Miss Sahib by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Essay Example

She liked and was interested in everyone, and it seemed a privilege to her to be near them ands was aware of what seemed to her their fascinating, their passionate lives.” (Jhabvala, p.562) Miss Tuhy or “Miss Sahib” in the short fiction by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1968) is a colonial romantic with a colonial curiosity for India. The problem is that she mistakes it for love ultimately to realize the cultural superiority inherent in her that she cannot escape. Her alienation becomes complete. Her belief in the pre-lapsarian “innocence” and simplicity of the Indians and their passionate zest for life dulls England in comparison. There is nothing interesting in their “cold” distant, uneventful, and “dim” England. Miss Tuhy enchantment with those “dark, large, liquid Indian eyes” (Jhabvala, p.561) that mesmerized her spirit and the vibrant surrounding filled her with an engaging adventure. This ‘exoticism’ of the East made her quite engrossed her into a world of romantic quest, which fuelled her imagination and sustained her illusion that captured the inadequacy of the stark, frugal reality that she was made to inhabit. Infact after Independence when other English teachers went home she did not even think of joining them because “she went on teaching as if nothing had changed” (Jhabvala, p 560). She was not yet cured of her colonial gaze. She was still the “Self” and the Indians the “Other”1 and she remained “too engrossed in the present to allow fears of the future disturb her” except for “once, in an uncharacteristically realistic moment she had calculated” (Jhabvala, p 560), if she could really afford to continue with her “passionate inclination” (Jhabvala, p 560) for teaching. Her “usurpers” (Jhabvala, p 560) made her proud for it was she who has bequeathed her legacy of English language and of Western ideology to the Indian girls, thus became “sharp, emancipated, centuries ahead of their mothers and grandmothers” (Jhabvala, p.560) The story ensues with her nostalgic escape into India, once she discovers her “real love” for the country. Miss Tuhy’s quest is an idea of the orient that to her seems at once exciting and sensual but also fearful. However, the fear and disgust of the colonized seem to haunt her only after she is exposed to the human aspect of Sharmila and her grandmother. To Miss Tuhy it was the idea behind each of the people she encountered counted more than the actual being itself that was human. She considered all the Indian people a different category who inhabited her mind and she moved her affection from one cluster to another without any personal involvement…they were all the same to her – the outsiders who made her existence vibrant just by being the object of her ideal idea about the colonizers: “She was just happy to be back…and lived contentedly…only venturing forth on Sundays to visit her former colleagues and pupils…as time went on, these Sunday visits became fewer…there was less to say now…but it didn’t matter, she was even happier staying at home because all her life was there now, and the interest and affection she had formerly bestowed on her colleagues and pupils, she now had as strongly for the other people living in the house, and even for the vegetable-seller and the cold-drink man though her contact with them never went further than smiles and nods…” (Jhabvala, p 561) She was completely detached at a human level and yet her ardor for enchantment drew her close to Sharmila, one of the few people in the house with who she established a thorough contact beyond the frontier of unabashed gaze. Yet her personal contact with her was mostly a unidirectional exchange from Sharmila’s side and none from her. Infact throughout the story, only the omniscient narrator seems to know the subjective position of Miss Tuhy and she never communicates with Sharmila (maybe she considers herself inexplicable to the Indian’s). She loves her role as the teacher and that of the one who instructs. This idea of Miss Tuhy about her capability of transference of knowledge from her to that of Sharmila was one of the “happiest times” for she not only taught, but most importantly, she liked the engrossed “eagerness” of Sharmila trying to learn, “sitting there with her all day long”. Whatever she had to offer filled her with a sense of importance and filled her solitary and friendless life with an engagement that was both intellectually as well as ideologically conducive to her idea of the colonizer. She thus enjoyed enlightening the people of India and enjoyed their simple lives from the point of view of a White English woman. She thought she knew what is good for her is good enough for Sharmila. Therefore, when she found her “passionate reading of the romantic poets” were quite dissatisfying to Sharmila (who yawned unabashedly), she did not figure out why that was so. Instead of understanding that a native girl of her age would not actually understand something or care, to like something that held a great historical and creative importance for her. Her disillusionment followed when again she failed to understand Sharmila’s point of view when pined for home from Shimla. Miss Tuhy had described it with paradisiacal exuberance saying Sharmila’s children would get English rosy cheeks by going there and she thought that they would like sausages in the same manner like her and her inability to understand Sharmila’s rejection of her ideas (after she felt sorry for Sharmila for the life she was leading) made her bitter. This subconscious superiority with which she judged the Indians and which led to her disillusionment