SOURCE: “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's ‘The Widow’: Reading the Subtext,” in The Literary Criterion, Vol. 27, Nos. 1 & 2, June 1992, pp. 133-37.

In the following essay, Usha provides an in-depth analysis of Jhabvala's short story “The Widow.”

Born in Germany, of Jewish-Polish parentage and educated in England, R. P. Jhabvala came to India in 1951 as the wife of a Parsi architect. The 24 years she spent in India—“most of my adult life”—gave her abundant time and opportunity to study India and write about it. But her approach is that of an “initiated outsider” (in the words of John Updike in his review of Heat and Dust). Her relationship with India vacillates between extremes, ranging from intense love to active loathing. To describe it in her own words:

There is a cycle that Europeans—by Europeans I mean all Westerners, including Americans—tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage...