Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, << jahb VAL uh, rooth PRAH vehr >> (1927-2013), was an author known for her perceptive novels about life in modern India. Jhabvala won the 1975 Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust (1975). The Booker Prize is the United Kingdom’s highest literary award. Heat and Dust tells two stories set in colonial and modern India.
Jhabvala was also a noted screenwriter. She won the 1987 Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for A Room with a View (1986).
Ruth Prawer was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, into a Jewish Polish family. Her family moved to England in 1939 to avoid persecution in Nazi Germany. She earned an M.A. in English literature from the University of London in 1951. That same year, she married Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, an Indian architect, and then lived in India for 20 years. She moved to the United States in 1975. Jhabvala became a British citizen in 1948 and a United States citizen in 1986.
Jhabvala’s first eight novels are set in India. She established herself as an important writer with her first two books, To Whom She Will (1955, published in the United States in 1956 as Amrita) and The Nature of Passion (1956). Both books are humorous portraits of Indian society and customs. Esmond in India (1958), The Householder (1960), and Get Ready for Battle (1962) are typical of her early fiction in their explorations of conflicts within middle-class Indian families.
In A Backward Place (1965), Jhabvala began examining the situation of Europeans living in India. In these works, she moved away from the traditional third-person narrative voice. She experimented with more complex ways of telling a story, using letters and monologues as well as multiple points of view.
After she moved to the United States, Jhabvala’s fiction changed to include non-Indian settings. For example, In Search of Love and Beauty (1983) is a portrait of Austrian and German refugees in New York City. Poet and Dancer (1993) is also set in New York City and explores the mysterious double suicide of two sisters. Shards of Memory (1995) is set in New York City, England, and India, and follows four generations of one family. Her short stories were collected in East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi (1998). My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past (2004) consists of nine related autobiographical stories set in New York City and London as well as in India. At the End of the Century (2018) is a collection of 17 short stories written from 1963 until the author’s death.
Jhabvala began her screenwriting career in the mid-1960’s and formed a long association with the American director James Ivory and the Indian producer Ismail Merchant. Her screenplays, some cowritten with James Ivory, include Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Bombay Talkie (1970), The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), Madame Sousatzka (1988), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993), Jefferson in Paris (1995), Surviving Picasso (1997), The Golden Bowl (2000), and The City of Your Final Destination (2009). Jhabvala died on April 3, 2013.
