Two Seekers

Pankaj Mishra reviewed Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Nine Lives for the New York Times recently, and followed up with a review for the Washington Post of Charlotte Bacon's There is Room For You. It's a pity they didn't run in the same magazine, because the two reviews offer a perspective on what two very different seekers found in India. (The Babu likes the idea of people coming to India to "find" themselves, inner peace, the yeti, poverty, reality and etc--reinforces the deeply patriotic view I have of my country as a cross between a giant oddbin and a rubbish dump):
Here's Mishra in the NYT:
"Jhabvala, who spent much of the 1960's in India, was also well placed to observe European and American seekers who sought to escape the bourgeois materialism of the West and often encountered in India the tackier materialism of the East. Feckless middle-class Westerners, unctuous Indian middlemen and charismatic but fraudulent gurus proliferate in novels and short stories like 'Travelers,' the Booker Prize-winning 'Heat and Dust' and 'How I Became a Holy Mother: And Other Stories.' These were suave comedies, albeit with an undertone of melancholy, and they showed Jhabvala's cosmopolitan ability to evoke entire cultures with a few well-chosen details.
But it was also in these books of the 60's and 70's that Jhabvala's satire began to harden into cynicism. Her Western seekers usually ended up badly, defrauded and exploited. The Indians they met were either indolent fools or sexually rapacious knaves. East is East and West is West, Jhabvala seemed to say, and they meet only in silliness and depravity."
And here he is in the Washington Post:
"Anna travels to Delhi, Agra, Varanasi and, finally, Calcutta. In Varanasi, she meets British and Spanish tourists and falls for a young Israeli student of Sanskrit. In Calcutta, she rescues a child from destitution. During her travels she reads her mother's account of an Indian childhood. Much of this sounds like 'Heat and Dust,' one of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's many sardonic fictions about middle-class Western women adrift in India, seeking complicated answers to personal problems."