Dorothee heat’s Weblog

In the following text I am going to summarise an extract from the novel ‘Heat and Dust’ written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, which is about an encouter between the protagonist,also the narrator of the story, a young English woman who has come to India in order to retrace the steps of a distant relative of hers, and 3 young people who have left England for India to find peace and spiritual enrichment there.

The scene takes place outside a travellers’ bungalow, where the 3 people currently stay. One of them is identified as being from the English Midlands by the narrator, although he is dressed like an Indian ascetic and tries hard to conceal his actual origin. At first, the other two people, a man his girl, appear very open but this impression changes immediatly when talking about the Indian people, Indian way of life and their bad experiences with it, which include robbery and deception among other things. The protagonist asks the 3 people for the reasons they had when having decided to go to India and so the man tells her that he and his girlfriend got involved with the Hindu religion in England. They attented a lecture by a visiting swami and had been impressed, even overwhelmed by the power and spiritedness they were confronted with. That breath-taking atmosphere finally made them set off for India.

The ascetic explains that he had smiliar reasons for coming to India. Being pleased with his decision in the first couple of months, he found a guru who gave him initiation and taught him his way of life: divest himself of all personal possessions and start a pilgrimage across India. But then he tells the narrator that he found it impossible to live his life like that, as he suffered from the stresses and strains caused by his journey as well as the oppressive feeling that he was not taken seriously by the Indian people.