Letter from James Ivory, London, England, to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, 1971 July 20: typescript signed.

Telling her about a deal Merchant has made with a French company to produce an hour-long television show for the Indian market, on the theme of "lost treasures, stolen treasures, treasures mysteriously spirited to 'safety' and never returned, etc."; admitting that at first he was uninterested, until he "learned there were to be stories [underlined]"[i.e. narratives, rather than documentary]; describing how this led him to consider "India's treasures, which are today being mysteriously spirited out of the country by all those people, from Galbraith and other high-minded types, right down to the smugglers who are reputed to take valuable statues out in boats where they are taken aboard other boats like gold or hashish and sold abroad"; admitting that what interests him most are "all those people involved ... all those fancy Indian dealers in their fancy shops in Sunder Nagar , and their counterparts in less fancy places in Bikaner and Jaipur and all over ... and the foreigners after all this, from ambassadors and Ford Foundation types, to pathetic figures like Ralph Benkaim, and the dealers, sharp ladies like Doris Weiner [sic] and Stella Kramrisch and Alice Heeramanick [sic] ... The Heeramanicks [sic] just sold their Indian pictures and embroideries to the Los Angeles County Museum for three million dollars ... [and] fantastic characters like Charles Fabri ... Couldn't a marvellous hour-long film be made out of all this?"; saying Merchant would prefer a feature-length film, but Ivory likes the idea of the shorter form-- "Very good discipline and no dangers to poor investors"; describing a strange man who recently proposed "a hare-brained scheme" to him to catalogue all of India's works of art; thinking that, "if we made this film, we must have a character like [him] in it, and that I [underlined] must play such a character ... Wouldn't you like writing a part for me? ... What fun it could be, no?"; saying the only drawback to the project would be that the main character would need to be French; reminding her of "Stella Budi and Muriel Neff's arrest at Khajarao or where ever it was, when they spurned the attentions of a local keeper of the monuments, and he had them arrested for theft, and the whole bottom of their car was found to be full of heads and other bits from statues? Think of all these things, piling up for us over the years"; telling her that they have finished the "re-recording for the Chaudhuri film" and today are due to show it to the BBC, and "if they like it, and don't want any changes, I'm going to go to Tangier on Friday for ten days before going back to New York"; reporting that he and Merchant had lunch with Jhabvala's mother "on Sunday. She seemed in good spirits. There was beautiful music playing on the radio when we came in, she was singing as she served that clear soup I dearly love."