| Book extracts: Page
1 (1960) | Page
2 (1960) | Page
3 (1971) | Page
4 (1971) | Page
5 (1971)
After ten years of study in England and America, Ved Mehta revisited
his home in India in the summer of 1959. In this book he gives
a sensitive and vivid account—sometimes deeply serious, sometimes
very funny—of his attempt to reidentify himself first with
his family, then with the military and civil leaders of the Indian
state. He is joined by his great friend from Oxford, the poet
Dom Moraes, and together they spend a carefree month meeting Indian
writers and poets, enjoying the social life of New Delhi, Nepal,
and Calcutta, and speaking at Indian universities. Ved Mehta then
returns alone to Delhi to reflect on what he has seen and heard,
to make an ancestral pilgrimage to Haridwar, and—the climax
of his visit home—to meet Nehru.
Ved Mehta’s first book, Face to Face,
was widely acclaimed as a brilliant and moving piece of autobiographical
writing, and Walking the Indian Streets and Portrait
of India have confirmed his reputation as one of the most
interesting writers to emerge from postwar India. Walking the
Indian Streets was first published here in 1961, and this
is a new, revised edition.
Buy
this book
Excerpted Reviews
“Ved Mehta writes with a tender, humorous fatalism that
is both extremely attractive and completely Indian. What he doesn’t
say—what he implies—is often of more importance than
what he states categorically, and his prose has a swift, subtle,
gliding quality that can capture a character or a scene with amazing
force and brevity.” – Peter Greave, Books
and Bookmen
“Ved Mehta has a unique gift for expressing himself with
sensitivity and delicacy. It is quite unsentimental, folded in
beautiful prose, and handed out with humour. He is a natural writer
furthermore and no phenomenon whose asides are more impressive
than his narrative. By revealing India through himself, Ved Mehta
has produced something that seemed difficult, a worthy successor
to the autobiography of his childhood, Face to Face.”
– David Pryce-Jones, Time
and Tide
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