Letter from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, to James Ivory, Dinuba, California, 1967 January 2 : autograph manuscript signed.

Wishing Ivory "a wonderful and happy and fruitful New Year"; offering words of encouragement that his current frustration will evaporate as soon as he finds himself working again, that he'll be "a giant" and "find yourself overflowing with energies and ideas"; continuing "Don't forget you've only just started & are still chock-full of films waiting to be made: films that only you & no one else can make"; admitting that he and Merchant will probably always be fighting Paramount (and by extension, studios in general) "but you and Ismail will always win on the important things"; describing how she "started off the New Year in the most pious manner possible" by going to a chilly morning show of Satyajit Ray's film "Nayak"-- "Amid a crowd of skinny, chattering, shivering, hair-oiled Bengalis... we must have been the only non-Bengalis there" [Ray was Bengali]; describing the crowd parting for her and Jhab and an unnamed companion as they helped her to her seat because she was suffering from sciatica; pronouncing the film "an awful disappointment" but analyzing in detail why Ray is still a master of his craft despite occasional misfires; emphasizing the need for Ivory to work on projects he feels passionately about-- "To Ismail it's all more or less the same, he just wants to make films ... [b]ut you should only want to make the films you want to make"; musing on how "I always have a worm's-eye view of everything: it's shabbiness & failure that attract me", whereas Ivory is drawn to "the successful, the established, the beautiful, the rich ... but only in their aspect of decay ... And there I'm with you again, & that perhaps, if we're lucky, is the way we shall present London [in the "Shakespeare Wallah" sequel]"; reflecting that "the London which I fled with such horror, I couldn't get out of it fast enough-- I look back on it now with nostalgic longing!"; describing Christmas spent with the English expats at Catherine Freeman's, "all English and Dickensian"; asking if Ivory has received a calender she had sent to him, one meant to appeal to Anglophiles, and thinking she originally meant it as a joke "but now I'm laughing from the other side of my mouth."