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Although blind since his early childhood, the India-born writer
Ved Mehta has surmounted his disability to become one of the most
versatile contemporary men of letters. Encouraged by the success
of his early autobiographical study, Face
to Face (1957), Mehta went on to publish a novel and several
nonfiction books in which he created his own brand of roving journalism.
He has written with equal felicity about events and personalities
in India, Great Britain, and the United States, and about more
abstract matters, such as philosophy, religion, and linguistics.
Mehta received much acclaim for his book Daddyji
(1972), a delicately crafted portrait of his father, a distinguished
Indian public health officer. Since 1961 he has been a staff writer
and reporter with The New Yorker magazine.
Ved Parkash Mehta, the fifth of the seven children, and second
son, of Dr. Amolak Ram Mehta and Shanti (Mehra) Mehta, was born
on March 21, 1934 in Lahore (now a Pakistani city with a predominantly
Sikh and Moslem population), which was the administrative seat
of the British raj in the Punjab in what was then British India.
The Mehta family, who later fled the Punjab after the Indo-Pakistani
war of partition in 1948, were Hindus of the Kshatriya (warrior)
caste and had absorbed many aspects of British culture. Ved Mehta's
grandfather, Bhola Ram Mehta, a patwari, or agricultural inspector
and tax assessor, had encouraged his six sons to take advantage
of the educational opportunities offered by the British, and the
eldest, Amolak Ram, obtained scholarships to study medicine and
public health in Great Britain and the United States. Returning
to Lahore in the late 1920's, he was appointed junior public health
officer for the Punjab. A dedicated adversary of the epidemic
diseases still rampant in pre-World War II India, Dr. Amolak Ram
Mehta (the "Daddyji" of Ved Mehta's book) became a major figure
in the Red Cross Society and toured the British provinces and
princely states, in charge of the society's anti-tuberculosis
campaign. After India attained independence in 1947, he became
deputy director-general of health services in the national government.
It was especially tragicÜin view of his own crusade against
physical sufferingÜthat Dr. Mehta's fifth child, Ved, was blinded
by spinal meningitis at the age of three. During his next twelve
years, the handicapped boy was sent by his father to a variety
of hospitals and boarding schools, including an American mission
school in Bombay, in a desperate search for proper sensitivity-training
and instruction. In 1949 Ved Mehta accepted an invitation to come
to the United States and attend the Arkansas State School for
the Blind in Little Rock. There his verbal gifts were recognized,
and he was taught to develop his touch and hearing, as well as
his memory, to an extraordinary level of acuteness. He learned
to play chess, to ride a bicycle, and to form mental images of
people and places from the descriptions of others. Later he was
to reimagine his entire childhood in brilliant colors, and to
write of the "yellow of mustard flowers outlined by the feathery
green of sugarcane,"' and the "red of coral-tree flowers, and
the scarlet of flame-of-the-forest."
After receiving his high school diploma from the Arkansas State
School, Ved Mehta spent four years at Pomona College in California
and during that period he attended several summer sessions at
Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year, he obtained
his B.A. degree from Pomona College in 1956. He then went to England
for three years of postgraduate work in modern history at Balliol
College, Oxford, which granted him a B.A. degree in 1959. Returning
to the United States, Mehta undertook an additional year and a
half of graduate studies at Harvard under a fellowship, and he
obtained his M.A. degree there in 1961.
Although Mehta had originally planned for an academic career,
he found himself drawn more and more to writing during his student
years. When he was twenty, he completed his first extended piece
of nonfiction, an autobiography that was published under the title
Face to Face (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1957; Collins,
1958) and drew praise for its candor, elegant prose, and lucid
style. Later he contributed stories and articles to British, American,
and Indian periodicals. In 1959 he met William Shawn, the editor
of The New Yorker, who encouraged him to contribute to
the magazine and invited him in 1961 to join its staff.
Before joining The New Yorker staff, Mehta had demonstrated
his talents as a journalist with his impressionistic account of
a summer trip to his native India entitled Walking
the Indian Streets (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1960; Faber, 1961).
In the book he related his experiences wandering all over India
and Nepal with a friend and recorded the conversations, sounds,
and smells that intrigued him. Among the people he met on his
journey was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who casually invited
him and told him: "Talk to me whenever the spirit moves you."
