The US ambassador to India wasn't speaking of the novel that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who died in her eighties last week, was most celebrated for - Heat and Dust (1975). Jhabvala had begun writing about India 20 years before that book won the Booker. In 1955, she published To Whom She Will, the first of several works of fiction; Galbraith's review was of her third novel, The Nature of Passion.
These 10 books were explorations of Indian joint family conundrums and arranged marriages, written long before it became fashionable to look at these subjects. Jhabvala specialised in gentle and then less gentle portraits of wide-eyed seekers who arrived in India demanding, like babies, everything from exotica to gurus and settling for dysentery war stories instead. When she left India behind, both geographically and as a subject, she signalled her bereavement plaintively, in a short story collection titled Out of India.
Jhabvala was not a good traveller, and the impression that she peered anxiously at this loud, noisy, terrifying country from the safety of a more or less settled life in Delhi is inescapable. But what she saw - and she was sponge-like in her absorption of other people's lives - she set down with precision.
Galbraith noted this in his astute review, which captures both sides of the Jhabvala legacy - the writer as a privileged travel guide, and also her more astringent doppelganger. "As everyone knows," he remarked, "the Indian soul is made of very sensitive tissue, and Mrs Jhabvala presides joyously over tearing it."
By her mid-eighties, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was more watched than read, her screenplays better known than her fiction. And yet, just as the apparently watercolour nostalgia of the Merchant-Ivory films proved surprisingly durable, so did her novels and short stories.
Jhabvala's fiction was rarely referenced in heated contemporary debates over Indian writing, rarely offered awards here or elsewhere after she won the Booker for Heat and Dust - but her books, though they might occupy the back shelf of memory, are seldom out of print.
Jhabvala was an almost anthropologically accurate observer of people in or out of their accustomed surroundings. Her eye was usefully beady; it stopped just short of being merciless. At her best, buttressed by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, she wrote meticulously imagined screenplays - their collective ouevre would run all the way from The Householder to Jefferson in Paris.
Critics have their blind spots, and her short stories - accomplished, often funny - were not for me: Jhabvala at her best was of the school of Henry James, while I preferred writers from the school of James Joyce. Acknowledging this weakness was useful: I took care never to review her short stories, which seemed to me like aborted screenplays.
Instead, I went back to the first dozen novels - To Whom She Will, Esmond in India, The Householder, A Backward Place, Heat and Dust; the titles are dated and faded now, and perhaps only the humour and the sometimes dry observations survive.
But the way in which Jhabvala writes about India, the complex blend of disgust, terror, love and longing it stirs in the bosom of a certain kind of long-term visitor, is uncomfortably contemporary. "If the buses are always the same, so is the landscape through which they travel," she writes in Heat and Dust, "Once a town is left behind, there is nothing till the next one except flat land, broiling sky, distances and dust. Especially dust…" It's all there, in that book and in her other novels: the disenchanted Westerners who come here looking for God and have their pockets picked, the Maharajah whose seductions are as tawdry as every other bit of apparent exotica, the incessant expatriate chatter about servants.
It takes several readings to recognise that Jhabvala was equally fascinated by both sides - the Indians bustling through their busy, complex lives, the Europeans fluttering against an alien landscape, fitting in or sticking hopelessly out according to types - but that she probably liked neither for too long. Fascination is not the same thing as love; finding your home ground as a writer is not the same thing as belonging to a place.
She was steeped in India, perhaps the only place that she did, tentatively, claim, far more than either Europe or America. Like the letters of one of her characters, she knew it well - "all the characteristic odours of India, spices, urine and betel". There it is, the precision and the flinching, the fascination and the distaste, wrapped neatly into three words. Modern-day travel writers, especially those who still want to write the big India book, should read Jhabvala's prose first, for the cliches and the clarity.
nilanjanasroy@gmail.com