Esmond in India by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (published as R. Prawer Jhabvala), George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1958

I enjoyed reading and admired this early novel of RPJ, set in India -- New Delhi -- in the 1950s, when India is still adjusting to independence from England and the partition of the country.

Esmond is a handsome, charming, intelligent young Englishman in India who has gotten himself disastrously married to a beautiful, indolent, and not-very-bright Indian woman, with whom he has a son.  The plot revolves around two families: the family of Esmond's wife and the family of the Indian man she was engaged to, but jilted in order to marry the glamorous Esmond.  Now the girl's family wants to marry its son, a penniless but altruistic doctor working with poor people in the jungle, to the daughter of the other family, a recent college graduate who is idealistic but is also  seduced by Esmond's golden charm.

With so much attention paid to matrimony and family dynamics, one understands why Jhabvala is often compared to Jane Austen -- they both write about the same kinds of people in the same kind of situations, observed with the same gimlet eye.

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