vala, an Indian architect. The couple moved to
India and lived there for more than 20 years with
their three daughters before moving to New York,
where she currently resides. She is now an Ameri-
can citizen.
Jhabvala’s works reflect her multicultural ex-
posure. Her early works explore an understanding
of her Indian experience. In 1960 producer Ismail
Merchant and director James Ivory approached
her and this began her long collaboration with
them and Jhabvala’s entry among Hollywood’s
elite. Besides recognition in Hollywood as an ac-
complished screenwriter, Jhabvala has won nu-
merous literary awards for her novels. In 1975
she won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for
her novel Heat and Dust, a love story set in India
in 1923. In 1984 she won the British Academy of
Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best
Screenplay for the Merchant-Ivory film adaptation
of Heat and Dust.
Gradually, Jhabvala’s work began to shift away
from predominantly Indian themes. In 1986 she
received her first Academy Award for Best Adapted
Screenplay for A Room with a View. This period
piece adapted from E. M. Forster’s novel com-
bines a passionate romance and a study of op-
pression within the British class system. In 1992
Jhabvala received her second Academy Award for
Best Adapted Screenplay for Howards End. Set in
England during the early part of the century, this
adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel involves the en-
counters of three families, each from distinct so-
cial classes whose intertwined relationships affect
one another. Another adaptation by her of a story
set in England was Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains
of the Day, which won her an Oscar nomination
in 1993.
Other adaptations by Jhabvala for the Mer-
chant-Ivory team include Henry James’s novels
The Europeans, The Bostonians, and others. Set in
1840, The Europeans (1979) centers on the cul-
tural clashes that unfold when a brother and sister
from Europe unexpectedly arrive at the doorstep
of their American cousins. The Bostonians (1984)
depicts the post–Civil War intellectual community
of Boston in 1875, and brings to life the suffrag-
ist movement, while unfolding the life of a woman
whose journey of self-discovery leads her to make a
choice that changes the lives of those around her.
Over the years Jhabvala’s works continued to
capture American themes, and in 1990 she won
the Best Screenplay Award from the New York Film
Critics Circle for Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. The story,
originally a novel by Evan S. Conell Jr., involves
a traditional middle-class family in Kansas City,
Missouri, during the 1940s, caught up in the trap
of repression and respectability. Her screenplay
based on Kayle Jones’s novel, A Soldier’s Daughter
Never Cries (1998), captures the experiences of a
former American war hero, who is now a success-
ful author living as an expatriate with his family
in France. Events force the family to move back to
North Carolina, where they struggle to find their
true cultural identity.
Jhabvala’s recent adaptation of Henry James’s
novel The Golden Bowl (2000) focuses on the
tangled web of relationships between a wealthy
American art collector, his wife, daughter, and son-
in-law. Each character yearns to be elsewhere or
with someone else, and the cracked “golden bowl”
symbolically holds the plot together while tearing
the family apart. Jhabvala explores similar complex
familial relationships in her latest screenplay Le
Divorce (2003), based on the novel by Diane John-
son. The story focuses on an American woman
who travels to France to visit her pregnant step-
sister and ends up becoming a Frenchman’s mis-
tress. Like many of her other works, this explores
contemporary American and French themes.
Besides adaptations, Jhabvala’s skill in handling
diverse concepts and cultures is reflected in her
original screenplay Roseland (1977). Set in con-
temporary America and consisting of three sepa-
rate episodes, Roseland depicts ballroom dancing
in New York, where characters attempt to find
their dance partners. Similarly, Jhabvala experi-
ments with a different plot in her screenplay Jane
Austen in Manhattan (1980): As rival theater com-
panies compete to produce their own versions of
Jane Austen’s childhood play, events during the
production begin to mirror those occurring within
the play itself. Another original screenplay, Jeffer-
son in Paris (1995), in which Jhabvala dabbles with
American history, is about America’s obsessionJhabvala, Ruth Prawer 137