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To be at Oxford: the university had occupied Ved Mehta’s
imagination ever since he was a small, blind Hindu boy, during
the British Raj. His quest for learning had taken him from India,
where education for the blind consisted of little more than confinement
in an orphanage, to America, where he attended high school in
Arkansas and college in California. Now, in this volume, he journeys
to England, to earn what he saw as the highest mark of intellectual
attainment—an Oxford honors degree from Balliol College.
 Few
foreign undergraduates can have entered the stream of English
life with more verve and gusto than Ved. While he is not surprised
at being intellectually challenged at Oxford by the erudition
of his tutors, he is floored by the achievements of his contemporaries.
Believing his own sketchy educational background to be an all
but insurmountable handicap, he struggles mightily to keep up
with them. Still, neither his friends nor his pursuits are just
scholarly. He is elected to a debating society that mirrors the
House of Commons and develops verbal dexterity. He becomes part
of a literary circle centered on a mercurial and captivating young
poet. He is seized by a strong desire to be accepted into upper-class
society, and in his speech he cultivates the vocabulary and the
cadence of an English gentleman. As time goes on, he is charmed
by numerous young women with upper-crust accents, and is befriended
by a lord, whose ancestral castle he visits for a shooting party
during a Christmas vacation. All the same, in the land of those
who once ruled India he manages to come to terms with his own
ethnic heritage.
Few foreign undergraduates can have entered the stream of English
life with more verve and gusto than Ved. While he is not surprised
at being intellectually challenged at Oxford by the erudition
of his tutors, he is floored by the achievements of his contemporaries.
Believing his own sketchy educational background to be an all
but insurmountable handicap, he struggles mightily to keep up
with them. Still, neither his friends nor his pursuits are just
scholarly. He is elected to a debating society that mirrors the
House of Commons and develops verbal dexterity. He becomes part
of a literary circle centered on a mercurial and captivating young
poet. He is seized by a strong desire to be accepted into upper-class
society, and in his speech he cultivates the vocabulary and the
cadence of an English gentleman. As time goes on, he is charmed
by numerous young women with upper-crust accents, and is befriended
by a lord, whose ancestral castle he visits for a shooting party
during a Christmas vacation. All the same, in the land of those
who once ruled India he manages to come to terms with his own
ethnic heritage.
In Up at Oxford Ved Mehta recalls the nuances of
his conversations and his meditations, the range of his youthful
emotions, and the sounds, smells, and tastes of undergraduate
life, and along the way he draws memorable portraits of; among
others, novelists, poets, scholars, and peers. He catches people
in their youth who later make significant contributions to politics
and letters, and also some whose youthful promise turns to failure
and tragedy. And he introduces us to various brilliant figures
who made Oxford the pinnacle of intellectual life in the fifties.
Up at Oxford is unlike any other account of university
life. Told with wit and candor, Ved Mehta’s journey to his
degree—from the awkward moments at his freshman dinner to
the anxious days and nights of his final examinations—captures
a time and a place worth discovering and remembering.
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