The Householder by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

First published: 1960

Type of work: Comedy of manners

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: New Delhi, India

Principal Characters:

• Prem, the protagonist, a young Hindi teacher at Khanna Private College
• Indu, his wife, who is expecting their first child
• Raj, his friend, a low-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Food
• Hans Loewe, a young German and Prem’s friend, who is seeking enlightenment
• Mr. Khanna, the headmaster of Prem’s school
• Sohan Lal, an older teacher of mathematics at the school
• The Seigals, Prem’s carefree landlords

The Novel

In the opening pages of the novel, the third-person omniscient narrator introduces Prem, struggling to maintain an illusion of dignity and beset with anxieties over how he will manage the family’s affairs. His marriage with Indu was arranged, according to Hindu custom, by his mother after his father’s death. He is in his first year as a Hindi teacher at Khanna Private College, a school for boys of wealthy families who need additional study before they can be accepted into better colleges. Although he has been married for a few months, Prem regards Indu as a stranger; she does little that suits him, and he is critical of even her visits with the Seigals, his upper-middle-class landlords who live in an apartment below his own modest quarters. Prem, characteristically lacking self-confidence, sees himself as a failure as both a husband and a teacher.

Prem defines his role as husband as only that of material provider. Embarassed by sexuality and Indu’s increasingly visible pregnancy, he thinks of the anticipated birth only in terms of higher salary, lower rent, or both. His bumbling, comic attempt to request a raise from Mr. Khanna, the aloof overbearing headmaster, ends without Prem having even made the request. When Prem attempts to ask the Seigals for reduced rent after the baby arrives, he suffers the same result: Prem cannot ask for what he wants, because he does not know what it is that he really wants. Isolated from his fellow teachers and indifferent to classroom discipline, Prem is befriended by Sohan Lal, a mentor figure, who has been a householder for much of his life. Lal’s response to the anxieties and responsibilities of family life, however, has been to adopt lower-middle-class living standards and periodically to visit a local guru, whose message, ironically, is the renunciation of mundane, material life—including that of the family. The message is anything but relevant to Prem. Trying to assert himself as a disciplinarian in order to impress Mr. Khanna and hoping to avoid what he perceives as the humdrum routine of Lal’s life, Prem reports several students who harass young girls passing the school. When he is confronted by Mr. Khanna’s inaction (he is afraid of losing the boys’ tuition), Prem retracts his accusations. Whatever Prem sets out to do, he seems destined to fail.

In the midst of his anxiety, Prem meets a young German, Hans Loewe, who sees Prem as a stereotype of Indian spiritualism. While Hans questions him about the philosophical virtues of Hinduism, Prem reports the material progress of independent India. Shortly after his new friendship with Hans, Prem accompanies Lal to the guru’s temple, the top floor of an old house. While Prem is moved by the guru’s happiness and devotion, the impression is fleeting. Completely isolated (even his weekly meetings with his friend Raj at the cinema have ended), Prem is forced to confront conflicting loyalties to his wife and to his mother, who plans to visit at the same time that Indu plans to return home, a plan that Prem has forbidden to no avail. To make matters worse, Prem has been invited to a tea party at his school—an occasion whose importance he vastly overestimates—and he expects Indu to accompany him.

When his mother arrives, Prem’s household becomes engulfed in silent tension. His mother gives the couple little room for privacy, and Indu withdraws further into herself, remaining silent much of the time, weathering the mother’s snide comments and retiring to bed earlier than usual. As his mother, a self-pitying busybody, apologizes for Prem’s bad marriage, Prem himself comes to appreciate Indu more than ever before. In fact, he begins to fall in love with Indu, although he is still unwilling to defend her from his mother’s criticism or notice that she delays her trip in order to go to the tea party with him. Resuming his friendship with Raj, Prem finds himself warming to the idea of being both husband and father, a householder.

At the Khannas’ tea party, Prem is fascinated with Indu’s beauty, but his enthrallment gives way to embarrassment as Indu gobbles up sweets and ignores the condescending insults of Mrs. Khanna, the domineering, arrogant voice of power behind the scenes at the school. Desperately hoping for the chance to impress his colleagues at the party, Prem remains oblivious to Mrs. Khanna’s shabby treatment of his wife; he leaves the party still dreaming of the perfect profound statement but without having uttered much more than a word. The next day, once again sensing his failure, Prem contemplates the guru’s call for renunciation of desire and ambition and for a life of devotion, bhakti yoga. After once more attempting and failing to ask for lower rent, Prem begins to sense that much of his life is illusion, or maya, as the guru had suggested. He is jerked back into reality, however, by his mother’s relentless martyrdom and Indu’s departure for her parents’ home.

In Indu’s absence, Prem’s mother pampers him as if he were a child. The very contrast in his mother’s attitude and his own sense of failure as an adult drives Prem deeper into his frustration. During his mother’s visit, however, Prem develops a genuine love for Indu: He writes angry letters and an explicit love letter but then destroys them. After another visit to the guru during which Prem realizes that devotion to God can also be devotion to Indu and the householding stage of his life, a halfhearted attempt to secure a new job in Raj’s office, and receiving a letter from Indu, Prem realizes that he enjoys the household pressures. He begins to feel confident that he can accept responsibility, and stronger for the realization, he writes to Mr. Khanna requesting a raise.

When Indu arrives home, Prem acts quickly, writing his sister in Bangalore in order to arrange for his mother to visit his sister upon her request. Indu and Prem discover new intimacy in their sexuality, and Prem senses, perhaps for the first time, that they do belong together. Once more overcome by timidity, however, he asks his mother to request the reduction in rent, which fails when she insults the Seigals before asking them. After his mother leaves for Bangalore, Prem and Indu fall more in love than ever. The sense of belonging fortifies Prem anew: he argues with Mr. Chaddha, the pretentious history teacher with whom he shares a classroom, after Mr. Chaddha has insulted him in front of his students. As a result, Prem is threatened with dismissal, but he accepts the threat stoically, realizing that lower rent (when Prem finally does make the request, the Seigals ignore him) and a higher salary will not be possible.