What resulted from those chats was an admiring portrait of a leader
whom Mehta had criticized in his earlier writings. He now wrote
that Nehru was right in curtailing Hindu nationalism and preserving
the rich mélange of East and West bequeathed by British
rule. Nehru's character, he maintained, "reconciles and resolves
the various Indias."
Mehta's Indian odyssey also enabled him to gain some insight
into his own intellectual homelessness. "Those of us who were
born in the twilight of the British raj," he observed, "were wounded
for life. The setting of the British sun left us with an intellectual
contempt for English values, but emotionally we were too far committed
to withdraw. Our whole generation was sacrificed to a country
in transition and we were condemned to live with a permanent hangover."
He apparently felt that all Indian intellectuals, wherever they
live, are spiritual expatriates. In the view of Herbert L. Matthews
(New York Times Book Review, August 21, 1960), Walking
the Indian Streets is "an entertaining and touching work with
flashes of deep insight. It is deliberately keyed to an almost
frivolous and cynical gaiety, with the serious and genuine emotions
the author experiences hidden under a veneer of indirection, understatement,
and mockery."
His impressions of India were followed by two forays into what
might be called the "journalism of ideas." In the first, The
Fly and Fly-Bottle; Encounters with British Intellectuals
(Weidenfeld; Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1963), Mehta tried to pinpoint
the intellectual climate of Great Britain during the heyday of
positivism. Among those whom he interviewed were the philosophers
Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, and the historians Arnold Toynbee,
E. H. Carr, and A. J. P. Taylor. Despite his admiration for the
British tradition in social thought, Mehta soon found himself
appalled at the stuffy little parishes of self-importance that
he discovered in London, Oxford, and Cambridge universities. "Going
for the largest game," he wrote, "creating an intellectual sensation,
striking a posture, sometimes at the expense of truth, stating
the arguments against a book or its author in the most relentless,
sometimes violent way, and gauging the interests of practically
the whole intelligentsia by using every nook and cranny of journalism,
carrying on a bitter war of words in public but keeping friendships
intact in private, generally enjoying the fun of going against
the grainÜall these features were part of the broader English
mental scene."
Predictably, the book was received with acerbity by some English
reviewers. Writing in The Guardian, (September 27, 1963), for
example, Anne Duchene accused Ved Mehta of "writing The New Yorker's
special kind of sophisticated vulgarization for those whose ignorance
is not innocent," and added, "In one sense the book is a very
high-toned gossip column: a vignette of each scholar, and a long
interview, usually ending with tea served by a faceless wife."
On the other hand, William Barrett wrote in The Atlantic Monthly
(November 1963) that although Mehta "eavesdrops shamelessly upon
some squabbles now going on among philosophers and historians
he also preserves a sense of proportion and takes their problems
very seriously. Beneath the gaiety of its surface, Mr. Mehta's
book is an illuminating report on two sectors of British intellectual
life."
Mehta's second and equally barbed study of contemporary Western
thinkers was The New Theologian
(Weidenfeld; Harper, 1966), for which he interviewed a wide range
of religious scholars, including older "liberals" like Karl Barth
as well as "radicals" like John Robinson, William Hamilton, and
Paul Van Buren. Once again, in the course of many hours of conversation
with the champions of a fashionable intellectual stance, Mehta
began to be assailed by doubts as to their clarity of intent.
"What he evidently thinks," Philip Toynbee wrote in The London
Observer (November 6, 1966), "is that most of these men are extremely
muddled speculators [who] use the language of Christianity to
describe a set of beliefs and disbeliefs for which that language
was expressly not intended." Writing in The Christian Century
(December 14, 1966), D. W. Ferm praised Mehta's treatment of the
liberal German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the book and
added: "If Mehta had treated the other theologians with the same
care and discernment, the result would have been a truly definitive
work."
