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Although blind since he was nearly four, the Indian-born American
writer Ved Mehta has surmounted his disability to become one of
the most versatile contemporary men of letters. In 1957, when
he was twenty-three, he published his first book, a young autobiography
titled Face to Face.
Following the success of that book, Mehta went on to publish 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, history, theology, and linguistics.
In 1972, Mehta received much acclaim for his book Daddyji,
a delicately crafted portrait of his father, a distinguished Indian
public health officer. Between 1961 and 1994, he was a staff writer
and reporter with the New Yorker magazine. Since then,
he has held distinguished chairs at many colleges and universities,
including Yale and Williams College.
Ved (Parkash) Mehta, the fifth of seven children and second
son of Dr. Amolak Ram Mehta and Shanti (Mehra) Mehta, was born
on March 21, 1934 in Lahore, in the Punjab, then in British India
and now in Pakistan. The Mehta family, who later fled the Punjab
after the Indo-Pakistani war of partition in 1947, 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 tropical medicine and public health in Great Britain
and the United States. Returning to Lahore in the late 1920s,
he was appointed junior public health officer for the Punjab.
Making it his mission to try to control the cycle of epidemics
that regularly visited India, Dr. Amolak Ram Mehta (the "Daddyji"
of Ved Mehta's book) became a major figure in the Red Cross Society,
where he was in charge of its anti-tuberculosis campaign. In that
capacity, for many years, he toured the British provinces and
princely states. After India attained independence in 1947, he
became deputy director-general of health services in the national
government.
It was especially tragic—in view of his own crusade against
disease—that Dr. Mehta's child, Ved, was blinded by cerebrospinal
meningitis. The boy, not yet five, was sent by his father to an
American missionary school in Bombay, some thirteen hundred miles
from his home in Lahore, in order to learn Braille and arithmetic.
He was sick much of the time and was returned home in broken health
after three years. For the next seven years, he had very little
schooling, but 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." When he was
fifteen, he won admission to the Arkansas State School for the
Blind in Little Rock. There his verbal gifts were recognized,
and he developed his touch and hearing, as well as his memory,
to an extraordinary level of acuteness. After receiving his high
school diploma from the Arkansas 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 BA degree from Pomona
College in 1956. He then went to England for three years of study
in modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, which granted him
a second BA 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 MA 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 most of his first extended
piece of nonfiction, an autobiography that was published under
the title Face to Face and drew praise for its candor, elegant
prose, and lucid style. Later he contributed stories and articles
to British, American, and Indian newspapers and 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 editorial staff. Mehta had already published in the magazine
an impressionistic account of a summer trip to his native India
after ten years' exile. In it, he related his experiences wandering
around the country with a friend and recorded the conversations,
sounds, and smells that assailed him. Among the people he met
on his journey was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who invited
him for lunch 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 milange 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 lived, were spiritual
expatriates. The articles were published in 1960 as a book entitled
Walking the Indian Streets. In the view of Herbert L. Matthews
(New York Times Rook 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, Mehta tried
to pinpoint the intellectual climate of Great Britain during the
heyday of Oxford philosophy. 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 grain—all these features...were
part of...the broader English mental scene." 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, for which he interviewed a wide range
of religious scholars, including older "liberals" like Karl Barth
as well as "radicals" like John Robinson. Once again, in the course
of many hours of conversation with the champions of a current
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, which had been serialized earlier in the
New Yorker. Its protagonist, Chacha—the name means "uncle"
in Hindi—is an amiable fraud who, in his quest for adventure
journeys to London, becomes a commissionaire of the All India
Taj Mahal Curry, Chutney and Soup Restaurant. In that tale, Mehta
cleverly exploits—and reverses—a 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. 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,
a collection of some fifty of his New Yorker essays about a trip
to India in 1965-66. Included are descriptions of mountains, rivers,
and people, covering topics such as famine, birth control, Soviet
industrial aid to India, frontier tribesmen, life in New Delhi,
Bombay, and Calcutta, indeed, in the whole country. The book is
a quarter of a million words long, and the intent of it is to
evoke a portrait of post-independent India. His next book, John
Is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken
Word, is a collection of six sketches of literary
figures, including American linguist Noam Chomsky, based on personal
interviews. That was followed, in 1977, by a companion volume
to Portrait of India entitled, Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles,
in which Mehta tried to encapsulate the life of one of the most
influential leaders and thinkers of the twentieth century.
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 on an almost Proustian scale, and a step
in his own search for identity, Mehta wrote Daddyji, 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. 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 since Face
to Face to refer directly to his blindness. In the
original edition of Walking the Indian Streets, 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 doctor, resulting in
a delay of treatment that caused him to lose his sight. "When
I started to write," Mehta told John Corry in an interview about
Daddyji
in the New York Times, "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."
Daddyji was a cornerstone of a vast autobiographical series
bearing the omnibus title, Continents of Exile. Each book in the
series is independent and self-contained, but each is also chronologically
and thematically related to the other books. The series includes
Mamaji
(1979), a biographical portrait of his mother; Vedi
(1982), his early school days in India; The
Ledge Between the Streams (1984), his childhood in
British India; Sound-Shadows
of the New World (1986), his discovery of America
in Arkansas, The Stolen
Light (1989), his experiences at college in California,
Up at Oxford (1993), his university years in Britain; Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker (1998), the New Yorker years;
and, most recently, All
For Love (2001), his romantic quest in the sixties.
As the author observes in respect to the series, "[I explore]
the boundaries of time and memory, the clash of culture and self,
and the meaning of place and exile—as I have experienced
them." In a 1984 New York Times Magazine article, he
told the writer of the piece, Maureen Dowd, "I don't belong to
any single tradition. I am an amalgam of five cultures—Indian,
British, American, blind, and The New Yorker."
Ved Mehta has widely commented on radio and television on Indian
politics and has also narrated and written a documentary film
called Chachaji, My
Poor Relation (PBS, 1978 and BBC, 1980), which won
the DuPont Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.
He has received many honors, including half a dozen honorary degrees
(Williams, 1986 and Stirling University, Scotland, 1988), several
Ford Foundation grants, and two Guggenheims. He was a MacArthur
Prize Fellow (1982-1987). In 1999, he was elected honorary fellow
of Balliol College, Oxford.
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 an amanuensis, 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 Upper East Side, where he
lives with his wife
and two children.
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
