A Transcultural Study of the Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Shashi Deshpande in Light of the Rasadhvani

Abstract

The thesis sets out to prove the efficacy of the rasadhvani, a traditional Indian aesthetic, to enable a transcultural reading of six literary texts by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Shashi Deshpande. The mainstream of post-colonial critical practice has already identified the need for adequate theoretical models within the field of post-colonial literary studies. But these same models become problematic with transcultural writers like Jhabvala and Deshpande because they move beyond the boundaries of traditional post-colonial approaches. Post colonial theory, in other words, mainly studies literary works which are based in a rich diversity of cultural settings outside Britain but are written by authors who share the English language as a means of literary expression. Post-colonial theoretical approaches, therefore, define themselves in terms of the ethnic origin of the author under critical examination. My claim is that the rasadhvani theory facilitates a transcultural reading which moves beyond the categorical limitations of culture and even of gender that we often unwittingly set up whenever we regard literature as the unproblematic expression of the ethnicity or gender of the author. In practice, the theory involves a particular kind of close study with the aim of discovering and identifying the presiding emotion (rasa) of a literary work. The concept of rasa refers to a heightened level of emotional response to a play in performance, a poem, a novel or even a painting or sculpture through the process of dhvani (suggestion). When it is applied to writing it considers the text in terms of two levels; the level of statement based on words alone (vacya) and the level of suggested meaning (vyaṅgya), where both words and meaning convey a further sense. In six close readings of fictional works by Jhabvala and Deshpande, I set out to resituate the critical discussion of these two writers using Indian literary concepts. In other words, the rasadhvani transforms basic human feelings aroused by incommunicable personal traumas into transcultural emotions which reach out to readers from any particular culture.