Letter from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, to James Ivory, Mumbai, India, 1970 March 11: autograph manuscript signed.

Referring to a formerly enclosed copy of "the latest [New] Yorker to have arrived", which she is sending because of the cover and because it has given her another title idea for the movie, "which is: 'Life! Death! Love!'"; describing the extraordinary response to a recent Satyajit Ray film festival in Delhi which sold out so quickly that she was not able to get tickets; recounting a conversation she had with "Sina[?]" about Sina's recent trip to Jaipur with an unnamed designer (referred to by Jhabvala as a "fab Negro girl") who was worried about being kidnapped "ever since Jim Thompson (?) went and got himself kidnapped in Laos (?)"; repeating what Shama said about Sina and why Sina's qualities make her "so fascinating"; referring to her discussion of the two women as "a catty aside", then backtracking; summarizing an interview that Ray gave after the festival about his filmmaking practices; criticizing "Aranyer Din Ratri", which she refers to as "totally vile. Terribly boring as a film..." and specifically expressing concern at the film's depiction of Indian people ("I wouldn't slander Indians to such an extent") and referring to an interview that one of the actresses in the film gave ("it made my heart sink so"); asking him to say, if asked her opinion of the film, that she only expressed "regret at not understanding Bengali"; describing a "boring American couple" that she met who had "all the right ideas and attitudes" about Vietnam, segregation, and other "big topics" and would smoke "marijuana cigarettes (or do you eat salad? - anyway, whatever it is, they do it correctly)"; describing a program run by the college that the American couple were affiliated with ("Callson College? Something like that") where students would spend a year in India for cultural immersion; retelling a story they told her about their students' experiences at Sai Baba's ashram in Bangalore; adding in a postscript that there is already a film recently released with the title "Life Love Death".