"Disinheritance" -Identity constructions in the prose works and archives of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

This PhD project will engage with the novels, short stories and manuscripts of the Ruth Prawer Jhabvala archive to trace her engagements with issues of female and diasporic identities in her fiction. The project will focus on notions of dislocation and new identity formations, looking at how Jhabvala explores these in different settings - India, especially Delhi, and the US, especially New York - and in historical contexts, from the era of the British Raj in India to 1990s New York. The thesis will pay close attention to Jhabvala's own positioning as a writer, born in Germany, raised in England, and for whom India and the USA are 'adopted' countries. This lens will allow for important new insights into questions of a globally articulated citizenship and contribute to contemporary discussions around the construction of new identities that emerged in the wake of increasing cross-flows of people, a phenomenon that has shaped the twentieth century. Jhabvala's own trajectory from Germany to London to Delhi to New York provides a useful template for an analysis of how these shifts in location are explored in fiction. The project will focus on the narrative strategies at work to highlight the many faceted ways with which Jhabvala renders the Indian environment and also trace how these modes of representation shift once she moved away from India, both in her descriptions of the subcontinent as well as the USA. Particularly an analysis of narrative shifts in location and point of view will be important cornerstones of this study. It is proposed that the PhD candidate, by comparing archival manuscript sources alongside the final published novels will trace the narrative strategies of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's fiction from a deeply invested and embedded engagement with the cityscape of Delhi to her later writings on New York.

Another important element this PhD project will investigate is Jhabvala's method of writing. As is well known, her fiction traverses a range of different literary forms, from short stories to novels to life writing, as well as screenplays and plays. This engagement has facilitated a cross-fertilisation between her fictions, and the PhD will investigate how after her forays into screenplay writing, visual story-telling derived from the language of cinema evolves in her later work in particular. This narratological and manuscript-based approach will offer a new model with which larger questions of dislocation, cultural inheritance and exile could be explored beyond narrower theoretical articulations of diaspora studies. Such an investigation will allow for a comparative analysis of this issue alongside other female writers of Indian heritage, such as Attia Hosain, Anita Desai and Kiran Desai as well as male writers such as Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie. Work on the Jhabvala collection will be supplemented by an engagement with archival holdings of the India Office Records and Library. This will enable the PhD to complement research into Jhabvala's fictionalisation of the British Raj in India, will give the project additional historical depth, highlighting the connection of her work with other holdings at the British Library, and facilitate a conversation around the wider issue of identity constructions in the Anglo-Indian novel.