Reading South Asia:
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's India, 1950 to the present
Alexandra Viets
Reading:
*Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Out of India: Selected Stories, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Read the introductory essay, "Myself in India," and the following stories: "The
Widow," "The
Housewife," and "Two
More Under the Indian Sun."
*Also suggested: Heat and Dust, the film produced by Merchant Ivory (1983)
Date: Friday, Oct. 26, 1-3 p.m.
Price: $40 ($35 members)
Now 85 years old, novelist, essayist, short story writer and academy award winning screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has been writing about India since the 1950s. Called postcolonial before the term was invented, Jhabvala's work examines themes such as loss of language, land and history in a landscape she both claims and expresses dispossession from. This two-hour class will explore pre-independence and post-independence India through the prism of Jhabvala's Booker prize winning 1975 novel, Heat and Dust, and a selection of stories from her 1985 collection, Out of India. Among the themes to explore will be the integration of Western values, domination and power, the entwining of spirituality and sexuality, and Jhabvala's portrayal of India's urban middle class.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Alexandra Viets is a screenwriter and journalist with a background in South Asia who received her MFA degree from Columbia University. Her first feature-length screenplay, Cotton Mary, won a New York Foundation for the Arts award and was produced by Merchant Ivory. She is currently in pre-production on Ask Me No Questions, a feature film about a Bangladeshi family fleeing NYC post 9/11, and Hijabi Girls, a documentary about Muslim-American teenage girls who wear the hijab. She has also completed Kashmir, a screenplay set in modern day Kashmir and The Bibighar, a wartime drama of 1857 India. A frequent contributor to the Asian Wall Street Journal, her film/theater reviews have also appeared in The International Herald Tribune and The Far Eastern Economic Review. She is the recipient of the Paul Newman Award for screenwriting and an award from the National Film Development Council in Mumbai. She teaches in Baltimore at Towson University's Department of Theater Arts, specializing in film and literature of South Asia. She is a 2011 Fellow with the National Endowment for Humanities in South Asian literature, history and art.
