Ruth Prawer Jhabvala passes away at 86

For years, people who read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novels assumed she was born in India. She wrote about swamis, social climbers, duplicitous landlords and other characters from the Indian bourgeoisie who inevitably found themselves colliding with curious visitors from the West.
But Jhabvalawas a Westerner herself: a German Jew displaced by war to England, who married an Indian man and settled in his country. She absorbed enough of subcontinental culture to portray it with clarity and comic sensibility in books that earned her comparisons to Jane Austen