Those two obliterating forces in the title are what officers of the British Raj famously and self-pityingly resented. Other colonialists saw empire as a personal adventure and an arena of secret delight and shame, a personal drama obscured by the dazzling glare and discomfiting dustclouds.
Heat and Dust, the 1983 movie adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own Booker-winning novel, directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, is now revived in British cinemas. It emerges from literary and cinematic styles that haven’t been fashionable for many a year: the Anglo-Indian world made famous by EM Forster, Paul Scott and JG Farrell and the costumed Edwardian period-prestige movies that came out under the Merchant Ivory banner.
After 37 years, Heat and Dust stands up as an intelligent, ambitious, substantial picture – with flaws but also intriguing aspects that were perhaps not sufficiently understood at the time. Is the movie’s love story a diversionary heterosexualisation of something else?
It is double-stranded. In the 1920s, Olivia Rivers (Greta Scacchi) is a spirited young Englishwoman who comes out to India with her decent though stuffy husband Douglas (Christopher Cazenove) and encounters various grumpy, pink-faced repressed Brits wielding the colonial whip, driven mad or melancholy in the burning sun. The British contingent are uneasily aware of the political need to placate a local prince, the charming Nawab (Shashi Kapoor) and his glittering-eyed mother, the Begum (Madhur Jaffrey). The empire-builders rather disapprove of the Nawab’s louche British houseguest, Harry Hamilton-Paul (Nickolas Grace) who has rather gone native. But the Nawab’s charms and apparent rich inner life – represented as sumptuous and mysterious in the classic orientalist style – excite Olivia and she is drawn into a dangerous affair.
Meanwhile, in the early 80s, Olivia’s great-niece Anne (Julie Christie) comes to India with a cache of Olivia’s letters (although we don’t see her writing to anyone), intent on finding out what happened to her ancestor. She, too, has an exciting affair – with a gentle, understanding and married Indian man, Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain) – and wonders if she is in fact a reincarnation of Olivia. Her interest in India is shown to be intelligent and authentic, whereas a tiresome hippie American called Chid (Charles McCaughan) is an example of the west getting India wrong: a tourist-scrounger condescendingly projecting his own insecurities on to another culture .
That parallel story looks a bit facile now; the consequences of Anne’s adventure and her feelings about Inder Lal’s wife Ritu (Ratna Pathak Shah) are fudged and Julie Christie’s half of the film is simply less interesting, although the duplication does create an emphasis on a certain intersection of sexual and imperial politics. In each case, the Indian man has sex with the English woman. Reverse the genders, make it a white man and an Indian woman, and the story becomes different, an even less level ideological playing field, something like Rudyard Kipling’s brutal story Beyond the Pale.
Watched in 2019, what becomes really interesting is the Nawab’s relationship with Harry. This unconventional Englishman is of course frowned upon by the expatriate community, though his intimacy with the Nawab is important as a channel for their diplomatic relations. But then the Nawab begins his friendship with Olivia and Harry mysteriously falls sick – and that, too, is a pretext for Olivia’s visits. But the truth here could be happening behind our back. The relationship between the Nawab and Harry could well be comparable to that of Dr Aziz and his British friend Mr Fielding in A Passage to India, or maybe even that of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. The real forbidden love could be almost unnoticed.
Shashi Kapoor is terrifically good as the Nawab: cool, elegant, stylish and virile, and Greta Scacchi is wonderful as Olivia. It is a pleasure to see the classical stage performer Susan Fleetwood in the essentially comic role of the uptight Burra Memsahib. Ivory contrives a great set piece as the English types in full evening dress stand for the national anthem played on skirling pipes by Indian musicians. A telling spectacle of duty and embarrassment.
