Ruth Prawer Jhabvala papers

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was a noted novelist, and writer of short stories and film scripts. For many years she was associated closely with the film makes James Ivory and Ismail Merchant.

She was born on May 7, 1927 in Cologne, Germany to a Jewish family that had immigrated from Poland. In 1939, when she was twelve, the family fled Hitler’s Germany to England where she experience the Blitz at times living in an air raid shelter. She quickly learned to speak English and began writing short stories. On coming of age, she attended the University of London and graduated in 1951 with a degree in English literature.

In the same year she married the Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, and moved to Delhi, India. Here she assumed the roles of housewife and continued writing. Over a period of twenty-four years she raised three daughters and found time to write a number of novels. In the 1960s she began her association with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant when she wrote the screenplay for her novel, The Householder. This was followed by Shakespeare Wallah, both films receiving critical acclaim. In all, she collaborated in writing twenty-three Merchant-Ivory screenplays and won academy awards for two of them: Room with a View in 1986 and Howards End in 1993, both adaptations of E.M. Forster novels. She also won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust in 1975, also a film by Merchant-Ivory.

During her early years in India she immersed herself in the country: she wore a sari and love the blue skies, its smells of spices, and exotic temples. Her early novels reflected this fascination and were about the life and customs of India and the westernized Indian middle-class and their struggles. Later her attitude about India changed as she was moved by the poverty and misery she saw all around her along with the heath and filth. Her later novels were treated harshly by the Indian critics who considered her an outsider and accused her of holding colonial attitudes towards the country.

In the 1970s she decided to spend part of her year in New York and the other in Delhi with her husband. In New York City she purchased an apartment in close proximity to those owned by Ivory and Merchant. Here the creative triad, now in close consultation with each other, continued to make prize winning films for over forty years. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1986. Moving to New York also made her feel connected to her early life and those she once knew in Cologne. She was known to say “Once a refugee, always a refugee.” She continued writing, submitting many short stories to The New Yorker magazine and publishing works of fiction about the immigrant experiences in America.

She died on April 3, 2013 at the age of 85 of a pulmonary condition. She is survived by three daughters: Renana, Firoza, and Ava, and six grandchildren.

Biography written by Richard Yates.