SEARCH FOR INDIVIDUALITY IN THE NOVEL ‘THE HOUSEHOLDER’

ABSTRACT

As Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s literary career advanced, her narrative tone also changes, becoming darker and darker with each successive novel. She presents a drama of conflict and resolution in terms of a youth’s quest for identity In the world her protagonist confronts, several social realities that were the consequence of Indian planning which are easily identified. The break-up of the joint family and mushrooming of nuclear units that followed created a need for new adaptations and adjustments. This phenomenon is characteristic feature of the new India as the decay of the aristocracy and the emergence of the business class enters Prawer Jhabvala’s fiction for the first time.

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