Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was a German-born British and American 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 producer Ismail Merchant.
After meeting Cyrus Jhabvala in England, she married him and moved to India in 1951; Jhabvala was an Indian-Parsi architect. The couple lived in New Delhi and had three daughters. Jhabvala began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and 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.
Early life
Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne, Germany to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer who moved to Germany from Poland to escape conscription and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. Her father was accused of communist links, arrested and released, and she witnessed the violence unleashed against the Jews during the Kristallnacht. The family was among the last group of refugees to flee the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert Salomon Prawer, an expert on Heinrich Heine and horror films, was fellow of The Queen's College and Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.During World War II, Prawer lived in Hendon in London, experienced the Blitz and began to speak English rather than German. Charles Dickens' works and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind kept her company through the war years and the latter book she read while taking refuge in air raid shelters during the Luftwaffe's bombing of London. She became a British citizen in 1948. The following year, her father died by suicide after discovering that 40 members of his family had died during the Holocaust. Prawer attended Hendon County School and then Queen Mary College, where she received an MA in English literature in 1951.
Literary career
Years in India
Jhabvala lived in India for 24 years from 1951. Her first novel, To Whom She Will, was published in 1955. It was followed by Esmond in India, The Householder and Get Ready for Battle. 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 and The Autobiography of a Princess. She collaborated with Ivory for the screenplays for Bombay Talkie and ABC After-school Specials: William - The Life and Times of William Shakespeare.In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust which was later adapted into a movie. That year, she moved to New York where she wrote The Place of Peace.
Jhabvala "remained ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life." She wrote in an autobiographical essay, Myself in India 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 of 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."
Life in the United States
Jhabvala moved to New York in 1975 and lived there until her death in 2013, becoming a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1986. She continued to write and many of her works including In Search of Love and Beauty, Three Continents, Shards of Memory and East Into Upper East: Plain Tales From New York and New Delhi portray the lives and predicaments of immigrants from post-Nazi and post-World War Europe. Many of these works feature India as a setting where her characters go in search of spiritual enlightenment only to emerge defrauded and exposed to the materialistic pursuits of the East. The New York Times Review of Books chose her Out of India as one of the best reads for that year. In 1984, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.In 2005 she published My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past with illustrations by her husband and the book was described as "her most autobiographical fiction to date".
Reception
Her literary works were well received with C. P. Snow, Rumer Godden and V. S. Pritchett describing her work as "the highest art", "a balance between subtlety, humour and beauty" and as being Chekhovian in its detached sense of comic self-delusion. Salman Rushdie described her as a "rootless intellectual" when he anthologised her in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing while John Updike described her an "initiated outsider".Jhabvala was initially assumed to be an Indian among the reading public because of her perceptive portrayals of the nuances of Indian lifestyles. Later, the revelation of her true identity led to falling sales of her books in India and made her a target of accusations about "her old-fashioned colonial attitudes".
Jhabvala's last published story was "The Judge's Will", which appeared in The New Yorker on 25 March 2013.
Merchant Ivory Productions
In 1963, Jhabvala was approached by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to write a screenplay for their debut black-and-white feature 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, another critically acclaimed film. There followed a series of films including Roseland, Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures, The Europeans, Jane Austen in Manhattan, Quartet, The Courtesans of Bombay and The Bostonians. 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 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, Jefferson in Paris, Surviving Picasso, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries , The Golden Bowl and The City of Your Final Destination which was 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 before Merchant's death that year.
In an for the British Film Institute, British actor James Wilby claimed that Jhabvala refused to write the screenplay of the 1987 film Maurice, despite being "the normal writer" for Merchant-Ivory films. Wilby further surmised that Jhabvala may have been uncomfortable with the central subject matter of the film, based on a posthumously published novel by E. M. Forster, which depicted a gay relationship set in Edwardian England. Ivory was reportedly "quite upset" by Jhabvala's decision, given the fact that their friendship was "incredibly close." For her own part, Jhabvala apparently did provide notes for Maurice, but claimed she didn't wish to write the screenplay, as the novel was “sub-Forster and sub-Ivory."
The Merchant-Ivory duo was acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest collaboration between a director and a producer although Jhabvala, too, was a part of the trio from the very beginning. She introduced the composer Richard Robbins, who went on to score music for almost every production by Merchant-Ivory beginning with The Europeans in 1979, to the duo after meeting him while he was the director of Mannes College of Music, New York. Madame Sousatzka was the one film she wrote which was not produced by Merchant Ivory.
Selected Filmography
Awards and Nominations
Academy Awards| Year | Film | Category | Result | Ref. |
| 1986 | Best Adapted Screenplay | A Room with a View | ||
| 1992 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Howards End | ||
| 1993 | Best Adapted Screenpaly | The Remains of the Day |
Golden Globe Awards
| Year | Category | Film | Result | Ref. |
| 1992 | Best Screenplay | Howards End | ||
| 1993 | Best Screenplay | The Remains of the Day |
British Academy Film Awards
| Year | Category | Film | Result | Ref. |
| 1983 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Heat and Dust | ||
| 1986 | Best Adapted Screenplay | A Room with a View | ||
| 1992 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Howards End | ||
| 1993 | Best Adapted Screenplay | The Remains of the Day |
Writers Guild of America Awards
| Year | Category | Film | Result | Ref. |
| 1986 | Best Adapted Screenplay | A Room with a View | ||
| 1992 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Howards End | ||
| 1993 | Best Adapted Screenplay | The Remains of the Day | ||
| 1993 | Screen Laurel Award |
Honors
- 1975: Booker Prize – Heat and Dust
- 1979: Neil Gunn Prize
- 1984: MacArthur Fellowship
- 1984: London Critics Circle Film Awards – Screenwriter of the Year for: Heat and Dust
- 1990: New York Film Critics Circle - Best Screenplay: Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
- 2003: O. Henry Prize Winner for "Refuge in London"
Personal life