Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (7 May 1927 – 3 April 2013) was a Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of directorJames Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films won six Academy Awards.

 

Personal background

She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany, to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora (Cohn) Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert Salomon (1925–2012), an expert on Heine and horror films, was fellow of The Queen's College and Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and William Phillips at a PEN meeting in New Delhi, Sept. 20, 1962

During World War II she lived in Hendon in London, experienced the Blitz and began to speak English rather than German. She became a British citizen in 1948. She received her MA in English literature from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1951. In the same year she married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect.

In 1951 the couple moved to Delhi, India, and they had three daughters: Ava, Firoza and Renana. Her three daughters are living in three different countries, India, the United States (Los Angeles) and England. In 1975 Jhabvala moved to New York and divided her time between India and the United States. In 1986, she became a naturalised citizen of the United States.

Prawer died in her home in New York City on 3 April 2013 at the age of 85. James Ivory reported that she had been suffering from a pulmonary disorder.

 

Literary career

While living in India during the 1950s, Jhabvala began to write novels about her new life there: To Whom She Will (1955), Nature of Passion(1956), Esmond in India (1957), The Householder (1960) and Get Ready for the Battle (1962). Her literary output would be steady and of a consistently high quality (see below).

Her early comedies drew comparisons with Jane Austen, in their anatomy of power within westernised, extended families, or the slow growth of love in arranged marriages. She found affinities with Jewish culture in an emphasis on family and humour.

She wrote to 20 publishers in London, who "all wrote back", and soon joined John Murray, her UK publisher for four decades. After she found a US agent in the 1950s, many of her short stories appeared first in The New Yorker.

Her view of India is different than that of Naipaul or E. M. Forster. Jhabvala, unlike Naipaul, wasn't drawn to India by ancestry or, as in Forster's case, by a desire to move beyond a complacent Western liberalism. She was in Delhi, as she wrote, only because her husband was there, and she was interested not in India but in herself in India. In any case, what matters is that she managed to transmute her personal experience, however narrow, into art. Often her stories are seen from the point of view of an outsider. Some Indian critics have labelled her authorial detachment as a sign of old-fashioned Western attitudes toward India.

In 1975, she won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award for the English language in the Commonwealth, for her novel Heat and Dust.

 

Merchant Ivory Productions

In 1963, Jhabvala was approached by filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to write a screenplay of her 1960 novel The Householder. The film, The Householder, was released by Merchant Ivory Productions in 1963 – this began a partnership that would produce over 20 films. She had no previous film making experience.

The next Merchant-Ivory project Shakespeare Wallah (1965), was a critical success, and it was followed by a number of other collaborations between the three, including an adaptation of Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust, (1983); the docudrama The Courtesans of Bombay (1983); A Room with a View (1985), for which she won her first Oscar; Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990);Howards End (1992), her second Oscar win; and The Remains of the Day (1993), for which she was nominated for a third Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, though she did not win. Her screenplays are often less comedies of manners than profound struggles over the souls of young women.

Of this collaboration, Ismail Merchant once commented: "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 died in 2005, of complications resulting from a stomach ulcer.

Jhabvala's last screenplay was The City of Your Final Destination (2008), based on the novel of the same name by Peter Cameron.

 

Awards

Winner:

• 2003: O. Henry Prize Winner for "Refuge in London"
• 1994: Writers Guild of America's Screen Laurel Award
• 1992: Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay – Howards End
• 1987: Writers Guild of America – Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for: A Room with a View
• 1986: Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay – A Room with a View.
• 1984: British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) – Best Screenplay – Adapted for: Heat and Dust
• 1984: London Critics Circle Film Awards – Screenwriter of the Year for: Heat and Dust
• 1984: MacArthur Fellowship
• 1975: Booker Prize – Heat and Dust (novel)

Nominated:

• 1993: Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay – The Remains of the Day

 

Novels and short stories

• To Whom She Will (1955; published in the United States as Amrita)
• The Nature of Passion (1956).
• Esmond in India (1958)
• The Householder (1960)
• Get Ready for Battle (1962)
• Like Birds, Like Fishes (1963)
• A Backward Place (1965)
• A Stronger Climate (1968)
• A New Dominion (1972; published in the United States as Travelers)
• Heat and Dust (1975)
• An Experience of India (1971)
• How I Became a Holy Mother and other stories (1976),
• In Search of Love and Beauty (1983)
• Out of India (1986)
• Three Continents (1987)
• Poet and Dancer (1993)
• Shards of Memory (1995)
• East Into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi (1998)
• My Nine Lives (2004)

 

Select screenplays Year Title Other notes 2008 The City of Your Final Destination screenplay, adapted from the novel by Peter Cameron 2003 Le Divorce co-written by James Ivory, adapted from the novel by Diane Johnson 2000 The Golden Bowl screenplay, adapted from the novel by Henry James 1998 A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries screenplay, adapted from the novel by Kaylie Jones 1996 Surviving Picasso screenplay 1995 Jefferson in Paris written by 1993 The Remains of the Day screenplay, adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro 1992 Howards End screenplay, adapted from the novel by E. M. Forster 1990 Mr. and Mrs. Bridge screenplay, adapted from the novels by Evan S. Connell ("Mr. Bridge" & "Mrs. Bridge") 1988 Madame Sousatzka screenplay, adapted from the novel by Bernice Rubens. Directed by John Schlesinger 1985 A Room with a View screenplay, adapted from the novel by E. M. Forster 1984 The Bostonians screenplay, adapted from the novel by Henry James 1983 Heat and Dust screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jhabvala 1981 Quartet screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jean Rhys 1980 Jane Austen in Manhattan written by, inserted libretto "Sir Charles Grandison" by Jane Austen 1979 The Europeans screenplay, adapted from the novel by Henry James 1978 Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures written by 1977 Roseland story and screenplay 1975 Autobiography of a Princess written by 1972 Bombay Talkie screenplay 1969 The Guru screenplay 1965 Shakespeare Wallah screenplay 1963 The Householder screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jhabvala

 

References

^ ^ Ruth Prawer Jhabvala – Guardian ^ Schudel, Matt (3 April 2013). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 85". Washington Post. Retrieved 3 April 2013. ^ Jhabvala Passage to India – New York Times Review ^ Books and Writers

Anthologies and encyclopedias:

• Bausch, Richard and R. V. Cassill (ed.). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala." Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: 6th edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000: 801–813.
• Mishra, Pankaj (ed.). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala." India in Mind: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books, 2005: 108–130.
• Ross, Robert (ed.). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala." Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction in English: An Anthology. New York: Garland, 1999: 189–209.
• Serafin, Steven (ed.). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala." Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, 3rd edition. Farmington Hills, Michigan: St. James Press, 1999.

Screenwriting:

• Bailur, Jayanti. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Fiction and Film. New Delhi: Arnold Publishers, 1992.
• Katz, Susan Bullington (ed.). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala." Conversations with Screenwriters. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000: 1–8.

Other:

• Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Twayne, 1992.
• --. Passages to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1991.
• Rai, Sudha. Homeless by Choice: Naipaul, Jhabvala, Rushdie and India. Jaipur: Printwell, 1992.
• Shepherd, Ronald. Ruth Prawer Jhabwala in India: The Jewish Connection. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1994.
• Sucher, Lawrie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.