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 India
contains one-sixth of the world’s people. It is the world’s
largest democracy. Its culture is old and great. Its political
importance to the future of mankind may prove to be crucial. Yet
to much of the Western world India is still virtually unknown.
Portrait of India, based on Ved Mehta’s years of study
of India and his months of travel throughout the country, is the
first definitive book on present-day India, and is likely to be
historic in its singular power to make India, at last, real and
comprehensible to Western readers. Born and brought up in India,
educated in American universities and at Oxford, Mr. Mehta has
a sensibility that is neither wholly Western nor wholly Eastern—an
exquisite balance of the rational and the intuitive.
 Employing
the journal form, he sets down a first-hand report on, among a
multitude of other things, India’s early experiences with
the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution (introducing
the spirit of free inquiry into an uncongenial society), the abortive
invasion of India by China, India’s recent war with Pakistan,
India’s Five-Year Plans, the abrupt arrival of the twentieth
century in India’s villages, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Sikhism,
Calcutta, Bombay, Goa, the Ganges, the Himalayas, and the southern
(Communist-governed) state of Kerala, and he records talks with
politicians, soldiers, engineers, planners, priests, maharajas,
economists, workers, farmers, teachers, students, musicians, dancers,
filmmakers, philosophers, and poets—a gathering that includes
the incomparable film director Satyajit Ray, Jayaprakash Narayan
(direct political descendant of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave), and
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The scale and design of Mr. Mehta’s
work on India are appropriately majestic. Mr. Mehta is, however,
an artist, not an encyclopedist, and what he has created is a
vast but subtle mosaic of scenes, impressions, atmospheres, moods,
conversations, and historical and political reflections, all of
which together convey, as nothing before has done, the essence
of that awesome land.
Buy
this book
Excerpted Reviews
“This book… is immensely readable…. The reader
not only has the sense of immersion in the sights, scents, and
sounds of India [but] also meets representative people from high
and low walks of life.” – Stephen Spender, New
York Times Book Review
“A kaleidoscope of India’s infinite variety, of faiths,
languages, climates, landscapes, problems, and personalities.
Ved Mehta considers each seriously, unhurriedly, humorously, deeply.
A book to ponder, to keep and to refer to often.” –
Anne Freemantle, Commonwealth
"He is well read, widely informed, brimming with curiosity."
– Raymond Mortimer,
Sunday Times (London)
"Mr. Mehta writes uncommonly well and is a remarkable observer."
– A.C. Dharker, Scotsman
(Edinburgh)
"Portrait of India is not only one of the most
honest works written about the country in recent years, it is
also something very different-a formidably true book that employs
a unique perception, without sensation or bias of any kind. And
to its informational value one must add the quality of the prose.
India has produced a number of excellent practitioners of literary
English, such as R.K. Narayan, Nirad Chauhuri, and Bhalachandra
Rajan. Mehta equals the best of them, and in his latest volume
he writes at the top of his form....Mehta knew the right people
to get him permits into the normally forbidden sensitive border
regions of NEFA (Northeast Frontier Agency), Sikkim, and Ladakh.
He went to remote military outposts, saw rebel Naga leaders, and
called on the breathless American queen of Sikkim....It is in
these chapters that one realizes how far Mehta has in fact drifted
from his background; I have come across no Indian journalist-not
even the formidable Frank Moraes-who looks upon Indian government
policy with quite so sharp an eye for the specious....Mehta takes
us to the dark and shadowy regions of Indian life: to the horrors
of Calcutta, a dying city (its harbor is silting up) filled with
dying people, and the lesser but more flamboyant miseries of Bombay;
to the rampant overpopulation of Kerala, and the endemic famine
in Orissa and Bihar....I have been unable to find an error of
fact-or, for that matter, any important distortion of judgment-when
Mehta deals with the mainstream of Indian tradition and contemporary
life." – George Woodcock, The
New Leader
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