28/06/2023
"It is a strange marriage we have at Merchant Ivory... I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew, and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!" Ismail Merchant in an interview about Merchant Ivory Productions.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in 1927 in Cologne, Germany. Following the Kristallnacht, the family managed to flee together to London. After the war, her father committed su***de on learning most of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Prawer attended Hendon County School (now Hendon School) and then Queen Mary College, where she received an MA in English literature in 1951. That same year, she married Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala and moved to New Delhi. She began then to write novels and tales based on India and its people. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories. She was made a CBE in 1998 and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.
Her first novel, To Whom She Will, was published in 1955. It was followed by Esmond in India (1957), The Householder (1960) and Get Ready for Battle (1963). The Householder, with a screenplay by Jhabvala, was filmed in 1963 by Merchant and Ivory. During her years in India, she wrote scripts for the Merchant-Ivory duo for The Guru (1969) and Autobiography of a Princess (1975). She collaborated with Ivory for the screenplays for Bombay Talkie (1970) and ABC After-school Specials: William - The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (1973).
In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust, later adapted into a film. That year, she moved to New York where she wrote The Place of Peace. Her husband also moved to the US permanently in late 1980s.
Jhabvala "remained ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life." She wrote in an autobiographical essay, Myself in India (published in London Magazine) that she found the "great animal of poverty and backwardness" made the idea and sensation of India intolerable to her, a "Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis." Her early works in India dwell on the themes of romantic love and arranged marriages and are portraits of the social mores, idealism and chaos of the early decades of independent India. Writing about her in the New York Times, novelist Pankaj Mishra observed that "she was probably the first writer in English to see that India's Westernizing middle class, so preoccupied with marriage, lent itself well to Jane Austenish comedies of manners."
In 1963, Jhabvala was approached by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to write a screenplay for their debut The Householder, based on her 1960 novel. During their first encounter, Merchant later said Jhabvala, seeking to avoid them, pretended to be the housemaid when they visited. The film, released by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1963 and starring Shashi Kapoor and Leela Naidu, met with critical praise and marked the beginning of a partnership that resulted in over 20 films.
The Householder was followed by Shakespeare Wallah (1965), another critically acclaimed film. There followed a series of films, including Roseland (1977), Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures (1978), The Europeans (1979), Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), Quartet (1981), The Courtesans of Bombay (1983) and The Bostonians (1984). The Merchant Ivory production of Heat and Dust in 1983 won Jhabvala a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay the following year.
She won her first Academy Award for her screenplay for A Room with a View (1986) and won a second in the same category for Howards End six years later. She was nominated for a third Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay the following year for The Remains of the Day.
Her other films with Merchant and Ivory include Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), Jefferson in Paris (1995), Surviving Picasso (1996), A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998) (the screenplay for which she co-authored with Ivory), The Golden Bowl (2000) and The City of Your Final Destination (2009), adapted from the eponymous novel by Peter Cameron and was her last screenplay. Le Divorce which she co-wrote with Ivory was the last movie that featured the trio of Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala. Interestingly, she chose not to write the script for the film Maurice (1987), a story by E.M. Forester dealing with q***r love between two men, though she did provide notes for the script. It is unclear but possible this is because she was uncomfortable in some way with writing about the subject. Because of this, Merchant Ivory's other founders always felt the film was not up to the standard of their other work.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died in 2013.
