The Brilliance of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’S Creative Perspective and Technical Ability

Although she was well known when she lived in India and England, it was in the last quarter of the 20th century, since her move to New York City, that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala became famous as a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Her many awards include England's 1975 Booker Prize for Fiction for Heat and Dust. Her earlier novels, set in India, depict middle-class life among Indians (To Whom She Will [1955], The Householder [1960]) or feature British civil servants, expatriates, and travelers in India (Esmond in India [1957], A Backward Place [1965], Heat and Dust). Numerous critics have noted her gradual withdrawal from India in her fiction. Her first novel to be set in the United States was In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), followed by Three Continents (1987) and Poet and Dancer (1993), all of which contain characters from both East and West and explore such issues as immigration, ancestry, alienation, and identity. Always present, as well, are romantic and family relationships and good and evil. Jhabvala gained fame for her screenplays, the best known of which include Jefferson in Paris(1995), Howard's End (1992), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), A Room with a View (1986), The Bostonians (1984), The Europeans (1979), Heat and Dust (1983), and The Remains of the Day. In addition to numerous Academy Awards for her adaptations of British novels, in 1990 she won the Best Screenplay Award from the New York Film Critics Circle for Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), based on the novels by Evan S. Connell and starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, to Marcus Prawer, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, and Eleonara Cohn, a Russian-German daughter of the cantor in Cologne's largest synagogue. The family fled Germany in 1939 and Jhabvala was reared in England, became a British citizen in 1948, and studied at St Mary's College, University of London, where she received a master's degree in 1951. That same year she married Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, a Parsi architect, and moved with him to New Delhi, India, where she lived for the next 24 years. Four years later Jhabvala published Whom She Will, as it is known in England, and in the United States as Amrita, a novel portraying the inner workings of New Delhi's middle class, both Parsi and Punjabi. The Nature of Passion (1956) also elicited praise from reviewers, with many critics applauding her ability to write so realistically of Indian life. Esmond in India was praised for its womanizing civil servant whom upscale Indian women—one of whom is his mistress—find attractive. The Householder features the recently married Prem, temporarily infatuated with the life of a swami and with Hans, his idle German bachelor friend, until he realizes his love for and responsibilities to his wife, Indu. Critics generally see a more critical treatment of India beginning with A Backward Place, in which Judy, an Englishwoman happily married to a Hindu, is contrasted with Etta, a Hungarian who attempts suicide after the dissolution of her marriage to an Indian and her betrayal by her Indian lover. Heat and Dust tells two stories, in two different eras, of Olivia, a young Englishwoman married to Douglas Rivers, an officer in India in the 1920s, and her granddaughter, who returns to trace Olivia in the 1960s. Both Olivia and her granddaughter fall in love with, and are seduced and disgraced by, Indian men and become pregnant; the difference is that while Olivia aborts her child, the granddaughter keeps hers. As the critic and scholar Judie Newman notes, Jhabvala's early, whereas her later novels move toward an ironic depiction of the colonial presence and a more immediate cultural confrontation.

In addition to the many awards she has won for her fiction, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1976 and a Neil Gunn International Fellowship in 1979. She was a MacArthur Foundation fellow from 1986 to 1989. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has achieved remarkable distinction, both as a novelist and as a short-story writer, among writers on modern India. She has been compared to E. M. Forster, though the historical phases and settings of the India they portray differ widely. The award of the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975 made her internationally famous. Placing Jhabvala in a literary-cultural tradition is difficult: Her European parentage, British education, marriage to an Indian, and—after many years in her adopted country—change of residence from India to the United States perhaps reveal a lack of belonging, a recurring “refugee” consciousness. Consequently, she is not an sensitive, intense, ironic—the work of a detached observer and recorder of the human world. Her almost clinical accuracy and her sense of the graphic, the comic, and the ironic make her one of the finest writers on the contemporary scene. In 1984, Jhabvala won the British Award for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for Best Screenplay for the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory adaptation of Heat and Dust, and in 1986 she won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for A Room with a View. In 1990, she received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best screenplay for Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, which she adapted from two novels by Evan S. Connell. Jhabvala received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1992 for her adaptation of Forster’s Howards End, and in 1993 she was nominated for an Oscar for her adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. In 1984, Jhabvala was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Award, and in 1994 she was honored with the Writers Guild of America’s Laurel Award. In 2003, she was awarded the NBC Screenwriters Tribute and received honors at the Nantucket Film Festival. In 2005, her short story “Refuge in London” won the O. Henry Award.

Is the fact that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala spent the first twelve years of her life in Germany during the rise of Nazi power reflected in her fiction? Compare the Western women in Jhabvala’s A Backward Place with those in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Is Jhabvala’s “The Housewife” primarily about the nature of the housewife in the story or about housewifery in India? Can both alternatives be presented successfully? To what extent is Jhabvala’s India representative of the East? What is the symbolic significance of Jhabvala’s title Heat and Dust?

Agarwal, Ramlal G. Ruth Prawer Jhbavala: A Study of Her Fiction. New York: Envoy Press, 1990. Contains good criticism and interpretation of the novels. Incudes index and bibliography. Booker, Keith M. Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Although discussion of the author is not central in this book, what proves engaging is the context into

Chakravarti, Aruna. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study in Empathy and Exile. Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1998. Discusses other European authors who have written about India, and Jhabvala’s role as expatriate. Useful for scholars and students approaching Jhabvala for the first time. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Twayne’s English Authors Series 494. New York: Twayne, 1992. In a chapter entitled “Sufferers, Seekers, and the Beast That Moves: The Short Stories,” Jhabvala’s first five volumes of short fiction are discussed. Crane maintains that the differences among Jhabvala’s stories reflect her own ambivalence toward India. Includes biographical chapter, chronology,notes, and bibliography.

Agarwal, Ramlal G. "An Interview with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala," Quest 91 (September/October 1994): 33–36. ———. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study of Her New Fiction. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers, 1990. Belliappa, Meena. "A Study of Jhabvala's Fiction," The Miscellany, no. 43 (January–February 1971): 24–40. Chakravarti, Aruna. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study in Empathy and Exile. New Delhi, India: BR Publishing Corporation, 1998. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Twayne, 1992. Curtis, Sarah. "Antique Furnishings." Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1998, p. 26. Glazebrook, Philip. "Intruders in the Dusk and Elsewhere," Spectator 281, no. 8,879 (October 10, 1998): 43. Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi, India: Orient Longman, 1983. Kitley, Philip T. "Time and Scriptable Lives in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust," World Literature Written in English (Spring 1992): 55–65. Pritchett, V. S. The Tale Bearers: Literary Essays. New York: Random House, 1980. Shepherd, Ronald. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in India: The Jewish Connection. New Delhi, India: Chanakya, 1994. Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. Usha, V. T. "Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 'The Widow': Reading the Subtext," Literary Criterion 27, nos. 1 and 2 (June 1992): 133–137