Jhabvala as novelist and screenwriter and a comparison w/ Forster

We don't expect any surprises in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 1975 novel, Heat and Dust, as she announces in the first sentence that this novel relates how Olivia (a young Englishwoman married to a colonial official and living in India in the 1920s) left her husband (Douglas) and began a (lifelong?) relationship with the local Indian governor, always referred to as the Nawab. The narrator of the story is Olivia's granddaughter, a 20-something who journeyed to India in the present (of the novel, i.e., the 1970s) to learn about her grandmother's life; the narrative incorporates the granddaughter's diary and letters from Olivia in the 20s to her sister. So, no major surprises - but RPJ rises to the challenge and holds our interest throughout the novel - I'm about halfway through this relatively short (180 pp) work - despite our foreknowledge of the outcome. She deftly sketches in Olivia as a dutiful but bored member of the tiny British-colonial society who is increasingly drawn to the Nawab, who showers her w/ attention and small gifts - and all the while she (and we) learn about the Nawab's utter corruption and cruelty. She should be able to see what a mistake it would be to fall for him, but the fact that she's drawn to his charm - and wealth - and that she's stifled by the role of the colonial wife - stay at home and knit and play the piano, head for the highlands for a four-month separation from husband every year - shows us how desperate she must be to leave her conventional life and take up w/ this dangerous man. RPJ is great at dialog and at the deft sketching of a scene through careful detail selection, so we can see how she later transofrmed her work as a novelist into a highly successful career as a screenwriter, known for her work w/ classic 20th-century British fictoin (not sure if H&D was ever filmed but the adaptation would be pretty easy given the groundwork that RPJ has set in place). Obvious comparisons w/ Forster of course come to mind - but there are major differences as well: In Forster, the British families (notably Mrs. Moore) are hoping to "connect" with the Indian people, with dire and tragic consequences; here, Olivia has no illusions (nor does her granddaughter decades later) and she wants not so much to learn about and connect w/ an "exotic" culture but to give up her life and privilege and to dive recklessly into an alien (to her) world.