Merchant has been ever since. He neglected his studies at St. Xavier’s Jesuit College at Bombay University, preferring to stage flamboyant productions. While a graduate student at New York University’s business school in the late 1950s, he spent most of his energy hustling diplomats, bankers and entertainment folks, trying to raise film funding as well as his profile. Then Merchant met James Ivory, a young Oregon-born director. They went for coffee at the Right Bank on Madison Avenue. And, as Merchant proudly writes in the book–twice–there will soon be a plaque commemorating that meeting. Merchant recalls listening attentively as Ivory talked about film. Ivory remembers Merchant’s jumping up to make repeated calls on the coffee shop’s pay phone, even borrowing a dime when he ran out of money.
After reading “My Passage From India,” it’s easier to believe Ivory’s recollection than Merchant’s. In this entertaining collection of anecdotes, studded with famous names and illustrated with candid snapshots, Merchant comes across as a slick but charming operator who will do whatever it takes to get what he wants. And it appears that what he has wanted from that marigold moment forward was fame. He managed to hold the gala premiere of the first Merchant Ivory film, “The Householder,” at the American Embassy in New Delhi, where he sat with U.S. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Later, after “Room With a View” and “Howard’s End” became huge hits, he writes about how thrilled he was that “Merchant Ivory” had become an adjective to describe sumptuous, meticulous period films.
Not that Merchant comes off as a braggart. From his opening recollections of his mischievous boyhood in Bombay to tales of his on-set, home-cooked-curry parties, Merchant is a generous, engaging raconteur. His grounding comes from the artists who most influenced him. In addition to Ivory, Merchant struck up a friendship with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born author who has penned most of their screenplays and who, until her association with the pair, “regarded film people as time wasters and, quite possibly, charlatans,” Merchant writes.
But he reserves his deepest admiration for the legendary Indian director Satyajit Ray, who helped edit the first Merchant Ivory film and scored several others. Throughout the book, he heaps praise on Ray’s work. He also recounts how in 1992 he personally lobbied the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award Ray a lifetime-achievement Oscar, and oversaw the rerelease of Ray’s greatest films. It was a rightful homage to the community that sparked his passion for filmmaking. Merchant may have left India to find fame, but he returned to it to find humility.
