Ismail Merchant, the Indian film producer who died yesterday at 68, was for more than 40 years one of the most unorthodox but successful independent filmmakers in Hollywood.

With his partner James Ivory and close friend Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Merchant produced some of the most popular films of recent years, including “Heat and Dust”(1982), “A Room With a View” (1985), “The Remains of the Day”(1993) and “The Golden Bowl” (2000).

Merchant’s great strength as a producer was a knack for funding his various projects and an ability to produce films for several million dollars less than those of his contemporaries. Friends described him as having “the cheek of the devil and the charm of an angel,” and Merchant explained his success as the result of “a passion for making films, not for making money.”

After early successes with films such as “The Householder,” “Shakespeare Wallah” and “Bombay Talkie,” Merchant and his partner suffered a lean period during the 1970s. Films such as “Jane Austen in New York” and “The Wild Party” flopped at the box office.

Their fortunes revived dramatically in 1979, however, when Merchant produced an adaptation of Henry James’s novel “The Europeans.” Merchant Ivory Films became known almost exclusively for their lavish costumes, high production values, and minute budgets.

By the early 1990s, Merchant and his partner were established as one of the most successful teams in Hollywood. They were courted by major studios such as Columbia and Warner Bros. and eventually signed a three-year deal with the Disney Corporation in 1991. “We would never go into any deal where we relinquish artistic control,” Merchant insisted.

Ismail Noormohamed Merchant was born on Christmas Day 1936 in Bombay, the son of a wealthy textile importer. He grew up bilingual in Gujarati (the local language) and Urdu (which his family spoke at home). He attended a Muslim school to learn Arabic and the Koran, and later attended an English Jesuit College to study history and math. When Merchant was 11 his family was caught up in the trauma of the partitioning of India. His father was a president of the Muslim League who refused to move to Pakistan, and Merchant later admitted that he carried the memories of “butchery and riots” into adult life.

While attending St. Xavier’s in Bombay, Merchant developed a passion for films that was to last throughout his life. He originally wanted to become an actor, and, as a close friend of the Bombay film star Nimmi, he was offered several modeling jobs and worked as an extra. Against his father’s wishes he began to spend most of his time at college organizing student dramas, which he financed through selling program space. “I’d get two beautiful girls,” he recalled, “and we would go round in a big car to various companies. Out of hundreds of doors you knocked on, maybe 20 would buy space.”

He graduated in 1958 and immediately moved to New York, where he studied nights at NYU for a business degree; during the day he worked as a messenger for the United Nations and used his job as an opportunity to persuade the Indian delegates to back his various film projects. “The UN dining room became a platform for my raising funds for my movie,” he said. “I was not intimidated by anyone or anything.”

Merchant made his debut as a film producer in 1960 with a short feature entitled “The Creation of Woman.” He then paid for the film to be shown in a cinema long enough for it to be eligible for Academy Award consideration. His gamble paid off when the film received a nomination for Best Short Film and was entered in the Cannes Film Festival of 1961.

On the way to Cannes, Merchant was invited to a screening of “The Sword and the Flute,” directed by James Ivory. The two became friends, and later that year went into partnership in Merchant Ivory Productions. They made “The Householder,” their first film together, in 1962 and began their long association with novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. She adapted the screenplay from her novel of the same name and went on to write the scripts for most of Merchant Ivory’s films.

Through Merchant’s contacts with Columbia Pictures, “The Householder” became the first Indian film distributed worldwide. He went on to secure Hollywood backing for MIP’s subsequent productions: “Shakespeare Wallah” (1966), which made a star of the young Felicity Kendal; “The Guru” (1969); and “Bombay Talkie” (1970). Throughout the 1970s Merchant continued to finance numerous productions written by Ms. Jhabvala and directed by James Ivory. While some of their films were still based in India (“Hullabaloo Over Georgie” and “Bonnie’s Pictures”), most now originated in the United States and were aimed at an international market. They received mixed reviews.

Projects such as “Roseland” (1977) were well liked by critics but ignored by the public; while others, such as “The Wild Party” (1975) and “The Au to biography of a Princess” (1975), were given scant attention by critics and public alike.

It was not until the end of the 1970s that Merchant Ivory hit on a successful formula for their studied, slow-moving pieces. Merchant persuaded Ms. Jhabvala to adapt “The Europeans” for the screen, and the subsequent film starring Lee Remick was an immediate success. Merchant Ivory became known for their attention to tiny period detail and the opulence of their sets. Further period adaptations followed, each more popular than the last. Merchant produced “Heat and Dust” (1983), “The Bostonians” (1984), and “A Room With a View” (1985) – his favorite film, which won three Oscars and was the first of a series of E.M. Forster adaptations which included “Maurice” (1987) and “Howard’s End” (1992). The latter, which also won three Oscars, cost only $8 million to produce (undercutting comparable productions by approximately $20 million).

In 1991, Merchant was again approached by Columbia, this time to produce “The Remains of the Day,” from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, a project which Columbia believed could cost $30 million. Merchant produced the film for $11.5 million, including the cost of hiring Anthony Hopkins.

When not working, Merchant was as well-known for the lavish nature of his private parties as he was for the parsimoniousness of his film budgeting. Typical parties included taking the whole cast of “Heat and Dust” on a picnic to a private palace in India, and Merchant’s Saturday night curry parties were regular events on all his productions. Such was his fame as a cook that he was asked to write a cookery book; he published “Ismail Merchant’s Indian Cuisine” in 1986. During the 1990s, he opened two restaurants in Manhattan, Bombay Bistro and Pondicherry.

He had beautiful manners and was always fastidiously dressed. While he never married, Merchant maintained that he was in every sense “a family man.” He had numerous nieces and nephews, and insisted that his relationship with Ivory and Jhabvala (both of whom had apartments in the same building as he) was identical to that of a family. “Our lives are knitted together” he said, “and our films are knitted together.”

In more recent years, Merchant had turned to directing. In 1993 he made “In Custody,” a film in Urdu about an Urdu poet; and six years later came “Cotton Mary,” about an Anglo-Indian nurse working in a white household in the 1950s.

He also directed “The Mystic Masseur” (2001), having persuaded V.S. Naipaul to consent to an adaptation of his novel.

Merchant had recently been working in China, directing a film called “The White Countess.” In preproduction was “The Goddess,” a musical based on Indian mythology and starring Tina Turner.