SOURCE: “Fictions of Princely States and Empire,” in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 17, No. 3, July, 1986, pp. 103-17.

In the following essay, Chew examines a number of works, including Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, that concern the princely states of India as the subject of historical fiction and “fiction-about-history.”

India became independent on 15 August 1947, and by mid-century the princely states no longer existed. Nevertheless, they continued to tease and to draw the literary imagination, as they had done throughout the period of British rule. The perspective, however, was altered and, with it, the highlights and depths, appearances and relationships. In Forster's A Passage to India, for example, the spiritual life of a princely state was viewed as a living part of the rich inheritance of India. When his The Hill of Devi appeared in 1953, it was to be “a record of a vanished civilization,” salvaging “something precious...