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In our stridently feminist western world, Shanti Devi could be
a creature from another planet. She was removed from school at
the age of 14, so that her head would not be filled with ideas
that would spoil her as a wife. When she was 17, and therefore
considered by the neighbours almost past it, a marriage was arranged
for her with a man she had never met. She spoke no English, had
never been inside a shop, and was a superstitious and conventional
Hindu.
She is now 72, and has grown into a typical Indian mater-familias,
subservient, self-effacing, convinced that a woman’s place
is in her husband’s home, until he gets tired of her: how
different, how very different, from the home lives of our own
dear western women!
One of her eight children has now published her biography, Mamaji
(Oxford, £6.95). You would expect such alien roots to be
interesting only in an exotic way. But the author is Ved Mehta.
So the story of Shanti Devi Mehta by her blind son is perceptively
and beautifully written, and has resonances for all of us about
our mothers. In the same way Anna Karenina may superficially
inform us about the way of life of the Russian upper classes in
the 1870s. But essentially, from such things as the story of Kitty
and Levin, we recognize certain truths about ourselves. The resonances
cut across the boundaries of nationality, culture, and time.
Shanti Devi Mehta’s fifth child, Ved, was born in 1934.
When he was four an attack of meningitis left him permanently
blind. In those days schools for the blind in India were few and
far between, and terrible. So, like his mother’s, Ved’s
Indian education stopped at the Fourth Standard. But his father
had an admirable, almost Jewish, conviction that education was
the best inheritance that he could leave his children.
At the age of 15 Ved was sent half way across the world to the
Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, where he learnt
English for the first time and much else; thence to Pomona College;
thence to Balliol; thence to Harvard. It was only his eyes that
were dim. At the age of 20, out of loneliness of being a blind
Indian cut off from his roots he wrote his first book of autobiography,
Face to Face.
While at Balliol, he wrote an autobiographical sequel of 20,000
words. It was too long for The Observer. But William Shawn,
the editor of The New Yorker, looked at it, liked it, and published
it. Since then Ved has been a staff writer for the great magazine,
writing a stream of books and articles on everything from India
to theology, philosophy, and fiction.
At around the milestone of his fourtieth birthday, he decided
that the best thing a writer can do is write the books that only
he can write: It is difficult to see our own parents as people.
We spend our time seeing them as figures of authority or folly,
hearing their stories and watching their lives without understanding
them. So Ved came to grips with his past by writing the life of
his father, Daddyji: the success story of a boy from an
Indian village who came to the city, was sent to England to train
as a doctor, and made good as a distinguished servant of the British
Raj in its sunset.
Ved then decided that there was material for a contrapunta account
of his mother, and her roots in an Indian city: “They are
extremely different people. Father is extrovert, an optimist,
and sunny. Mother is a pessimist from the dark side of the Indian
tradition. Father was highly educated in England. Mother was uneducated,
orthodox, all the things I rebelled against. I think it is easier
for a man to confront the truth about his father than his mother.”
Both books stop at the point when the infant Ved is struck blind,
and are intended as the cornerstones of the autobiographical books
that he intends to write over the next 30 years, as the spirit
moves him. Both books, and his recent enchanting television programme
"Chachaji," concerning the poor relation of the Mehta
family, are about a strange alien world, haunted by death and
tragedy, resignation, comedy and love.
But both books are rich with universal truths about family life
that are as applicable in Tooting Bec as in Lahore. Ved says:
"I know that it is no longer fashionable to be interested
in people’s families. It is considered bad form in America
to ask what somebody’s father did. But to me people simply
do not make sense unless one knows their biographies and backgrounds.
Whatever our race, we all eventually have to face our mothers
and come to terms with them. We all suffer the trauma of separation
from them. There are certain universal resonances about families,
whether they are Indian or English. The nuclear family is under
threat of dissolution in the West: but in my opinion it is still
the fundamental social institution. I am interested in the play
of character, in the compromises and truces that allow both
partners in a marriage not only to survive, but to flower.”
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way. The Mehta's extraordinary and happy
family is a joy to read about. It also has moving and instructive
echoes for all of us of woman born.
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Ved Mehta takes
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