Happy simply to have his job, Prem’s depression abates more rapidly than it might have in the weeks before Indu’s return. A visit to the guru, a chance encounter with Hans while he visits his friend Raj, and the recollections of his own wedding while attending that of Lal’s daughter all lead to Prem’s growing satisfaction with his responsibilities. When Hans visits him at the college before returning to Europe, Prem realizes that his best friend is Indu. He delights in pleasing her by inviting Raj and his family to dinner. With his confidence in both her and himself thus expressed, Prem beams with pride when Raj accepts the invitation. As the novel closes, Raj compliments Prem on Indu’s cooking, symbolizing Prem’s newfound comfort and pride in his role as head of household.

The Characters

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s characterization achieves a balance between the round character, who seems fully human in psychological development, and the flat character, who represents types or ideas pertinent to the action. Not even Prem, who is the most fully rounded character in The Householder, is developed sufficiently for readers to believe that they know him well. Yet even a seemingly flat character such as the guru is given sufficient dialogue to escape the predictability of stereotype. Jhabvala peoples her novel with characters who are individualized but also capable of representing various types in modern Indian society. Furthermore, by using both European and Indian characters, Jhabvala establishes cross-cultural relations as well as dissecting the manners of middle-class urban India.

Hans Loewe represents the naive European who believes that everything, and everyone, in India is gifted with spiritual wisdom. He befriends Prem, apparently one of the first people he meets, with a fierce determination to achieve enlightenment as soon as possible. Although Hans lasts only a few weeks in India, he is there long enough for his flattery of Prem to have its ironic consequences, for it is Hans who first renews Prem’s interest in his own religion’s spiritual legacies. By the end of the novel, his shallow approach to any sort of discipline is enough to convince Prem that friendship, with Indu or Raj, is much like the discipline of householding.

Kitty, who runs a poorly kept boardinghouse that caters to wandering Europeans and who rents Hans a room, is representative of the expatriate European who has been in India long enough to develop a jaded, cynical attitude toward both India and Indians, whatever attitude toward spiritualism remains. While she tolerates Prem for the sake of her roomer, she is downright crude and condescending toward her servant. Kitty is a British holdover from colonial India; when Prem accompanies Hans and her to a party, Kitty and several other snobbish women share their disdain for Indians “by birth” and declare their superiority spiritually by claiming to be Indian “by conviction.” The irony is not lost on Prem, and he leaves the party quickly and quietly. He prefers his own confusion to their willed ignorance.

In Jhabvala’s portrait of middle-class urban India, she offers a cross section of ordinary life. Raj and Lal represent young and old householders, respectively, who bear the daily struggle to make ends meet with quiet resolve. Although Raj is sometimes sullen and always quick to allow Prem to pay the bills on their outings and Lal flirts with renouncing his family life as less than godly, both characters offer role models to Prem. Through their friendship, Prem comes to discover the pleasure of mundane responsibilities and to build the confidence necessary to fulfill them.

On the other hand, Jhabvala presents characters who signify the materialistic corruption of some upper-middle-class Indians. The Seigals are wealthy enough to enjoy frequent parties and indulge excessively in whiskey, contrary to Hindu custom, while nearly ignoring the riotous nightlife of their son Romesh Seigal. Despite their comfortable standard of living, however, they seem oblivious to the needs of their young tenants, refusing even to negotiate a lower rent. Mrs. Khanna is bored by her husband’s academic facade and spends her time inflating the price of the teachers’ lunches and gossiping about illicit affairs. Mr. Khanna and Mr. Chaddha represent characters whose self-righteousness far exceeds the illusionary status of their positions. Prem’s responsibilities seem far more sincere and serious than their pretentions of wealth and status.

Jhabvala’s characters avoid falling flat because of the settings in which they live and act. Readers come to know characters as much from her vivid descriptions of place as from narrative exposition. Street scenes are vibrant; the visual appearance of rooms is fully described with well-selected details; the activity at the cinema and in the tea shop is wrought with vitality. Prem’s school and his apartment become places in which one could walk around with familiarity. In The Householder, class, nationality, and setting are so intricately linked that the characters seem never to be out of place, even when, as in the case of Prem’s mother, they are awkwardly placed for comic effect.

Critical Context

Born Jewish in Nazi Germany, educated in England, a resident for much of her adult life in India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala seems especially well suited to offer a detached yet intimate picture of ordinary life in modern Indian society. Jhabvala’s first six novels, of which The Householder is the fifth, all seek to establish a thorough social documentation of postindependence India. With insight equally perceptive from both English and Indian perspectives, her fiction offers the same balance that she brings to her characters. Like Henry James, she focuses her craft on recording the rapidly changing culture of a society at a major turning point and on the consequent interior changes in the people of that society. Like Prem, the India of The Householder (and of Jhabvala’s other five domestic comedies) is undergoing a major transition during its first decade as a Western-style democracy. Jhabvala’s achievement is in demonstrating that West and East can inform each other, yet do so without destroying the cultural integrity of either one.

Bibliography

Asnani, Shyam K. “Jhabvala’s Novels AThematic Study,” in Journal of Indian Writing in English. II, no. 1(1975), pp. 38-47.

Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 1983.

McArthur, Herbert. “In Search of the Indian Novel,” in The Massachusetts Review. II (Summer, 1961), pp. 600-613.

Shahane, Vasant. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 1976.

Williams, Haydn M. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 1973.