[1] A large portion of his estate was donated to charities, and his body of work is currently being digitally archived and published in e-books.[when?
After returning from service, Rubin continued his education at the University of Connecticut (BA, 1947), Brown (MA, 1948) and Columbia (PhD in Comparative Literature, 1954).
Rubin would later secure grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, returning several times to India and Nepal for research.
His experiences abroad informed much of his writing; even when his novels were set in America, Indian philosophy, characters, and mysticism worked their way into the plots.
In 1969, he published Premchand: Selected Stories, which was later republished by Oxford University Press as Widows, Wives and Other Heroines in 1998.
In this critical work he takes to task writers such as Paul Scott, Ruth Jhabvala, John Masters, J. G. Farrell, and Kamala Markandaya for their portrayals of Indian characters and culture.
Rubin felt that the writers’ inability to construct or convey multidimensional Indian characters helped stoke cultural biases that enabled the British to continue extracting wealth from India with impunity, long after the continent was freed from colonial rule in 1947.
The Greater Darkness was favorably reviewed by a number of publications, including the NY Times, which states that it is a “fine and engrossing Indian first novel.”[4] The Columbia Spectator noted that in The Greater Darkness Rubin's writing is “comparable to the writing of a major symphony by an unknown composer.”[5] The Saturday Review says of this novel, “The author’s descriptions of the beauty of the Taj Mahal and the horror of a stampede and a mass drowning at a holy festival are gripping, and his considerable knowledge of Indian music is put to good use.”[6] Rubin's two novellas, which were packaged together as Enough of this Lovemaking / Love in the Melon Season, were favorably reviewed by the NY Times, which called them “an entrancing diagram of erotic crosscurrents in an Indian pension.”[7] Cassio and the Life Divine was said by the Kansas City Star to be “a handsomely written and richly varied novel of romantic intellectual wandering among the contradictions of modern India.”[8] The Cleveland Press proclaimed that “David Rubin’s novel is not, thank God, another tea-party meeting of East and West.