Profile: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (original) (raw)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala moved to New York in the 1970s, after a quarter-century in India, with a sense of homecoming. In the pickled cucumbers of West Side delicatessens, she found a "memory-stirring madeleine" to evoke the pre-war German childhood she had lost as a refugee in England in 1939. "I met the people who should have remained in my life," she wrote, "people I went to school with in Cologne, with exactly the same background as my own."

Her singular path, and marriage to the Indian architect CSH Jhabvala, took her from postwar England to post-raj India, and thence to north America. Yet, while "at home" on three continents, she has always felt a distance.

"Once a refugee, always a refugee," she says. "I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was. But you don't give your whole allegiance to a place, or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in."

In a rare fragment of autobiography, her 1979 Neil Gunn fellowship lecture "Disinheritance", Jhabvala described herself as a "writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture, till I feel - till I am - nothing". However, "I like it that way," she said. Her dispossession had made of her a "cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others' nests", a "chameleon hiding myself in false or borrowed colours".

When she began to write in the 1950s, many readers believed her to be Indian. But John Updike identified her as an "initiated outsider", while for Salman Rushdie, who anthologised her in his Vintage Book of Indian Writing (1997), her voice was that of the "rootless intellectual". Early admirers included CP Snow ("the highest art"), Rumer Godden, who praised her "hallmark of balance, subtlety, wry humour and beauty", and VS Pritchett, who found her Chekhovian in her detached observation of the "comedy (in the sternest sense) of self-delusion".

She won the Booker prize for her eighth novel, Heat and Dust (1975), in which the hippy narrator in 1970s India retraces - and stumblingly replicates - the steps of her grandmother Olivia, an English bride in the 1920s disgraced by an affair with a maharaja. Yet Jhabvala's fictional oeuvre, comprising 13 novels and six volumes of short stories, has increasingly been set in the US and Britain.

"Ruth was postcolonial before the term had been invented," says British writer Caryl Phillips. "She understood loss of language, land and history in a brutal and visceral way, and reinvented herself, first in the heart of the old empire, then in the cradle of a newly independent country, and now in the centre of the new American empire." For Indian novelist and friend Anita Desai, in contrast to refugees who focus on their past, she has "always written about the new worlds she's entered".

Although she sees fiction as her vocation, Jhabvala is better known as the screenwriter in the long cinematic partnership of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. Over 40 years she has written more than two dozen screenplays, from original scripts set in India, to adaptations of classic novels by EM Forster and Henry James. She won Oscars for A Room With a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), and a Bafta for Heat and Dust (1983). She was awarded the CBE in 1998, and a joint Bafta fellowship with Merchant and Ivory in 2002.

Jhabvala, aged 77, spends most of the year in Manhattan with Cyrus, or "Jhab", who is retired from his architectural practice in Delhi. They live on the East Side in the same elegant art-deco building as Merchant and Ivory; when in town, theyoften breakfast together. In summer they regroup in Ivory's country house in Claverack, upstate New York, which has its own editing room. Jhabvala and Cyrus winter in Delhi. "All my books are there," she says. "As long as we still can, we'll travel. I never look ahead further than that."

Small and ethereally slight, she has forsaken the saris she wore in India for tailored trousers. She speaks softly, sometimes coughing from the asthma she developed in Delhi's smog. At lunch in a Second Avenue restaurant, her husband is mordantly funny and expansive, while she is more silent and watchful.

She rarely gives interviews, and has been known to deflect callers by intoning down the phone, "Ruth is not at home." According to a New York friend, Joanna Rose, formerly of the Partisan Review, she "looks fragile, but spiritually and emotionally she's as strong as can be; it's immense self-discipline". A London friend, Catherine Freeman, describes her as "intensely private, reserved, austere and serious, and at the same time she loves to be made to laugh". Phillips, noting her "profoundly mischievous sense of humour", says: "Ruth appears to give openly, while it's only later you notice that the core has remained hermetically sealed".

