- 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.
- He met his future partner, James Ivory, at a screening of Ivory's documentary The Sword and the Flute (1959) in New York City.
- 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).
- 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.
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 55th Venice International Film Festival in 1998.
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