Observation
Perpetual outsider
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the only writer to have won both the Booker and the Oscar
In retrospect we can admire the diamond edged brilliance of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s oeuvre. She cut and polished her characters with a miniaturist’s eye for flaws. She picked her creations with steel claws and turned them this way and that, before placing them in settings as diverse as the Three Continents (1987), the name, somewhat misleading, of one of her most ambitious books for she touched only upon those countries that she knew best — India, Britain, the United States of America.
She’s the only writer to have won both the Booker and the Oscar — the first for Heat and Dust in 1975 and the second for the best adapted screenplay of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View that established her as part of the enormously gifted triumvirate of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Jhabvala, creators of gorgeously crafted films with a view to the past. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, many of them nominated for the Oscars and eight collections of short stories. She was nothing if not passionate about her work, even if she remained for the most part an enigma to outsiders.
She did not speak often of her early life. Many of the details of this painful past have been recorded in her obituary notes. Her father, Marcus Prawer was a distinguished lawyer in Poland. He married Eleonore Cohn and the family moved to Germany hoping for a better life. Eleonore’s father served as the cantor of Cologne’s largest synagogue. Ruth was born in Cologne on May 7, 1927. They were one of the last ones to escape the Nazis in 1939. They found refuge in England and became British citizens in 1948. The year after that, Marcus committed suicide when he had to face the tragic news that 40 members of the family had been killed or had died during the Nazi regime.
The young Ruth immersed herself in literature. She got a Master’s degree in English Literature from Queen Mary’s College in 1951. It was the same year that she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect and a Parsi. They came to India, where Ruth was to live for the next 24 years, with their three daughters, Ava, Firoza and Renana. People who knew her from her New Delhi days recall her as being always something of an outsider, reserved to the point of being remote.
An anecdote that has been often repeated is that when the Merchant-Ivory pair bounded on to her doorstep to ask her whether she would write the screenplay for her second novel The Householder their breakthrough film that would star the young Shashi Kapoor and the exquisitely lovely Leela Naidu, Ruth opened the door and pretended to be the servant of the house. In other versions, she is said to have tried to be the Parsi mother-in-law. She was that shy.
Or as she herself once explained in an interview with The Guardian in 2005: "Once a refugee, always a refugee.” She goes on to add, "I can’t remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give up your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in.”
Even the way that she appears in her photographs changes through the years when she moved from post-War Britain, which became her adopted home when she was only 12 years old in 1939; to India in 1951 when she married her Parsi husband; and in her later flight to New York in 1976, perhaps to make it easier to work with the Merchant-Ivory duo. When she died on April 3, 2013 she was living in the same apartment that both Merchant (who died in 2005) and Ivory occupied and where Ivory still lives.
Cyrus moved to New York a decade after his wife had left India. He has had a successful career in India as the head of the prestigious School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. He did some excellent drawings for her book: My Nine Lives — Chapters of a Possible Autobiography.
In the photographs that show her in those early years in India, Ruth not only bears a striking resemblance to Indira Gandhi, in her style of adapting herself to elegant silk saris and the side sweep of her neatly coiffed hair, she could even be mistaken for an upper class Parsi lady. In her New York years, she appears bird-like and always cold it would seem draped in shawls and sweater, cashmere of course and looking more old world European and Jewish than American, or a diva of the Nobel Academy awards.
She was to find an epiphany of sorts in her semi-autobiographical book, My Nine Lives. Oddly enough, though she wrote with as much verve and zest of the North American lives of her characters, it was "her” India and her Indian characters that continue to fascinate. The anti-hero Chrishi from the Three Continents is as flawed a character as one can imagine, a Dorian Gray of eastern decadence and yet she manages to make him a charismatic, even memorable figure. Does this however add fuel to the critics who accuse her of favoring "old fashioned colonial attitudes” one cannot help but ask? Chrishi is dangerously exotic.
Though it’s always dangerous to make sweeping generalizations, without getting the nod, or otherwise from the writer in question, there was one intriguing feature: Jhabvala never seemed to have engaged herself with a Parsi character in her fiction. At least not in a manner that is memorable. This is odd considering that Parsis tend to appeal to the imagination of writers if not anything else as those belonging to an ancient religion of "Fire Worshippers.” Even Herman Melville in his Moby Dick refers to one. It could not be that there were no interesting Parsis in the Delhi social milieu in which she moved. It was the time that the most colorful and flamboyant of them captured the public eye, from the fiery Feroze Gandhi, to the irrepressible wag and castigator of Parliamentarians Piloo Mody, not to mention Minoo Masani as well as Sam Manekshaw and even Bhicoo Manekshaw, who was just starting to whip up her soufflés at the India International Centre. They were right up there as the social elite of their time. It could be however that she was not interested in studying icons and preferred to be more of an iconoclast. Equally, she might have preferred to leave members of her husband’s extended family outside of her sharp critical pen.
In an interview given in 1971, she wrote: "I am no longer interested in India, what I am interested in is myself in India, which sometimes in moments of despondency, I think of as my survival in India.” (Entry in the Wikipedia.)
Writing in the New Indian Express, she had also recorded the three stages through which a foreigner learns to cope with the Indian experience. To summarize: In the first phase, a person is overwhelmed by India’s varied culture and wisdom. In the second phase, it’s the dirt and squalor that hits them. The third phase she writes is "somewhere in-between, neither fascination nor disgust.”
For her Indian readers, Jhabvala’s unequivocal evocation of the Heat and Dust that informed her best known Indian novel, made it difficult for most of us to see beyond her persona. That she left the country soon afterwards in 1976 and made a home for herself in Manhattan only served to heighten the sense that Jhabvala belonged to a fairly well established lineage of India haters and baiters. None of this was necessarily true. None of this should matter now. She rejected us. We rejected her.
