Hindu Marjorie

AMRITA(283 pp.)--R.Prawer Jhabvala --Norton ($3.50).

Amrita Chakravarty is a Hindu Marjorie Morningstar. She has a job with a touch of glamour--announcer on a New Delhi radio station. She is up to her coiled black coiffure in a venture even more advanced and emancipated than a radio career, i.e., picking her own boy friend and would-be husband. The man she thinks she loves is Hari Sahni, a fellow announcer with a neat little Clark Gable mustache. But Mama Chakravarty, like Mama Morgenstern, has no intention of letting her daughter marry a no-good. A widow, she marches Amrita straight off to stern old grandpa for a verbal rattanning: "I have enquired into the young man's family. The result was not satisfactory."

Far from killing the romance, this edict merely makes Amrita and Hari hold hands tighter in the corridors of the radio station. What finally loosens the young lovers' grip, and how, takes up the rest of this first novel. It also gives 28-year-old Novelist R. Prawer Jhabvala, Polish wife of a Hindu architect and a resident of India for the past five years, her chance to fashion a deft comedy of manners and values. Allowing for an Indian sea change, her moral is essentially Herman Wouk's--that one's cultural heritage is not a vise but a virtue.

In love with love, Amrita and Hari see only what they want to in each other. With her B.A. degree, Amrita thinks of untutored Hari as a simple, unspoiled sort who should eat with his fingers. To be worthy of her upper-class favors, Hari struggles manfully with a knife and fork instead and stifles his burps.

Quite by accident, Hari meets Sushila, a dark, big-boned, full-breasted girl with tumbling black hair ("A real Punjabi beauty," clucks his aunt). Soon the marriage-broker mills are grinding, and Hari, as he almost admits to himself, is secretly relieved. Amrita's clan also starts making other arrangements. Still spouting defiance and undying love, Amrita and Hari find that the sight of each other is not a stab at the heart but a pain in the neck. At novel's end, Hari is leading Sushila seven times around the ritual wedding fire, and Amrita is in seventh heaven over an "England-returned" Bengali intellectual.

Author Jhabvala gets comic sparks out of the cultural short circuits when East plugs in on West, e.g., a professor bent on art criticism ("His use of green for trees is especially remarkable"). Best of all, everyday life bustles through the pages of Amrita with all the clatter, chatter and haggling delight of an Eastern bazaar.

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