Conflict And Integration:the Symbolic Reading Of Heat And Dust

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala(1927-2013)is a famous British novelist and screenwriter with 24 years' life experience in India.Among contemporary Western writers,she is one of the most successful novelists writing about India.With her great insight and profound language skills,she shows the reader a panorama of Indian life in her novels.As Jhabvala's most prestigious work,Heat and Dust won the Booker Prize in 1975 and was successfully adapted into a film in 1984.The novel describes the life experience of two generations of British people in India with a two-line parallel structure,which shows Jhabvala's expectation of the British and Indian integration and multicultural exchange.Experts and scholars have carried out various analyses of Heat and Dust,but on the basis of symbolism in the novel,the confliction and integration between the British and the Indians have seldom been concerned.The present author mainly applies symbolism to analyze Heat and Dust and aims to find out the reasons why the British and the Indians conflict with each other and their cultural integration before and after the Indian Independence respectively.The thesis mainly consists of the introduction,the body and the conclusion.The introduction part comprises introductions to Jhabvala,Heat and Dust,its literature review at home and abroad,and the importance of the study.There are three chapters in the body part.Chapter One illustrates the natural symbols in Heat and Dust,which can be divided into the negative and the positive natural symbols.Before the Indian Independence,the disordered and oppressed heat and the dust are the negative natural representative symbols which reflect the conflict between the British and the Indians.But after the Indian Independence,there are the positive natural symbols like the fresh rain and the blue sky which reveal the eased relations between the two sides and the tendency of integration.Chapter Two begins with two types of symbolic characters in Heat and Dust who treat the British and the Indian relations with opposite attitudes.On the one hand,owed to inequality and misunderstanding,the British represented by Douglas and the Indians represented by the Nawab hate and conflict with each other;on the other hand,the British like the narrator and the Indian representative Inder Lal getting along moderately with each other,respecting each other and successfully achieving integration across cultural and ethnic barriers.Chapter Three takes the symbolic settings as the analysis object,comparing the incongruous settings and the harmonious settings in Heat and Dust.For one thing,the conflict between the British and the Indian is vividly demonstrated in the incongruous setting like the Civil Lines;for another,they can understand each other and co-exist together in the harmonious settings represented by Baba Firdaus' grove.The conclusion part summarizes the whole thesis and points out that the symbolic reading of the novel reflects the process from conflict to integration between the British and the Indians before and after the Indian Independence respectively,which embodies Jhabvala's expectation of multiculturalism and provides positive thinking for the intercultural exchange.