Her latest book, My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, published in paperback this month, with drawings by her husband, is her most autobiographical fiction to date. Older women of central European origin or mixed heritage look back at their younger selves with irony and amusement. Alongside Jhabvala's familiar cast of rapacious artists and charismatic gurus, seductive bullies and parasitic spongers, are "pale wanderers" who escape to India from parental divorce or suicide, and naive participants in bizarre sexual ménages. In an "apologia", she writes that each tale is "potentially autobiographical", charting her "alternative destinies". Many hark back to a refugee milieu of London boarding houses steeped in silent trauma. "England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer," she says, "but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn't England so much as what went before."

Reviewers were dazzled but tantalised by veiled fragments of a life that might have been. Judie Newman, professor of American studies at Nottingham university and author of The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (1995), reads the book as the survivor's "Holocaust narrative Jhabvala never wrote", which multiplies selves in place of those who died. In Newman's view, "you always feel there's this unspoken thing underlying her writing. She translates her unspeakable childhood into gothic metaphor and the silent operation of power in relationships."

Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne in 1927 into a Jewish family that had "sung for Kaiser and fatherland". Her father, Marcus, was a lawyer from Poland and her mother Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's biggest synagogue. In 1934, her parents were arrested during a Nazi parade, her father accused of communist links, but released the next day. On her way to her segregated Jewish school on Kristallnacht in 1938, "I could see mobs going down the street smashing windows. I went home again." As she later wrote of her life aged six to 12: "Those should have been my formative years; maybe they were." Her family, failing to get US visas, fled to England in April 1939, escaping among the last refugees by the "smallest fluke".

Sponsored by friends in Coventry, the Prawers moved to London in 1940, "just in time for the Blitz. But one was glad to be where one was." She grew up between Hendon and Golders Green, an area "full of refugees. Everyone's lives were turned upside down; you were nothing and nobody." Her father lost his entire Polish family in the death camps. "We counted about 40." In 1948, as the realisation sank in, he killed himself. Jhabvala was 21. "All my stories have a melancholy undertone. That's probably why," she says. She has never been back to Germany. "To anyone of my generation," she has said, "Europe does now smell of blood." Yet her elder brother, Siegbert, is emeritus professor of German at Oxford, an expert on Heine and horror films. "My grandfather had the German classics, but I was too young," she says. She read War and Peace in the air raid shelters ("I liked big books for the long nights") and Dickens, and while at grammar school in Hendon, contributed to the school magazine. "I wrote and wrote: plays, stories, novels," in an English vein. "I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others."

While studying English at Queen Mary College, London University, she met Jhab at a party. A Bombay Parsi already qualified as an architect, he was "very good looking and extremely witty; he still is". She married him in 1951, undaunted by the prospect of uprooting to Delhi. "I just thought, great, it will be so warm - as it was. Other girls who were thinking of marrying an Indian asked, 'what's it like?' It never struck me that this was anything difficult." She left behind the "drab utility clothes" of postwar London for a sensuous feast. "I only really woke up in India," she says. "It was my first experience of plenty, strangely enough, because everything in England was rationed. I loved sweets, but you couldn't get them; then there was this marvellous mitthai - I went crazy."

Only four years after partition, the capital was full of Hindus from West Pakistan. "I went from one place of refugees to another," she says. They lived in a government hostel until her husband built a house in Civil Lines, then an affluent Old Delhi enclave of villas, where they brought up three daughters. Madhur Jaffrey, the actor and cookery writer who grew up in Civil Lines before moving to New York, first worked with Jhabvala on plays for All India Radio, and recalls her in "pink sari and pink-framed glasses, very shy but with a steely determination". Jaffrey, who discerns in the plot of Jhabvala's first novel, To Whom She Will (1955), her own first marriage to actor Saeed Jaffrey, says: "Ruth wrote then with a wonderful innocence and true love for India."

"It was very easy to be a writer," Jhabvala says of her life as a housewife. "I'd think what to eat for the day, then tell the cook. I didn't like interruptions, but it didn't bother me having children around. It makes it easier when nothing's expected of you; you're just doing your 'hobby'." She wrote to 20 publishers in London, who "all wrote back", and soon joined John Murray, her UK publisher for four decades. After she found a US agent in the 1950s, many of her short stories appeared first in the New Yorker.

