Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (born May 7, 1927) is 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 director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films won six Academy Awards.
She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's biggest synagogue. The family fled the Nazis in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert, is emeritus professor of German at the University of Oxford, an expert on Heine and horror films.
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. She also married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect, in 1951.
The couple moved to Delhi, India, in 1951 and they had three daughters: Ava, Firoza and Renana. Her three daughters are living all around the world: in India, in Los Angeles and in England. In 1975 Jhabvala moved to New York and divided her time between India and the United States. In 1986, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
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.
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!" [1]
Ismail Merchant died in 2005, of complications resulting from a stomach ulcer.
Jhabvala's next screenplay is The City of Your Final Destination (2008), based on the novel of the same name by Peter Cameron.
