SOURCE: "Writers and the Cinema—A Symposium," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4267, November 18, 1983, p. 1287.

In the following essay, Jhabvala comments on the reciprocal relationship between writing novels and screenplays.

I suppose my experience with films has been different from that of most other writers because I've always worked with the same team, the director James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant. This has protected me in so far as they have stood between me and what I would have found terribly unpleasant: a collaborative effort at what is called the script level; the dreaded story conference. The only sort of story conference we ever seem to have is when Jim says "Oh that's terrible, awful, can't you do better than that", thereby usually echoing my own thoughts.

Ramlal G. Agarwal on Jhabvala's India:

In a broader perspective, Jhabvala belongs to the tradition of the nineteenth-century comic English...