Her early comedies drew comparisons with Jane Austen, in their anatomy of power within westernised, extended families, or the slow growth of love in arranged marriages. She found affinities with Jew ish culture in an emphasis on family and humour. "I could understand the jokes before I understood Hindi," she says, adding that she still speaks it "terribly". As a character says in a story in Out of India (1986), her India was not that of "tigers, sunsets and princes", but the " real urban, suffering India" of tenements and bazaars.

According to the short-story writer and critic Aamer Hussein, Jhabvala was the first to write in English about north India's urban, lower middle class, "people with small jobs and modest artistic aspirations, their lives often blighted with failure. She wrote with a hard realism as well as great compassion." Desai, whose mother was German, found a model and mentor in Jhabvala as a schoolgirl in Old Delhi. Just after independence, says Desai, "nobody else in India had that clarity of vision of the new society, or that acuteness of observation".

"All my early books are written as if I were Indian," says Jhabvala. "In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability." Yet after 10 years of "delight and immersion" in India, Jhabvala turned to ironic satires on westerners in India, not colonials but hippies in the 1960s and 70s, who confused sex with spirituality. As she said, "all these people coming looking for peace and going to pieces. It was a riot." She has herself described Hindu devotional songs as "pure like water drawn from a well", and says, "I thought there might be a higher, wiser being, but I never met him or her. Maybe if I hadn't been a writer, I might have taken up with a guru." Yet her gurus and swamis have "feet of clay", her pale, jaundiced young women becoming "worn away physically and as people, in their personalities".

Jhabvala, says Hussein, was "way ahead of others in exploring the east-west encounter: bumbleheaded people coming to serve themselves in India, setting themselves up for exploitation, then feeling betrayed". Yet for Newman, "almost as many characters are liberated by India as destroyed by it. India's a vital force, like sexuality." Jhabvala says she was "fascinated both with the guru, or false guru, and the naive person who's looking for them. But that someone should be looking for something better or higher than what's offered - that kind of idealism I do admire."

Merchant and Ivory first approached Jhabvala to adapt her novel The Householder (1960), whose premiere in 1963 at the residence of US ambassador JK Galbraith was attended by Prime Minister Nehru. "I didn't know anything about film, and cared less," says Jhabvala, who wrote her first screenplay "as blindly as I went to India". But Jaffrey, who won a Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival for her role as a Bollywood idol in Jhabvala's Shakespeare Wallah (1965), an original screenplay based on the travels of Geoffrey Kendal and his daughters in India, says her characters are "wonderful for an actor because they leave so much unsaid". In the film, a teenage daughter played by Felicity Kendal falls for Shashi Kapoor's dashing but possessive Indian. "The English company became symbolic for us of the end of the raj," says Jhabvala. "They wanted to peddle Shakespeare, while Indians were only interested in going to the cinema."

Films, she says, were a "nice change for me; before that I sat at home. I also met people I wouldn't otherwise have done: actors, financiers, con men," she laughs. Though Jhabvala seldom appears on set, Ivory describes her as "merciless and exacting" in the editing room, where, he says, it is almost unheard of for a writer to sit in. "I like to come in again on the rough cut," she says. "I was only interested in editing and inter-cutting - that influenced my fiction a lot." With the novel Heat and Dust , written during dust storms in the last summer she spent in India, the parallel tales set in 1923 and 1970 were written in their entirety, then cut up and juxtaposed to ironic effect.

