The second, set in 1982, deals with Anne, Olivia's great-niece, who travels to India hoping to find out about her great-aunt's life, and while there, also has an affair with a married Indian man.

Heat and Dust form part of a cycle of film and television productions which emerged during the first half of the 1980s, reflecting Britain's growing interest in the British Raj.

[4] In addition to Heat and Dust, this cycle included the films Gandhi (1982) and A Passage to India (1984), and the television series The Jewel in the Crown (1984) and The Far Pavilions (1984).

At the 1984 BAFTA Awards, it earned eight nominations, including Best Film, and won Best Adapted Screenplay for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

In 1982, an Englishwoman named Anne (Julie Christie) begins an investigation into the fate of her great-aunt Olivia (Greta Scacchi), whose letters and the diary she has inherited.

In 1923, during the British Raj, Olivia, recently married to Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), a civil servant in the colonial administration, has come to join her husband in Satipur, in central India.

Mrs. Saunders (Jennifer Kendal), the morbid wife of the local doctor, warns Olivia that all Indian men are potential rapists.

The region is being ransacked by a group of sanguinary bandits, and intrigues are opposing the British community led by Major Minnies and Mr. Crawford against the ruler of the neighboring princely state, the Nawab of Khatm (Shashi Kapoor).

The Nawab, a romantic and decadent minor prince who combines British distinction with Indian pomp and ruthlessness, invites all the Anglo-Indian officials and their wives for a dinner party at his palace.

With his good humor and charm, Harry serves as a sort of court jester and he is well-liked even by the chain-smoking and proud Begum Mussarat Jahan (Madhur Jaffrey), the Nawab's mother.

The head of the household, Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain), is a polite civil servant who serves as her guide while she tries to get connected with the world that Olivia lived.

Anne befriends Chid (Charles McCaughan), an American charlatan posing as a sanyasi and a would-be convert to Hindu mysticism.

[6] The character of the secretary appeared first as Cyril Sahib, the Maharajah's tutor in Autobiography of a Princess, and then as the gay house guest of the Nawab in Heat and Dust.

They were for the most part produced by Ismail Merchant, directed by James Ivory, with scripts usually written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

The idea of making the film came from Ismail Merchant who explained: I wanted Heat and Dust not only to celebrate our twenty-one years together, but to unite all three of us again in India, as The Householder had- but with a much larger theme, and I hoped, with much more money.

[1]Merchant secured backing in England with a budget of £2.2 million, but halfway through the project some of the expected financings failed to materialize and the production ran out of money.

It's as if the passage of time that witnessed the independence of India and its partition, as well the introduction of jet travel for the budget-minded, had neutralized all possibility of heroic romance... Mr. Ivory and Mrs. Jhabvala have been working together so long that it's difficult for an outsider to know exactly who contributed what to any of their collaborations.

[15] In their film review, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat wrote: "James Ivory directs Heat and Dust with a firm grasp of India past and present — especially the natives' responses to outsiders.

Thanks to the finely etched character portraits of Greta Scacchi and Julie Christie, we open our eyes to the manifold mysteries of Indian life.

[19] The special features include an audio commentary with producer Ismail Merchant and actors Greta Scacchi, and Nickolas Grace.