SOURCE: "Strangers in a Backward Place: Modern India in the Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala," in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. VI, No. 1, June, 1971, pp. 53-64.

In the following essay, Williams discusses several of Jhabvala's novels, focusing on her sense of satire and irony and illustrating how her depiction of middle-class life subtly addresses various social and religious issues in India.

The novels and short stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala stand in a unique relationship to Indian literature in English. Though she lives in India and is married to an Indian, she is European by origin, and her work belongs in some ways to the literature about India written by foreigners with close connections with India, the tradition to which P. Meadows Taylor, Kipling, and John Masters belong. Yet her close personal, experience of Indian life and her exclusive interest in it as a novelist as well as...