Ismail Merchant

"My Passage from India describes Ismail Merchant's extraordinary journey from his start as an aspiring filmmaker in Bombay, scraping together a meager production budget for his first short film, to his triumphant arrival at the Oscar podium." "His story begins in India where he grew up. At the age of thirteen, sharing a triumphal gala entrance with Nimmi, a family friend and Indian film star, he had his first taste of cinema's allure and realized that he would spend his life making movies.". "In 1958, the young Indian filmmaker arrived in New York to pursue a master's degree at NYU. While landing a job in advertising, he kept his focus on his dreams, winning a place at the Cannes Film Festival for his first short film, Creation of Woman. His passion for film was relentless, helping him leap over obstacles with humor, guile and infectious enthusiasm. In 1961, he was introduced to a kindred spirit, James Ivory, and together they established Merchant Ivory Productions. Along with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, their partnership would result in more than forty extraordinary films (so far)." "Including seventy-five photographs of his life, My Passage from India is a sumptous feast of the stories, sights, sounds and larger-than-life characters that have been part of his remarkable world, in India and around the globe."--BOOK JACKET.

Set in India, HEAT AND DUST is the story of Olivia, a beautiful, spoiled, bored English colonial wife in the 1920s who is drawn inexorably into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in plots and intrigues. Olivia outrages the tiny, suffocating town where her husband is a civil servant by eloping with the captivating Nawab. It is also the story of Olivia's step-granddaughter who, fifty years later, is drawn to India by her fascination with the letters left behind by the now dead older woman, and by her obsession with solving the enigma of Olivia's scandal. A penetrating and compassionate love story, this brilliant novel immerses the reader in the heat, dust, and squalor of India, while providing a compelling mixture of the spiritual and the sensual.

The real-life adventures of a traveling theater group in India during the final days of English colonial rule. They try to uphold British tradition by staging Shakespearean plays but can't compete with the wildly popular Bollywood film industry.

E.M. Forster's story of two Edwardian-era Cambridge graduates that fall in love, but must abide by British society's strict norms regarding homosexuality.

1954, the Malabar Coast. British and Anglo-Indian identities blur when an English-woman with a neglectful husband births a sickly baby. Cotton Mary, a hospital aide and moralizing Anglophile who claims her father was a British officer, takes over the infant's care and, without a word to the mother, takes the baby daily to her sister to nurse. Mary moves into the English household, taking over more and more duties as she plays on the mother's fatigue and lack of spousal counsel: in effect, Mary colonizes the English household while she pilfers its stores and tells tall tales to her own family. For how long can Mary sustain her rule before the Englishwoman stands on her own feet?