Ruth Prawer Jhabvala cast her satiric gaze widely, scrutinizing everyone from Indian élites to New York émigrés, Maya Jasanoff writes. The writer, who won an Oscar for her adaptations of “A Room with a View” and “Howards End,” was born on this day in 1927.
There’s some poignancy in the fact that Jhabvala, who died in 2013, is best known today as the third member of the Merchant Ivory team. She considered “writing film scripts” to be a hobby alongside the real work of prose. In her lifetime, she published twelve novels and eight short-story collections. She excelled at concealing herself, most famously behind her own name.
At a party in 1949, Ruth met Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect who had come to England a few years earlier to study. Jhabvala had already bought his ticket home, but by the time he set sail for India he and Ruth were engaged. Two years later, having secured a job lecturing on architecture at Delhi Polytechnic, he came back to England to marry her, and the couple settled in Delhi.
If Jhabvala has an anthropologist’s curiosity about how society functions, she’s a decidedly nonparticipant observer; her narrative stance brings together candor and detachment. She’s unsparing about the constraints and the tedium of women’s lives, for instance, but also about the women who are leading them. The wife of a devoted elderly aristocrat, trapped among “provincial, dreary, unrefined people,” seeks diversion in the arms of an abusive local policeman.
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