Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer 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 (1957), The Householder (1960) and Get Ready for Battle (1963). 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 (1969) and The Autobiography of a Princess (1975). She collaborated with Ivory for the screenplays for Bombay Talkie (1970) and ABC After-school Specials: William - The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (1973).[8]

In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust which was later adapted into a movie.[9] That year, she moved to New York where she wrote The Place of Peace.[8]

Jhabvala "remained ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life." She wrote in an autobiographical essay, Myself in India (published in the London Magazine) 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."[10][11] 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."[10]

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 (1983), Three Continents (1987), Shards of Memory (1995) and East into Upper East: Plain Tales From New York and New Delhi (1998) 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.[10] The New York Times Review of Books chose her Out of India (1986) as one of the best reads for that year.[7] In 1984, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[12]

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".[5]

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".[5]

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".[3]

Jhabvala's last published story was "The Judge's Will", which appeared in The New Yorker on 25 March 2013.[13]

• 1975: Booker Prize – Heat and Dust[21]
• 1979: Neil Gunn Prize[22]
• 1984: MacArthur Fellowship[21]
• 1984: London Critics Circle Film Awards – Screenwriter of the Year for: Heat and Dust[22]
• 1990: New York Film Critics Circle - Best Screenplay: Mr. and Mrs. Bridge[21]
• 2003: O. Henry Prize Winner for "Refuge in London"[22]

Jhabvala died in her home in New York City on 3 April 2013 at the age of 85. James Ivory reported that her death was caused by complications from a pulmonary disorder.[24][25][26] Reacting to her death, Merchant Ivory Productions noted that Jhabvala had "been a beloved member of the Merchant Ivory family since 1960, comprising one-third of our indomitable trifecta that included director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant" and that her death was "a significant loss to the global film community".[27]

Anthologies and encyclopedias

• Prawer Jhabvala, Ruth (2000). "Passion". In Bausch, Richard; Cassill, R. V. (eds.). Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (6th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 801–813. ISBN 978-0-39397-508-6.
• Prawer Jhabvala, Ruth (2005). "Two more under the Indian sun". In Mishra, Pankaj (ed.). India in Mind: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 108–130. ISBN 978-0-37572-745-0.
• Prawer Jhabvala, Ruth (1999). "An experience of India". In Ross, Robert (ed.). Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction in English: An Anthology. New York: Garland. pp. 189–209. ISBN 978-0-81531-431-8.
• Serafin, Steven, ed. (1999). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala". Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century. Vol. 4 (L-Z) (3rd ed.). Farmington Hills, Michigan: St. James Press. ISBN 978-1-55862-377-4.

Screenwriting

• Bailur, Jayanti (1992). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Fiction and Film. New Delhi: Arnold Publishers.
• Katz, Susan Bullington, ed. (2000). "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala". Conversations with Screenwriters. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann. pp. 1–8. ISBN 978-0-32500-295-8.

Other

• Crane, Ralph J. (1992). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Twayne. ISBN 978-0-80577-030-8.
• Crane, Ralph J. (1991). Passages to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. ISBN 978-8-12071-355-0.
• Jasanoff, Maya (7 January 2019). "A passage from India : Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the art of ambivalence". The Critics. A Critic at Large. The New Yorker. 94 (43): 62–67.[28]
• Rai, Sudha (1992). Homeless by Choice: Naipaul, Jhabvala, Rushdie and India. Jaipur: Printwell. ISBN 978-8-17044-241-7.
• Shepherd, Ronald (1994). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in India: The Jewish Connection. Delhi: Chanakya Publications. ISBN 978-8-17001-096-8.
• Sucher, Laurie (1989). The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-33342-196-3.