Trivia

In addition to their 40-year-long professional partnership, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were also longtime romantic partners.

On location, producer Ismail Merchant was renowned for his cooking and feeding of cast & crew, a practice often necessary in Merchant/Ivory's earlier low-budget days.

Merchant and Ivory formed Merchant Ivory Productions in May 1961. Their first picture was The Householder (1963) in 1963.

The National Portrait Gallery in London has paintings of Ismail and his partners James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - even though they all live in New York City and none of them are English. (Ruth is German/Polish, Ismail is Indian, and James is American).

He met his future partner, James Ivory, at a screening of Ivory's documentary The Sword and the Flute (1959) in New York City.

Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 55th Venice International Film Festival in 1998.

Merchant personally selected and groomed Kai Wong as a producer in the New York headquarters of Merchant-Ivory after he was impressed by an literary article Kai Wong wrote in Manhattan, which created cinematic narrative on paper.

Educated at Bombay University and trained in business administration in New York.