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print version03 April 2013
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was Jewish by birth and grew up in Germany and then England before marrying an Indian architect and settling in Delhi, so her choice of theme was hardly surprising. She wrote 12 novels, five collections of short stories and around 20 screenplays, two of which won Academy Awards.
The best of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s books were set in India and her earlier novels centred on the petty snobberies, self-delusion and close family ties of post-colonial Indian society, to which she later added the ambivalent experiences of “seekers†– Westerners who journey to India in search of mystical enlightenment. Her books reflected her own mingled affection for, and impatience with, her adopted country.
In 1975 she won the Booker Prize with Heat and Dust, in which she explored the East-West relationship through the parallel narratives of a bored English memsahib’s affair with a nawab in the 1920s, and a young woman’s attempt to uncover its details on the hippie trail in India 50 years later. Critics drew comparisons with other classics of the genre such as E M Forster’s A Passage to India.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s interest in what it means to “belong†to a culture, her precise grasp of character, spare, controlled style and gift for understatement, translated well into film scripts and she won praise for bringing subtlety and restraint to the screen. The Merchant-Ivory-Prawer Jhabvala relationship lasted more than 30 years and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the film world’s longest, although in her Who’s Who entry she dismissively listed script writing under “hobbies†.
Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne on May 7 1927. Both her parents were Jewish, her father, a lawyer, having moved to Germany from Russian Poland to escape conscription. The family flat overlooked the main avenue in Cologne and they lived the comfortable life of assimilated German Jews.
After the Nazis came to power, her mother was initially reluctant to leave Germany, even after both she and her husband were arrested (and subsequently released) in 1934. However by 1939 things had got so bad that the entire extended family decided to flee, some going to Palestine, others to America or France, and some to Holland. Ruth, her elder brother Seigbert and her parents were among the last Jews to get out of Germany safely and were lucky in choosing England as their refuge. In 1948 her father committed suicide after discovering that some 40 members of his family — those who had gone to Holland — had perished in the Holocaust.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala never wrote about her childhood and never returned to Germany, confessing that she tried to forget she had ever lived there, though some detected traces of her past in the mournful, closeted childhoods experienced by many of her characters, and in her own sparrow-like frugality. Unlike her brother Seigbert, who became a professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford, she rejected German culture and within a week of her arrival she was writing short stories in English and devouring works by the English literary greats. While she often claimed to belong to nowhere, she admitted that England had given her a secure cultural background.
After a few months living with friends in Coventry, the family moved to Hendon, where Ruth attended Hendon County School, from where she went up to Queen Mary’s College, London, to read English. While at university, she met a young Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, a Parsee. They married in 1951 and she followed him back to Delhi. “I simply got married and went there,†she recalled. “I knew nothing about it and I didn’t ask. I was enchanted, It was a paradise on earth.â€
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala immersed herself in the sights, smells, and colours of India and began writing about what she saw. Her focus in her early years was the Hindu middle-class extended family, where households teem with in-laws and other relatives; her first published novel, To Whom She Will (1955), told the story of a Hindu girl whose family successfully frustrates her affection for a lower-caste boy and engineers her marriage to a suitable groom. She mined a similar seam in The Nature of Passion (1956), in which the head of an Indian family arranges the marriage of an attractive young woman inclined to dabble in the Western lifestyle.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala so brilliantly captured all the nuances and petty snobberies of Indian life that it was generally assumed in India that she must be Indian herself. When the truth leaked out, her Indian sales dropped and it later became fashionable among Indian critics to accuse her of old-fashioned colonial attitudes.
But help was at hand in the form of Ismail Merchant, who read her novel The Householder (1960), in which a young man struggles in his relationship with his recently acquired wife and with problems in his job as a teacher at a private school in New Delhi. So impressed was Merchant that he and James Ivory flew to Delhi to persuade its reclusive author to adapt the book into a film.
Despite her nervousness (she was so shy at first, she pretended to be her mother-in-law) and her husband’s warning that the film-makers looked like “fly-by-night people†, the two men convinced her to go into partnership with them: “I told them I’ve never done anything like his before,†she recalled. “But they said ’It doesn’t matter. We haven’t either.’†News of the collaboration was broken by Indian newspapers under the melodramatic headline: “Merchant-Ivory shoots Householder.â€
By this time though, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had begun to tire of India. The heat and the constant sight of poverty and disease began to alienate and oppress her, and her books and films reflected her increasing melancholy and feeling of being an outsider: “I am no longer interested in India,†she wrote in 1971. “What I am interested in now is myself in India, which sometimes, in moments of despondency, I think of as my survival in India.†Among her novels, A Backward Place (1965) examined the misery of exile through the lives of expatriates.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala went on to collaborate with Merchant-Ivory on a number of meditations on India and its interaction with foreigners. Shakespeare Wallah (1965) was based on a true story of a British family of travelling actors struggling to make ends meet and retain their dignity in the early years of Indian Independence; Guru (1969) starred Michael York as a British rock star who goes to India to learn the sitar; Bombay Talkie (1971) was set in the Indian film industry.
Heat and Dust was written in a wave of revulsion for everything Indian. The book made her reputation and she later scripted it into a successful film starring Julie Christie and Shahi Kapoor which won her a Bafta award in 1984 for Best Screenplay. But while writing the book she contracted jaundice, and in 1975, the year it was published, she suffered a severe asthma attack brought on by the polluted atmosphere of Delhi. The following year, she uprooted herself once again, leaving India for an apartment on the east side of Manhattan.
For more than a decade she and her husband had a long-distance commuter relationship between the two continents until he eventually joined her in New York.
Meanwhile, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory became her surrogate family. All three lived in the same apartment block, where they shared meals, argued, rowed and continued to produce films together. The partnership produced a sequence of successes, including adaptations of Henry James’s The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984), though it was not until Room with a View (1986) that they were catapulted from the art house to the mainstream. The film, an adaptation of EM Forster’s novel, won Ruth Prawer Jhabvala an Oscar for her script and broke into the big league both in box-office takings and international acclaim.
She won a second Oscar for her adaptation of Forster’s Howards End (1992), which was brought to the screen at her insistence. Her adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day elbowed aside Harold Pinter’s script and won her a further Oscar nomination. The script elicited a performance of exquisite melancholy from Sir Anthony Hopkins and elevated Merchant-Ivory once again, this time from heritage film-making to thoughtful popular drama. In 1990 she won the Best Screenplay Award from the New York Film Critics’ Circle for her adaptation of Evan Connell’s Mr and Mrs Bridge.
Away from adaptations, the scene of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s own literary interests had moved from India to New York. In Search of Love and Beauty dealt with Austrian and German immigrants to the city, and their destinies through three generations.
Poet and Dancer (1993), set in Manhattan, explored the relationship of cousins both of whom carry the burden of their family history; in Shards of Memory (1995) an ageing socialite in New York recalls her Indian Jewish heritage and the emotional havoc this has visited on her descendants. East into Upper East (1998) and My Nine Lives (2004) were her final books.
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