Hussein says Heat and Dust , and its screen adaptation with Julie Christie and Greta Scacchi, spearheaded the "raj revival" of the 1980s, including Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown . Yet in contrast to some of this work, he says, "Jhabvala doesn't glorify the link with empire, and she breaks taboos on miscegenation. Her Englishwomen are absorbed into India; they're not just playing out their own dramas." In Newman's view, Heat and Dust has been "misread as raj nostalgia, when Jhabvala's theme is always the psychopathology of power, the process of domination in personal relationships or clashing empires". With its Forsterian allusions, Newman sees the novel as an ironic undercutting of "Forster's faith in friendship between coloniser and colonised". Among critics in India was the poet Nissim Ezekiel, who condemned Heat and Dust as "stereotyped in its characters and viciously prejudiced in its vision of the Indian scene". Jhabvala says: "Once they found out I wasn't Indian, they didn't like my books at all: they said, 'she doesn't look deep; she doesn't know anything about us'." Desai says: "Ruth's isolation grew oppressive. She's always had fervent admirers, but it's very sad that there was, and continues to be, resentment towards a foreigner writing about India with such frankness and irony."

In "Myself in India", an essay from the 1970s, Jhabvala wrote: "My husband is Indian and so are my children. I am not, and less so every year." Later she wrote of a struggle "to keep my own personality and not become immersed, drowned in India". She says: "First, I was so dazzled and besotted by India. People said the poverty was biblical, and I'm afraid that was my attitude too. It's terribly easy to get used to someone else's poverty if you're living a middle-class life in it. But after a while I saw it wasn't possible to accept it, and I also didn't want to."

In Jaffrey's view of Jhabvala's fiction, "India often seems to be enticing the westerner with its sensuousness and lechery. It's as though India became a snake charmer, with Ruth trying to resist." Yet for Bryan Cheyette, professor of 20th-century literature at Southampton university, Jhabvala is "never quite a westerner. She embraced English innocence and the literary tradition of Austen and Forster as a way of trying to transcend trauma. But her fiction looks at that attempt ironically, with a cold eye. Even the move to India is a way of escaping the history and trauma of Europe, but the search for transcendence and redemption never works for her characters or herself." In "Disinheritance", Jhabvala saw herself locked "in a double pretence" of being Indian and Anglo-Saxon: "I exited India on a double lie - one it took me 24 years to manufacture."

Feeling a "terrible hunger of homesickness" for Europe, she says, "you try to reclaim what's yours, to recapture your past - even the past you haven't had". In 1975, with the proceeds of the Booker, she bought a flat in New York, a "very European city", but one she saw as innocent of Europe's history. Since 1986 she has had dual British and US citizenship. Her three daughters and six grandchildren live on three continents. The eldest, Renana, is national coordinator of an Indian women's trade union; Ava, a planning inspector, lives near Colchester; and Firoza teaches children with special needs in Los Angeles. They take after their father's family, Jhabvala says: her father-in-law was a trade-union pioneer, her mother-in-law active in women's rights, "both into social work".

Jhabvala began to adapt classic novels for the screen, including Henry James's The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), and later The Golden Bowl (2000). With the 1985 box-office success of A Room With A View , Merchant Ivory moved from art house to multiplex. Though critics jibe at "chocolate-box" costume drama, and an "Edwardian theme park", her screenplays are often less comedies of manners than profound struggles over the souls of young women. For Ivory, her main theme is that of the "outsider drawn into a foreign culture for better of worse", a condition shared by the trio of him as an American, Indian Merchant and central European Jhabvala. "Our films taken as a whole form some sort of joint autobiography," Ivory says.

For Kazuo Ishiguro, Jhabvala's 1993 adaptation of his novel The Remains of the Day was "quite wonderful". Given her background, "I was impressed by her complex, sympathetic - though never condoning - portrayal of Darlington", the English aristocratic Nazi sympathiser. Her original screenplay, Jefferson in Paris (1995), proved more controversial, depicting a US icon enamoured of Sally Hemings, the slave who bore his children, a fact subsequently confirmed by DNA tests.

"If the film came out now, no one would turn a hair," says Jhabvala, "but then people were outraged. To me, it seemed a terrible thing that they kept slaves, but not such a terrible thing that families were intermingled. What else could have happened?" Jhabvala is not involved in all Merchant Ivory films. With their adaptation of Forster's Maurice , says Ivory, "Ruth said, joking and quoting Jane Austen, 'How do I know what two men do when they're alone together in a room?'" Their next joint project, however, involves a gay protagonist in a screenplay based on Peter Cameron's novel The City of Your Final Destination, to be shot in South America.

