Ved Mehta

Encounters with British Intellectuals

Fly and the Fly-bottle

Stretching from the snowcapped Himalayas to the droughtprone state of Tamil Nadu, India is a vast and enigmatic country, full of contrasts. Portrait of India presents Ved Mehta's impressions of his native land - his first-hand report on India's villages and cities, its religions, politics and wars, its poets, philosophers, maharajas, and priests. Published in 1970 and now reissued with a new preface by its author, the book evokes the enormous variety of India for the Western reader.

Portrait of India

Delinquent Chacha

“Namaste.” Vedi’s father bade him the Hindu farewell. “You are a man now.” It was the first step in Ved Mehta’s long journey toward independence. He was a month shy of five years old, and he was to spend much of the next four years thirteen hundred miles away from home and family, at Dadar School for the Blind—really a mission orphanage, in a sooty section of Bombay, that had only the barest facilities but was run by an American-trained Indian Christian principal with Western ideas about education. Before Vedi was four, he had been left blind by meningitis. His father, a well-to-do, England-trained Hindu doctor, was determined that his son not experience the usual lot of the blind in India—begging alms or caning chairs—but receive the best education that India could offer a blind child. At the school, Vedi at first felt isolated. There was the obstacle of language: he spoke only Punjabi, the other children spoke only Marathi, and the principal was determined to teach him English. There were the differences of class and age: Vedi was from “a cultured home,” and therefore wore shoes and proper clothes, took his meals with the principal’s family, and had a special soft bed in the boys’ dormitory; many of the other children were waifs from the streets, and most of them were much older. As a consequence of what may strike some as an incomprehensible act—a father sending a child to a kind of foster home—Vedi learned to get along without his parents, without his sisters and his brother, without familiar sounds and scents and tastes, long before any ordinary child learns self-reliance. He also learned to read and write English Braille, to add and subtract, to play the games that all boys play—sometimes adapted by the principal for his pupils—and to get along with his school-mates. Not all his experiences were happy, of course. He had many illnesses; like any child, he got into “boy-mischief” and was subject to the discipline of the principal’s ruler and to the harsher punishments of the Sighted Master, who lived in the boys’ dormitory. When it looked as if the Second World War was coming to India, Vedi left Dadar School and returned home—as much a victim of events in his departure as he had been in his arrival. Yet, as his father knew, and as he himself came to know, the education he received at the school afforded him a chance for a meaningful life. He grasped it eagerly. Vedi is Ved Mehta’s memory of ordinary childhood experiences—of trying to find out, of struggling to fit in, of wanting to be loved, of playing, of dreaming—during the years that ordinarily make up childhood. But Vedi, in a sense, ceased to be a child before he was five. In the school, he learned what it was to feel apart from his peers even when he was among them; at home, on holidays, he learned what it was to feel apart from his family members even when he was among them. In the narrative, two voices alternate: the voice of a child and the voice of an adult. When the child speaks, even grim events seem innocent and funny; and when the adult speaks, even ordinary moments seem sad, reflected in a memory that brings together past and present and conveys them with eloquence in this extraordinary work.

(Penguin Petit)

Vedi

Ved Mehta and Adrian Wilson, both MacArthur Prize Fellows, met for the first time at a gathering of recipients of the award. Their conversation turned inevitably to their work—to Ved Mehta’s writing and to Adrian Wilson’s book designing and printing. The concept of publishing a Mehta work in a special edition arose naturally; and the author chose three stories with different characters and events, each revealing an aspect of boyhood in India under the British raj. Working in Wilson’s studio at the time was Zahid Sardar, a graphic artist from Bombay, and he was eager to illustrate the book. Sardar, who was already planning to visit his native land, took along his sketchbook and copies of the stories, and returned with a group of delicate and perceptive images recreating a vanished way of life. The title of the first story, “Four Hundred and Twenty,” refers to an infamous law of British India under which Indian subjects were tried for various sorts of antisocial behavior. The story reveals with gentle humor the mixture of petty bureaucracy and profound spiritual feeling during the period, and the deep division between Hindus and Muslims that in time led to the partitioning of the country. “The Music Master,” the story of a boy’s lessons with a lazy, devious, but appealing guru, shows how the crosscurrents of ancient superstition and modern Westernized thinking have buffeted the Indian subcontinent. The third story, “Sunset,” presents with great sensitivity and simplicity a picture of a village family, its traditions, and its strengths, in a time of tragedy.

