Esmond in India - A Novel

Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1958, 1st Edition

Readers of Mrs Jhabvala's novels of Indian life cannot fail to be impressed by her mastery of social comedy. The irony in the novel is deeper than before and the author's sense of comedy has acquired a satirical edge. The scene, as with her previous titles, is Delhi, but a Delhi that has now had years of independence. A new society has grown up, a society of ministers and administrators and officials, but in the process many who gave their lives and futures to the struggle for `freedom' find themselves socially stranded and rather bewildered. Against such a background we watch the antics of Esmond, an English expert on Indian culture, the embodiment of false self-conscious values. Married to an indolent Indian beauty whose habits enrage him, momentarily tempered by an idealistic young Indian girl of more modern tastes, but fundamentally wearried and exasperated by everything Indian, from the climate to its people, he has no place in the future of India. Nor have many others, but here we see the Indian scene, vivid and clear, and vibrating with life, the old and the new, the false and the true, in a struggle for a solution...