosophical terms: Everything must be experienced to the end” (AND 134). The suffering of

the dying dog becomes a symbol of the painful throbs that the inmates of the ashram experience

in their movement towards what they believe is a divine assimilation but which, in terms of the

novel’s message, is a physical and psychic annihilation. The novelist depicts Hinduism as a

highly sophisticated medium of abuse and exploitation. Hypnosis, torture by mere withdrawal,

manipulation by refraining from comment, and perversions cloaked in the garb of deeply

philosophical and mystical approaches to life are some of the forms of abuse practiced by the

Swami on his disciples.

To Jhabvala, it is not only religiosity of India that annihilates westerners, its capacity for

assault is also represented in the fates of Raymond and Miss Charlotte who having enough

reason and common sense are saved from being caught in the trap of spirituality. The novel

embodies a series of quests all of which come to naught including Raymond’s and Miss

Charlotte’s. Miss Charlotte is a strong woman with a mission yet she becomes a victim of

political change. She is the embodiment of her creator’s ideal of the only western type fit to life

in India.5 She is sent back after thirty years of selfless service in India- her lifelong ambition of

being laid to rest on Indian soil being left with no possibility of fulfillment. Raymond’s attraction

to the beauty and purity of Indian art forms get inextricably mixed with his feelings for an Indian

youth whose physical perfections hide his complete self-absorption, unconscious cruelty and

parasitical tendencies. Gopi becomes the source of Raymond’s most exquisite pleasures and pain

and ultimately annihilates her.

But if Gopi is manipulating Raymond, he is also being manipulated. Like all the other

characters in the novel, Gopi too is engaged in a quest for physical fulfillment, Raymond’s for

beauty and Lee’s for self-realization, Gopi’s may be termed as a quest for financial expansion.

He finds himself alienated from the members of his family because of their poverty. That’s why

he is attracted towards the people who are materially advanced than him. It is thus that he comes

in close contact with the foreigner Raymond, the princess Asha and his uncle’s well-to-do family

in Benares. With them is added a fourth- the inscrutable Banubai whose pretended mother love

serves to mask her darker desires. Ultimately Asha wins him solely on the merit of her superior

wealth and under her protection he finds his true identity- that of a handsome playboy and

parasite.

Thus, the final image of India that emerges from A New Dominion is a malevolent one.

While the novelist concedes that India has supreme gifts to give to those who are ready to take

them (AND 75), she deplores the fact that when the offer is false it is readily accepted and when

genuine, it does not make a mark. The University for Universal Synthesis, whose mission is “to

educate the mind in the language of the heart and the heart in the language of the mind” (AND

140), preaches a noble and beautiful concept. Yet no seeker, either of the East or the West, is

drawn to it. India as portrayed in the novel is then as area of darkness in which evil flourishes

and goodness and sensitivity are crushed. It is seen as particularly harsh on the westerner who is

trying to find his identity here. Here it can’t be forgotten that the novelist is recording that phase

of her consciousness in which India had failed her and her kind. It is phase when assimilation is

visualized by her only in terms of her ashes being immersed in the Ganges to the accompaniment

of Vedic hymns.6

To be obsessed only with the journalistic emphasis on all the strange and odd elements in

Indian spirituality will present a false picture of Indian life. Here a detailed analysis of Lee’s

behavior would throw light on her character. Here we should also bear in mind the fact that her

predicament also stems from her incapacity to distinguish between simple bodily pleasure and

the joy of spiritual merger. We see this confusing aspect in not only her relationship with the

Swamiji but also with her Indian friend Gopi. When Gopi makes love to her she begins to

realize, “perhaps this was part of the merging she had so ardently desired while looking out of

the window.” (AND 42)

Thus the conflict in A New Dominion emerges as one sided- not a conflicting at all but a

frightening assault on western values. When the novel concludes, the westerners flee India, get

trapped in the ashram of a bogus guru, are rendered homeless and rootless, or die in acute

physical and mental anguish. The novelist’s earlier optimism, visible in her depiction of Judy’s

assimilation of India in A Backward Place, gives way to an acute pessimism and a sense of

defeat in A New Dominion. Her pessimism is related to the fact that she is recording that phase of

her consciousness in which India had failed her. Laurence Fallis describes the prevailing

atmosphere of the novel analogous to a nightmarish journey of the soul:

The dramatic personae move within the framework of a plot that is like a slow train to

India: there is the noise and confusion of the departure, the appalling heat and monotony

of the countryside, and a fatigue of a midnight arrival, all of which provide the illusion of

a journey. But it is only an illusion for all that. And this, I think is what Jhabvala is trying

to tell us: we are all travelers on a train going nowhere. We come, we go and only India

remains.7

Notes

1. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament”, The Hindustan Times Weekly, 27 July 1980, p.1.

2. John Mellors, “Merging with India”, London Magazine, 16, no.3 (1976), p. 95

3. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Testament”, p.1

4. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “An Experience of India”, p.130.

5. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Myself in India”, p.9

6. Ibid, p.16.

7. Laurence Fallis, Review of Travellers by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala”, Books abroad, 48, No. 2 (1974), p. 419