Three Stories of the Raj

The six pieces collected here for the first time have been chosen by Ved Mehta from a decade of reportorial work for The New Yorker. “They reflect, in different ways,” he writes in the foreword, “the worlds in which I feel at home: India, where I was born and brought up; the United States and Britain, where I have lived since I was fifteen; and what Milton called ‘the olive grove of Academe,’ where I spent an interlude of almost nine years. The pieces are united by the ancient theme of the tongue and the pen. . . .” Among the literate personages Mr. Mehta writes about are the U.N. interpreter George Sherry (“A Second Voice”); the English editor and broadcaster Sir William Haley (“The Third”); the Oxford bookman Sir Basil Blackwell (“Quiet, Beneficent Things”); the Urdu translator and critic Ram Babu Saksena (“There Is No Telling”); the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan (“The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station”); and the American linguist Noam Chomsky (“John Is Easy to Please”). These men and many of their confreres who appear in the book “might well be surprised to find themselves in the same room,” Mr. Mehta writes. “They would have difficulty in understanding one another’s manners, attitudes, and, in some cases, language. The gathering would indeed be a bizarre one . . . but for me it would be Heaven.” Mr. Mehta combines the literary exuberance of the true writer with the intellectual rigor of the true scholar; his style is marked by wit and sweep and fire. In this book about encounters with virtuosos of the written and the spoken word he has made a delightful addition to the pleasures of literacy.

John is Easy to Please

The New India

The Ledge Between the Streams

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. Translating individual experience into the universal, Mehta recounts the story of his mother's arranged marriage to a British-trained doctor and, by extension, of an ancient Indian family's struggle to find its place in a modern, rapidly changing world.

Continents of Exile: 2

Mamaji

‘It is immensely well done. Mr. Mehta has a real gift of exposition and an unusual one. He can give a creditable and a credible account, not only of ideas but of the people who begot them, with illuminating reason why they did so. Each of the philosophers and historians with whom he talked appears as a self-consistent and self-explanatory personality, both intellectually and psychologically . . . Obliged, in spite of his English education, to see this from the outside, Mr. Mehta may have had peculiar and inherent advantages. He has written a very lively and also a very intelligent book which mixes lightness and seriousness in the best proportion. He is perhaps a bit jocose—indeed, in the self-depreciation and understatement of his humour, more British than the British.’ —Observer (London)

Fly and the Fly-Bottle

Portrait of India (1970) is a vivid account of 60s’ India and some of its most interesting figures—Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray, among others. Travelling across the country from the Himalayas to Kerala, through its villages and cities, Ved Mehta’s observations of and insights into India remain relevant and thought-provoking even today.

The Stolen Light

Book 3 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. Ved continues the story of Ved Mehta's two earlier memoirs, Daddyji, a biographical portrait of his father, and Mamaji, an exploration of his mother and her history. The focus here turns toward Mehta's childhood, his education in an Indian orphanage for the blind, and the general experience of blind people in India.

