Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's stories have been compared to Chekhov's. She is a detached observer of what he called morbus fraudulentus, the comedy (in the sternest sense) of self-delusion which leaves us to make up our minds. Her novel A New Dominion embodies this irony, but one is more struck, this time, by the echoes of A Passage to India. Two generations have passed since Forster. The Westerner is not now in India to rule or give…. But, allowing for this difference, Forster's and Mrs Jhabvala's characters are matched. Raymond, the sensitive English aesthete and inquirer, is another Fielding, plus unconscious homosexuality; his Indian friend, the ingenuous and plaguing student Gopi, is a budding, ill-educated, up-to-date version of Dr Aziz. The disturbance in the mind of the unhappy Mrs Moore becomes bold and explicit in the persons of three English girls who have recklessly gone to India on a...