"Ruth works very closely with Jim [Ivory]," says Jaffrey. "They go into shrieks of laughter together." Jhabvala says: "I know what Jim likes, and he knows what I can do. Ismail is the one we depend on to barge in everywhere; he's the driving force. In temperament, we're both quieter." Though cinema, she adds, was "never my great love, I've always enjoyed making films. With a book, you're more closed in on yourself." But she now goes to screenings as an Academy Awards judge. "I wouldn't travel for a premiere, but I'd go if it's across town," she says. "I can't go into a crowded room or a big gathering. I'm not a party-goer at all.

"I like characters who are larger-than-life, whether life-loving women or the artist or guru who grabs everything," says Jhabvala. "But I don't live among people like that." According to Catherine Freeman, "she loves to hear about others' lives and appetites, to experience life second-hand. She's above all the focused writer; everything is subordinated to her need to write." She writes, by hand, in the morning, then transfers it to the computer. "I can't do more than two hours for original writing," she says. To relax, "I lie on a bed and read".

Her recent fiction, including the stories of East into Upper East (1998), has largely American settings and characters. Many of them are central European Jewish émigrés, as in Shards of Memory (1995) and In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), which Updike compared to Proust in its "interest in Jewishness and homosexuality as modes of estrangement; and its insistent moral that human love will always find an unworthy object". There are more corrupt gurus, as in Three Continents (1987), obsessive or incestuous relationships, as between female cousins in Poet and Dancer (1993). Jhabvala has described this period as her "own return to Europe, but of course dragging with me everything I had in India, all the same questions and the same personality".

In "Refuge in London", a chapter of My Nine Lives that won an O Henry award last year, a 16-year-old girl and aspiring writer falls for a much older German refugee artist, whose drawings of "girls in bloom, flowers in May" alternate with "savage, searing colours dripping off the canvas ... visions of our destruction". Cheyette sees its subject as the "power of art, and the ability of the artist to control events that for others can be suicidal; to manage trauma in a way others can't. Art can enable you to cope with being a refugee, an exile."

Jhabvala's rootlessness, her "changing countries like lovers", is now a more common condition. But she says: "I'm still in a past sensibility when it was a rare thing. The new immigrant experience I know nothing about, nor the new India." In her latest refugee tales, suicide is a recurring motif. "I was aware of an epidemic of Jewish women killing themselves even before the Nazis," Jhabvala says. "I could see how people would come to that point, though I never did myself, just as I never followed a guru. I'm more interested in other people than myself. I live off other characters."

While readers sense a silence at the heart of her work, Jhabvala insists she will not attempt a memoir. "Novelists' autobiographies are so boring. You empty yourself out in your fiction; I don't give much away directly, but everything away indirectly. As an artist or writer, you're much more your work than you are yourself."

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Born: May 7 1927; Cologne.

Education: 1951 MA English, Queen Mary College, London.

Married: 1951 Cyrus Jhabvala (three daughters: Renana, Ava, Firoza).

Some fiction: 1955 To Whom She Will; '60 The Householder; '66 A Backward Place; '72 A New Dominion; '75 Heat and Dust; '83 In Search of Love and Beauty; '86 Out of India; '87 Three Continents; '93 Poet and Dancer; '95 Shards of Memory; '98 East into Upper East; 2004 My Nine Lives.

Some screenplays: 1965 Shakespeare Wallah; '69 The Guru; '75 Autobiography of a Princess; '79 The Europeans; '83 Heat and Dust; '84 The Bostonians; '85 A Room with a View; '89 Slaves of New York; '90 Mr and Mrs Bridge; '92 Howards End; '93 The Remains of the Day; '95 Jefferson in Paris; '96 Surviving Picasso; 2000 The Golden Bowl; '03 Le Divorce.

Some honours: 1975 Booker; '85, '92 Academy awards; '98 OBE; 2002 Bafta.

· My Nine Lives is published by John Murray.