Continents of Exile: 3

For more than three decades, a quiet man—some would say almost an invisible man—dwelt at the center of American journalistic and literary life. He was William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. Through the writers and artists he gathered around him and worked with, the forms of writing he invented, the pieces he encouraged and published, and his gentle but meticulous editing of those pieces, he expanded—permanently—the range of the possible in journalistic and literary writing. Among his writers were Edmund Wilson, Rachel Carson, John Cheever, V. S. Pritchett, J. D. Salinger, Penelope Mortimer, A. J. Liebling, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Schell and Jamaica Kincaid. In Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, a memoir that in itself is a literary achievement of a high order, Ved Mehta—who started writing for The New Yorker at the age of twenty-five, and over some thirty-three years contributed such historic pieces as his brilliant study of philosophers at Oxford and his biographical portrait of Mahatma Gandhi—gives us the closest and most refined description that has yet been written of Shawn’s editorship of the magazine. He portrays in detail the peculiar, nurturing atmosphere of The New Yorker. And he recounts the series of “tremors” that shook the magazine in the last years of Shawn’s editorship that ended in his abrupt, tragic dismissal by the new owners.

Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker

In March of 1963, the Right Reverend John Robinson, Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich, wrote an article for the London Observer that appeared under the headline “Our Image of God Must Go.” Soon afterward, a book called Honest to God, by the same Bishop, appeared. The book and the article together touched off one of England’s characteristically furious controversies. It also touched off an inquiry by Ved Mehta—one of The New Yorker’s new generation of writers—into the state of Christian theology in the contemporary world. What resulted was The New Theologian. For Mr. Mehta, Bishop Robinson turned out to be merely a point of departure; since many of the Bishop’s ideas were popular versions of ideas first developed by the pre-eminent theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich, Mr. Mehta began his investigation by returning directly to their work. He went on to study the work of many other important theologians and clergymen, particularly the so-called Christian radicals, and held conversations with a number of them, including, in addition to Bultmann and Tillich and Robinson, Karl Barth, Eberhard Bethge, David Edwards, William Hamilton, Eric James, D. M. MacKinnon, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Michael Ramsey, Ian Ramsey, Nicolas Stacey, Paul van Buren, and A. R. Vidler. What emerges in The New Theologian is a brilliant report on present-day theology—specifically, on a movement that is sometimes referred to as religionless Christianity but that can also be seen as a movement of troubled but profoundly religious thinkers who are groping toward a reconciliation of Christian faith with the main secular intellectual currents of our age. Mr. Mehta presents not only the ideas of this extraordinary group of men but also, in stunning portraits, the men themselves. Ved Mehta was born in India and educated in the United States and England. In the few years since he joined the staff of The New Yorker, he has established himself as one of the magazine’s most imposing figures. He combines the literary exuberance of the true writer with the intellectual rigor of the true scholar. His style is marked by wit and sweep and fire. In an earlier book, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, he brought these powers to bear on the minds and personalities of many of England’s leading historians and Oxford philosophers. In his present book, as he takes up the theologians, he distinguishes himself once more.

The New Theologian

This is the true and intimate story of one man and his love of four women, each of them very different, but each in her turn the object of his hopes and desires. What does Ved Mehta want of these women? To be loved by them, to marry them, to have children with them. He has been blind since childhood. Love, marriage, children—all these, he imagines, would make him whole. And the women, Gigi, Vanessa, Lola and Kilty? What do they want? It seems for a time that they too want to love him, marry him, have his children. But desire is a dangerous emotion and the state of being in love both illusory and mysterious. In spare and elegant prose, Ved Mehta transforms that most subjective of all human acts, falling in love, into an objective account. Without justification and without excuses, he documents the twists and turns of an extraordinary personal history that soars and dips with expectation and anguish, until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way to a new insight about women he has loved and about himself. Few other writers are such compelling and vivid witnesses to their private lives; few other men have been so honest about their misunderstandings and failures in the business of love.

