![]() “Nobody else in India had that clarity of vision of the new society, or that acuteness of observation,” novelist Anita Desai told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2005. Later, as she adopted a more critical tone toward an India beset by poverty and inertia, she faced more criticism from her Indian readers. Jhabvala’s early books, which often portrayed the lives of large Indian families, were compared favorably with the novels of manners of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh. The book won the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor, and was made into a 1983 Merchant-Ivory film starring Greta Scacchi. ![]() ![]() India always changes people, and I have been no exception.” They are no longer the same because I myself am no longer the same. “If I were to try to recollect them now, I might not be able to do so. “During my first few months here, I kept a journal so I have some record of my early impressions,” the first-person narrator said in the novel. Jhabvala wrote about a British woman’s travels in India as she sought to understand the life of an aunt who deserted her husband in the 1920s after falling in love with an Indian prince. Several female characters in her fiction became caught up in ill-fated love affairs or were swept along by currents of a world they didn’t understand. ![]() She often wrote of the bewilderment of Westerners encountering life in India. Jhabvala examined the theme of cultural dislocation, of outsiders becoming involved in - and sometimes victimized by - an exotic, foreign environment. She understands the process, the ‘buzz of implication’ that surrounds words. . . “She’s a novelist, so she understands the art of adapting novels better than most anyone else. “Ruth’s a genius, really,” actress Emma Thompson, who starred in “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day,” told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. She was nominated for a third Academy Award for screenwriting for “ The Remains of the Day” (1993), from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro about the life of a butler in an English manor house between the two world wars. Her literate, subtly shaded screenplays were lauded for their depictions of people caught in social worlds circumscribed by manners and emotional restraint. Jhabvala won Oscars in 19 for her screenplays of “ A Room With a View” and “ Howards End,” both adapted from Edwardian-era novels by Forster. Together for more than 40 years, until Merchant’s death in 2005, the trio made more than 20 films, including several genteel dramas based on the novels of Henry James and E.M. It was the greatest possible privilege for me to be working with a real writer and someone I liked.” “In any artistic collaboration, you have to be above ego. “Nobody tried to push anybody around,” Ivory said in an interview. Jhabvala formed what would become one of the most enduring creative teams in moviemaking history. Jhabvala accepted the project, despite knowing almost nothing about screenwriting, and the film was produced in 1963. The director was Ivory, an American who had previously made only documentaries. The call came from Ismail Merchant, a young producer from India who was making his first feature film. In 1961, she received a phone call asking if she would write a screenplay of her novel “The Householder.” Jhabvala (pronounced JAHB-vah-lah) wrote a series of novels and short stories set in her new homeland. Jhabvala’s life took many unusual turns, beginning with her exile to England from her childhood home in Germany, but none was more surprising than her journey into the world of filmmaking.Īfter moving to New Delhi with her Indian-born husband in the 1950s, Mrs. Besides the Academy Award, her honors included the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor. She had a pulmonary disorder, said James Ivory, the film director who had worked with Mrs. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a German-born novelist whose fiction was set largely in India and who gained her greatest acclaim as a two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter with the Merchant-Ivory filmmaking team, died April 3 at her home in New York City.
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