Perhaps it’s time to discover her harsh truths and moments of transcendence that she achieves in the different facets of her many lives and works.
She’s the only writer to have won both the Booker and the Oscar — the first for Heat and Dust in 1975 and the second for the best adapted screenplay of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View that established her as part of the enormously gifted triumvirate of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Jhabvala, creators of gorgeously crafted films with a view to the past. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, many of them nominated for the Oscars and eight collections of short stories. She was nothing if not passionate about her work, even if she remained for the most part an enigma to outsiders.
She did not speak often of her early life. Many of the details of this painful past have been recorded in her obituary notes. Her father, Marcus Prawer was a distinguished lawyer in Poland. He married Eleonore Cohn and the family moved to Germany hoping for a better life. Eleonore’s father served as the cantor of Cologne’s largest synagogue. Ruth was born in Cologne on May 7, 1927. They were one of the last ones to escape the Nazis in 1939. They found refuge in England and became British citizens in 1948. The year after that, Marcus committed suicide when he had to face the tragic news that 40 members of the family had been killed or had died during the Nazi regime.
The young Ruth immersed herself in literature. She got a Master’s degree in English Literature from Queen Mary’s College in 1951. It was the same year that she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect and a Parsi. They came to India, where Ruth was to live for the next 24 years, with their three daughters, Ava, Firoza and Renana. People who knew her from her New Delhi days recall her as being always something of an outsider, reserved to the point of being remote.
An anecdote that has been often repeated is that when the Merchant-Ivory pair bounded on to her doorstep to ask her whether she would write the screenplay for her second novel The Householder their breakthrough film that would star the young Shashi Kapoor and the exquisitely lovely Leela Naidu, Ruth opened the door and pretended to be the servant of the house. In other versions, she is said to have tried to be the Parsi mother-in-law. She was that shy.
Or as she herself once explained in an interview with The Guardian in 2005: "Once a refugee, always a refugee.” She goes on to add, "I can’t remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give up your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in.”
Even the way that she appears in her photographs changes through the years when she moved from post-War Britain, which became her adopted home when she was only 12 years old in 1939; to India in 1951 when she married her Parsi husband; and in her later flight to New York in 1976, perhaps to make it easier to work with the Merchant-Ivory duo. When she died on April 3, 2013 she was living in the same apartment that both Merchant (who died in 2005) and Ivory occupied and where Ivory still lives.
Cyrus moved to New York a decade after his wife had left India. He has had a successful career in India as the head of the prestigious School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. He did some excellent drawings for her book: My Nine Lives — Chapters of a Possible Autobiography.
In the photographs that show her in those early years in India, Ruth not only bears a striking resemblance to Indira Gandhi, in her style of adapting herself to elegant silk saris and the side sweep of her neatly coiffed hair, she could even be mistaken for an upper class Parsi lady. In her New York years, she appears bird-like and always cold it would seem draped in shawls and sweater, cashmere of course and looking more old world European and Jewish than American, or a diva of the Nobel Academy awards.
She was to find an epiphany of sorts in her semi-autobiographical book, My Nine Lives. Oddly enough, though she wrote with as much verve and zest of the North American lives of her characters, it was "her” India and her Indian characters that continue to fascinate. The anti-hero Chrishi from the Three Continents is as flawed a character as one can imagine, a Dorian Gray of eastern decadence and yet she manages to make him a charismatic, even memorable figure. Does this however add fuel to the critics who accuse her of favoring "old fashioned colonial attitudes” one cannot help but ask? Chrishi is dangerously exotic.
Though it’s always dangerous to make sweeping generalizations, without getting the nod, or otherwise from the writer in question, there was one intriguing feature: Jhabvala never seemed to have engaged herself with a Parsi character in her fiction. At least not in a manner that is memorable. This is odd considering that Parsis tend to appeal to the imagination of writers if not anything else as those belonging to an ancient religion of "Fire Worshippers.” Even Herman Melville in his Moby Dick refers to one. It could not be that there were no interesting Parsis in the Delhi social milieu in which she moved. It was the time that the most colorful and flamboyant of them captured the public eye, from the fiery Feroze Gandhi, to the irrepressible wag and castigator of Parliamentarians Piloo Mody, not to mention Minoo Masani as well as Sam Manekshaw and even Bhicoo Manekshaw, who was just starting to whip up her soufflés at the India International Centre. They were right up there as the social elite of their time. It could be however that she was not interested in studying icons and preferred to be more of an iconoclast. Equally, she might have preferred to leave members of her husband’s extended family outside of her sharp critical pen.
In an interview given in 1971, she wrote: "I am no longer interested in India, what I am interested in is myself in India, which sometimes in moments of despondency, I think of as my survival in India.” (Entry in the Wikipedia.)
Writing in the New Indian Express, she had also recorded the three stages through which a foreigner learns to cope with the Indian experience. To summarize: In the first phase, a person is overwhelmed by India’s varied culture and wisdom. In the second phase, it’s the dirt and squalor that hits them. The third phase she writes is "somewhere in-between, neither fascination nor disgust.”
For her Indian readers, Jhabvala’s unequivocal evocation of the Heat and Dust that informed her best known Indian novel, made it difficult for most of us to see beyond her persona. That she left the country soon afterwards in 1976 and made a home for herself in Manhattan only served to heighten the sense that Jhabvala belonged to a fairly well established lineage of India haters and baiters. None of this was necessarily true. None of this should matter now. She rejected us. We rejected her.
Perhaps it’s time to discover her harsh truths and moments of transcendence that she achieves in the different facets of her many lives and works.
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