All for Love

Ved Mehta’s acclaimed Continents of Exile series ends where it began—with a portrait of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta. But this, the final instalment of the eleven-book series, which has been appearing over the last thirty-two years, is its emotional crescendo, the story of the author’s discovery of his father’s affair with a married woman in the British India of the 1930s. The story has its origins in the 1960s, when Mehta by chance finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother’s shoulder during a New York dinner party. As a result, the son begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father’s British past in Simla, the magical hill station and summer capital of the Raj. Step by step, he is forced to confront his father’s passionate clandestine affair with Rasil, an exquisite beauty who in her teens was abducted from her poor family and raped. She was subsequently rescued by a Hindu philanthropist, only to end up trapped in an abusive marriage to a rich businessman. Years earlier, when the Daddyji of the story was working in the Punjab Himalayas as a medical student, he had met a young shepherdess on his rounds, and been intoxicated by her greenish-blue eyes, fair skin, golden hair, and the Nepalese lilt of her voice. At one moment, he caught sight of her concealed tattoo of the consort of Lord Krishna. She said that she, too, intended to marry the voluptuary deity. Some fifteen years later in Lahore, Dr. Mehta encounters a socialite whom he recognizes as the hill girl of his youth by her tattoo. They re-establish contact and in time become lovers. Their affair is kept alive by the exchange of love letters, or Red Letters—sublime if eccentric works in themselves—that Mehta’s father treasures for the remainder of his life as a memento of his enchanted time. Mehta’s exploration of his father’s love affair proves painful, as the son realizes that the entanglement, a passing episode in sixty-one years of a loving marriage, had shattering psychological side-effects on his mother—a close friend of Rasil’s—and also on his own life. The Red Letters is Mehta’s masterpiece, a work of extraordinary intensity that perfectly re-creates the exotic, closed world of British India. The appearance of this book is a major literary event, signalling the conclusion of Continents of Exile, one of the most remarkable literary achievements of the twentieth century.

The Red Letters

In this volume of a remarkable life story, Ved Mehta takes us through his college years—an adventurous young adulthood in California. After his father—a retired Indian-government health official—managed to secure the means to enter him in Pomona College, Ved set out to prove himself as a blind student among the sighted. For the first time, he was able to give his intellectual curiosity full play and pursue academic distinction—flexing and stretching and moving with newfound independence. Longing for all the normal experiences of the average American student, he joined a fraternity, revived the school’s International Relations Club, wrote for the school newspaper, and even bought a car. There were girls, too: Mandy, who shared a class with him at summer school in Berkeley; Phyllis, who caught him up in an emotional drama of her own making; and Mary, a deeply Christian Southerner, who taught him that being cerebral needn’t prevent him from being tender. Nevertheless, he remained something of an outsider and continued to be dogged by the prediction of experts—made even before he ventured to America for a high-school education—that he would be culturally maladjusted, unsuited to life in either India or America. But, never for a moment accepting limits, Ved seized all the knowledge and all the glory he could, though always with a sense of stealing something that the world never intended him to have. Mrs. Ethel Clyde, a mercurial, globe-trotting Socialist millionaire, who was his father’s patient and friend, helped support Ved’s education and gave him the money to spend two summers writing an autobiography. At first, Ved saw the project only as a way of making a bid for the affections of the most important girl—Johnnie, his reader, his amanuensis, his friend, and his real love, who always remained romantically beyond his grasp. But by the time the book was on paper, a rough yet promising beginning, he had taken a big step toward coming to terms with his extraordinary situation and creating a future for himself as a writer. Telling of experiences wonderful and tragic, love fulfilled and unfulfilled, and journeys sexual and scholarly, this is a lyrical narrative of an unusually talented youth’s coming of age. Ved Mehta recounts in touching detail how he reconciled conflicting cultural forces and forged a world of his own, an amalgam of East and West, Raj and California, learning and writing, daring and hoping. He shows how it felt to be poor and lonely and thoughtful and driven in a period that was as rich and fertile and sunny and languid as California itself. In fact, the book can be read not just as an intimate memoir of the author’s college years but also as a social history of the sanguine American fifties.

Book 10 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. In lucid, sparse prose Mehta documents the twists and turns of a romantic history peppered with disappointment and anguish - that is until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way toward new insights about himself and those he has loved.

Ved Mehta

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