About two months before author and screen writer for Merchant-Ivory Productions Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died in 2013, she told her daughter Renana to donate her collection of papers to the British Library, UK. Eleven large boxes were transported from America to Britain, as a result of this bequest, stated a report in the MumbaiMirror (MM) dated July 10, 2018. These "incredibly rich papers, a goldmine for literary historians and general readers alike, will offer a rare insight into the world of Jhabvala.” A summary of the Library’s recent acquisitions hosted on their website noted that the "papers offer research potential across a wide range of disciplines, post-colonial studies being only the most obvious... The archive comprises drafts, notebooks and other working material and a small amount of publishing correspondence relating to her prose writing and plays. It also includes some digital material.”
Top: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s journal; above: the writer
Photos: British Library
Above: Illustration by Cyrus Jhabvala (inset)
Illustration: British Library
Jhabvala won a Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust and two Oscars for her adaptations of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End. According to the Library’s website, she published 12 novels, five collections of short stories and 20 screenplays, both original works and adaptations of classics in collaboration with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
Born in 1927 in Germany, Jhabvala’s family fled to England in 1939. It was during her studies in England that she met and fell in love with architecture student Cyrus Jhabvala, who "went on to enrich her novels with his illustrations, and her life with his wit and charm,” noted MM. Cyrus was the son of trade unionist Savaksha Jhabvala. The article noted of the author’s two-decade stay in India after her marriage to Cyrus that, "Fired up by the vibrant colors, warm weather and a contrast to ration-hit England, Jhabvala found India...much more fascinating subject than the India of the past.”
At an event organized by the Library on July 3 to celebrate Jhabvala’s life, writer Anita Desai recalled that "The first published author I met was Ruth.” That meeting helped Desai break the notion of authors being grand old ladies and grand old men writing on history and colonialism. The panellists at the evening of readings and discussions included Desai, Ivory, and producer and friend Catherine Freeman, while actor Felicity Kendal read from some of Jhabvala’s works. The MM report quoted Freeman’s comment that Jhabvala was "extremely undomesticated,” had a sweet tooth and "loved being made to laugh.”