Turning to fiction, Mehta published his first novel, Delinquent
Chacha (Harper, 1966; Collins, 1967), which had been serialized
earlier in The New Yorker. Its protagonist, ChachaÜthe name means
"uncle" in HindiÜis an amiable fraud who in his quest for adventure
journeys to London, where he joins the staff of the All India
Taj Mahal Curry, Chutney and Soup Restaurant. In that tale, Mehta
cleverly exploitsÜand reversesÜa convention of twentieth-century
British satirical writing: that of the conceited wag who goes
to India to lord it over the natives and ends up making a fool
of himself. Although the book did not evoke universal enthusiasm,
Charles Poore of The New York Times (April 6, 1967) praised Mehta's
"gift of laughter" and detected possible influences of Dickens
and Max Beerbohm in his work. Anne Fremantle in The Reporter (May
4, 1967) compared its central character to Falstaff. "Chacha is
four-dimensional," she wrote. "For he is not only himself, tragic
and comic, poignant and farcical, but he is a representative....of
humanity itself."
As a sequel to Walking the Indian Streets, Mehta published Portrait
of India (Farrar, Straus, 1970), a collection of some fifty
of his New Yorker essays about a trip to India in 1965-66. Included
are such topics as famine, birth control, Soviet industrial aid
to India, frontier tribesmen, and descriptions of life in New
Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta. His next book, John
Is Easy to Please; Encounters with the Written and the Spoken
Word (Farrar, Straus, 1971), is a collection of six sketches
of literary figures, including American linguist Noam Chomsky,
based on personal interviews.
Notwithstanding Mehta's excursions into intellectual disciplines,
the central themes of his literary career have always been India
and his own life as an expatriate Indian. As part of a continuing
autobiographical project, and a step in his own search for identity,
Mehta wrote Daddyji (Farrar,
Straus, 1972), which was serialized in The New Yorker. The book,
whose title is derived from a hybrid diminutive, meaning "Beloved
Daddy," is a short, sparely written account of his father's life,
with the narrative ending a few years after Ved Mehta's birth.
Although some critics noted that the character of Dr. Amolak Ram
Mehta does not emerge very clearly from the narrative, the book
was warmly praised for its descriptions of north Indian upper
middle-class life in the first half of the twentieth century and
viewed as an accurate and concrete picture of a world and a state
of mind that passed with the departure of the British.
Daddyji was the first of Mehta's writings to refer directly to
his blindness. In the original edition of Face to Face the publisher
had included a note mentioning Mehta's handicap, but no further
reference was made to it in his subsequent books. In Daddyji Mehta
wrote about the illness that had led to his disability and about
the incorrect diagnosis given by a senior public health officials,
resulting in a delay of treatment that might have saved his sight.
"When I started to write," Mehta told John Corry in an interview
in The New York Times (May 2, 1972), "I wanted to see how I could
exploit my other senses. I reached the point where I wanted to
experiment. To really plumb the depths of the experiment, I wanted
to explore my own life....Partly I write because of blindness,
because of the heightened sense of loneliness that many intelligent,
blind people feel."
While continuing his day-to-day work as a staff writer and reporter-at-large
for the New Yorker, Mehta has been working on a major study of
the life and thought of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a project for which
he obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation travel
and study grant in 1971. "It's very important, at least for me,
to understand Gandhi," Mehta said in an interview in New Delhi
with Bernard Weinraub (New York Times, September 3, 1973). "I'm
not a Gandhian. I don't live like a poor person. . . . I'm not
a vegetarian. I don't follow his path. But I'm a writer and an
Indian and I can't escape those facts. I was born here, and Gandhi
is the only individual I can somehow identify with. . . . Gandhi,
to me, is the real India, the India of my background, my past,
my life."
Ved Mehta is a frail but energetic man who sometimes works ten
hours a day, seven days a week. Unable to write longhand, he composes
his manuscripts with the help of a typewriter and tape recorder,
revising some of his works as many as 150 times. "I am basically
a classicist about writing," he told John Corry. "I care about
the reader, and I explain things." When he is not traveling, Mehta
makes his home in an apartment on Manhattan's West Side, near
Central Park. In 1972 Pomona College conferred an honorary doctorate
on him.
References
NY Post p42 Ja 10 '62 por
NY Times p48 My 2 '72 por
Newsweek 79:106 + My 8 '72 por
Contemporary Authors 1st rev vols 1-4 (1967)
World Authors: 1950-1970 (1975)
Ved Mehta takes
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on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
