A frank, freewheeling man who was endowed with energy, charm and prodigious chutzpah, Merchant was the “producer wallah” of the celebrated cinematic duo he formed with James Ivory, the American film director. The two are listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having had the longest creative partnership in film history, much of it spent also in the company of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the German-born writer who composed almost all their screenplays.

Merchant, who had the knack of getting famous actors to work for him for “peanuts” (to use his own gleeful description) was the business mind behind Merchant Ivory Productions, a company he formed with Ivory in 1961.

Only 25, Merchant was then an aspiring — and struggling — film director in Los Angeles, working nights at the Los Angeles Times’s classified department to make ends meet. He had just had a lucky break: his first film, a 14-minute short called The Creation of Woman, was chosen for screening at the Cannes Film Festival, and he was en route to France. Breaking the journey for a day in New York, he chose to spend his few spare hours at a screening of The Sword and the Flute (1959), a documentary film by Ivory.

The young Merchant was smitten by Ivory’s abilities, as well as by his obvious affection for India. Years later, he was to recall that first meeting with the American: “During our conversation that first evening, I realised that he knew about India not in a dry, academic way but with understanding — something I have never encountered in an American before or since.”

A month later the two joined forces, a division of labour clearly demarcated: Merchant would raise money, hire actors, harangue technicians, haggle with everyone in sight, and distribute their films; Ivory would direct them. A legendary association thus began.

More than 30 years later, when Merchant directed his first feature-length film, In Custody (1993), he was asked why it had taken him so long to take the director’s chair. His frothy reply was: “Oh, I thought I’d give Mr Ivory a chance to get established first.”

Merchant was not to the cinema born. Merchant was not even his real name, but one he assumed while at college. He was born Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman, the son of a moderately prosperous Bombay textile trader and a barely literate mother. The family led solid, middle-class Muslim lives, and the young Ismail went to both Islamic and Jesuit schools, where he became fluent in the Koran and English respectively.

His father, Noormohamed Haji Abdul Rehman, was president of the Bombay branch of the Muslim League, the party, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which was agitating for the creation of Pakistan. A showman even as a callow boy, Merchant once addressed a political rally as a nine-year-old, electrifying more than 10,000 Muslim Bombayites with his words in support of Jinnah. More than 50 years later, he was to remember the occasion: “I had stirred up that crowd and there was no way to calm it down. Now, once one of our films starts, it is like that crowd. There is no going back.”

When Partition came to the Indian sub-continent, however, Merchant’s father stayed in Bombay. He had too much to lose, and the prospect of starting life afresh in the new Pakistan had little appeal for the family. Merchant had, by this time, abandoned his precocious interest in politics, seeking diversion instead in the city’s cinema halls.

In 1949, aged 13, he befriended Nimmi, a young film actress, who adopted him as a sort of mascot. With her, he went to film studios, spent time on lavishly decorated sets, and met a gamut of influential cinéastes and stars.

His family steered him towards a conventional education, and he studied political science and English literature at St Xavier’s College, the best university in Bombay. Predictably, his was not a bookish existence. More time was spent at the college canteen than in lecture halls, and he immersed himself in the university’s theatrical life.

So successful was he that he was able to pay for his own passage to New York in 1958, as well as for his tuition for a masters degree in business administration at New York University, from the proceeds of his last show. In New York Merchant discovered the films of Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica. “I went avidly to their films,” he recalled. “I continued to go to Hollywood films, but the European films became a passion.”