cannot lighten the fact that she was earnest at her efforts (the White man’s burden or here, the white woman’s burden). When she wanted to free Sharmila from her life of misery or when she thought that a change of place (that she considers quite ideal with English food and anglicized milieu), can help Sharmila lose her past. This becomes a subtle metaphor about the British process of acculturation2. Indeed, it was unsuccessful since she was measuring one culture from the point of view or partial eyes of another and she just assumed that Sharmila would like what she had to offer. There are instances when her imagination about the orient found such capturing catalyst in Sharmila’s attitude. The stories about her grandmother having a lover or when she described kissing scenes from Indian films with passionate innocence, or when she came to her room to empty her mind – every act was a fulfillment of her craving for a discourse that was a burden to the postcolonial India as it was to her. Miss Tuhy was a victim of her fancy and that we all know is a ‘deceiving elf’ (Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, 1819) and she could not ride in its crest forever when the horror of the darker side of the East began to threaten her. If she was delighted when Sharmila with her simple innocence would offer her “Halwa” (p.566) off her fingertips (quite a sexual scene though). It made her heart melt or the sound of her approaching footsteps filled her life with wonder like someone who sought to the Indians for amusement and extravaganza – to her watching the passionate Indians was a dreamy luxury. Then, the idea of Sharmila being a “she-devil” (p.567) as the Anglo nurse described her and being an adulterer, made her pray for her and defend her with the help of the scriptures. Miss Tuhy wondered about the grandmother and Sharmila and about the “sensuality in the East” (p.565). Every time she heard something exotic, “thousand impressions rippled over her mind” (p.564) and yet felt sorry for Sharmila and her sexual immorality involving the “wolf-boys” (p.567) (Kipling’s Jungle book like description of hilly boys who were hired as servants) who she let in at night. The passage in Page 568, describes a major scene when Miss Tuhy catches a glimpse of Sharmila in the bazaar, matronly and no longer young (note this line “she liked young people always” in pg 561) and coarsely quarrelling with the shopkeepers who leered at her. Miss Tuhy’s Christian eyes could not avoid the physical sensuality of Sharmila. She wondered about it herself saying, “If she had been born in India…instead of her thin, inadequate, English body, would she have grown up like the grandmother who had opened the door to the jeweler, or like Sharmila with flashing black eyes and a big bust?” This line not only suggests her lustful cravings for a sexual life but also a distorted sense of relief from the Western discourse of moral rigidity. By fantasizing about a voluptuous body, she is able to imagine a kind of amorality that to her mind represents the East and offers an ideal escape into the dark recesses of her own mind that she could hide even from herself. Her obsession about Sharmila’s propriety whether moral or physical and Sharmila’s unself-conscious display of characteristic changes that accompanied her from her innocent girlhood to her ripened and embittered womanhood escaped ideal paradigm that was already constructed for her by Miss Tuhy. She did not fit that bill and she suddenly began to represent every other Indian that Miss Tuhy had gazed at trying to meet her own ideas about them – everything about India served to excite her imagination and discursive constructs about it. But when Sharmila transformed into a normal human being in front of her, (“she saw her as a stranger might…her image of Sharmila was two-fold…simultaneous”, p. 568) with her constant bickering and complaining, Miss Tuhy finally saw her in the light of physical reality at least. Everything began to revolve outside her realm of expectations. Moreover, when the trip was cut shot because it failed to impress Sharmila and her children happy to come back to a stifling home and locality, Miss Tuhy could taste her own bitter failure at having been rejected somehow by everything that was Indian. The color vanished. Everything from then on began to smell and taste without that added flavor of an enchantment of illusions – the heat and the dust began to oppress her own imagination. Finally, she could understand only one truth: she could not understand India anymore, not without the armor of the Western discourse. But at a human level she also wanted Sharmila to be happy and always blissfully happy that would help her be happy again – because it was the failure on behalf of Sharmila to keep her happy made her lose hope and make her feel old for the first time as she stood reminiscing her mothers funeral. Works Cited 1. Fanon, Frantz, “Black Skin White Masks” Translated by C. L.Markham,, 1986 Pluto Press. 2. Huttenback, R. A. “The British Empire as a ‘White Mans Country’-Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement”, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Nov., 1973), pp. 21 for more information on the settlers determination to create a White Mans Country. 3. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. “Miss Sahib”, “An Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction”, ed. by Dean Baldwin, and Patrick J. Quinn 4. Said, Edward. “Orientalism”, New York: Vintage, 1979, 1, 3-5, 90-98 5. Spivak, Gayatri. “A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Toward A History of The Vanishing History” (London: Harvard University Press, 1999) Read More