Ved Mehta is quite an extraordinary young man, if for no other reason than that at the age of 22 he wrote an autobiography so graceful in tone his elders did not accuse him of impertinence.
He is now 27. His face is large, his body somewhat thick and his hands, often folded in his lap, have a way of simultaneously suggesting agitation and repose.
Mehta, whose English is spoken with accents precise enough to please even George Bernard Shaw, was born an Indian, but has lived almost half his life outside his ountry. Not long ago, while visiting India, he was counseled by Prime Minister Nehru to finish his education in the West, become a writer and then come home – the notion that the Westerner, once India’s master, might have been cruel but that his linen is finer remaining a part of India’s heritage.
Partly by chance, partly by design, Mehta has done the bulk of Nehru’s bidding. Three years ago he accepted a fellowship at Harvard, 10 months ago a job as a staff writer for The New Yorker.
It is doubtful, however, that Mehta will ever be able to obey the last of Nehru’s commands, to come home to stay. For three years before his talk with the Prime Minister, Mehta had been exposed to the ways of Oxford University. He had learned that you call the tutor at whose feet you sit by his first name; that you read King Alfred’s will in the original, even Latin documents in the original. He had found a sense of history which India’s universities, despite their emulation of the British system, cannot impart. “They have neither the freedom of American universities nor the fun of English ones,” says Mehta.
And vefore Englad, he had lived and traveled in the U.S. At 15, Mehta, blind since early childhood, was sent to a school for the blind in Little Rock. At 18, he entered Pomona College, where he earned the first of his four degrees.
“When I went back to India I had been away 10 years, and I found rediscovery a terrible problem,” says Mehta, a Hindu and the son of a New Dehli doctor who has spent his life in public health. “I could not forget the fact that I had lived in England and the U.S. One went back to a different set of assumptions about love, sex, morality, politics, newspapers, even sleeping. If you are a business man or a scientist the assumptions don’t get into your bones. If you are in the humanities as I am, you are apt to react more deeply.”
The dilemma of the expatriate, which Mehta had in fact become, is an obvious one, especially when the country in which you feel most comfortable – in Mehta’s case, England – is the one against which the country of your birth rebelled.
“Two years ago, I found great pain in admitting the fact that I was an expatriate,” he recalls. “Now I’m getting used to it and even see a certain amount of romance in it. Of course many of the Indian intellectuals who live in India are expatriates in the sense that they still value English thought and are emotionally bound to the Eliots, Audens, Pounds and Hopkinses. I have come to believe more and more in the freemasonry of nations. My identification now is more with a society, a form of government, than a country. I am more related to an ideal form of society, and now that I want to write more an anything else to the literary life of society.”
The split in Mehta is to be seen also in India and is, according to him, one of its most profound problems. Her business structure, government, civil service and educational system are all patterned after Brtitain’s. “And Nehru,” says Mehta, “has essentially run the government like an extremely educated Englishman. We’ve kept our English traditions and are uncomfortable with them, but I don’t think the answer is to forget the past but to make it part of the present.
“I have no sympathy with the nationalists who say Nehru has betrayed the revolution. I think he is doing the right thing in containing the nationalist sentiment. And actually we are beginning to develop an interesting amalgam. For instance, our use of English – the way words are used, the accent and even the grammar – is a little different. We must continue to do this.”
There was a time when Mehta thought of entering India’s politics or foreign service. His years at Oxford, however, seem to have convinced him that the only proper way to think is to write. Once set upon this course, Mehta produced his second book, “Walking the Indian Streets,” an account of his brief return to his native land. Since then he ahs most often done what The New Yorker has assigned him to do, the latest work being an article on the Oxford philosophers. It is a distinctive piece of writing, but there is one aspect of it which strikes Mehta as particularly memorable.
“I think,” he says, “it is the second longest article ever to appear in a magazine. John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ ran 30,000 words. This is 27,000.”
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