Ved Mehta

Ved (Parkash) Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a distinguished Indian writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of three as the result of a long bout of cerebrospinal meningitis. His father, a doctor, tried to give him an education, like his other children, so that the boy could become a self-supporting citizen of the world.

Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University. His first book was published in 1957. Since then he has written 24 books, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications, including the "The New Yorker", where Mehta worked as a staff writer for 33 years.

He is the recipient of several awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Prize. He has been a visiting Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, held the Rosenkranz Chair in writing at Yale University and taught Literature and History at a number of colleges and universities.

At the age of sixteen he went to a school for the blind in Arkansas, where he completed his elementary and high school education in three years. From there he went on to Pomona, Oxford and Harvard.

Upon returning to India he felt like a foreigner in his own country and set out to re-discover it. He traveled extensively and met hundreds of people for writing his books "Walking the Indian Streets" and "Portrait of India". Years later he also wrote a book, "Gandhi and his Apostles", because of a profound realization that rich and privileged Indians live in a bubble that bobs up and down on an ocean of poverty, and that Gandhi, like himself, was from that bubble of privilege, for Gandhi too had gone on to study Law in England.

His first book, "Face to Face", a youthful autobiography, was published in 1952, just before he went to Oxford. He dictated it to his first love during his intensely lonely years at Pomona college in California. His blindness prevented him from joining the fast set with their large cars, and he felt like a blind Scherezade telling his story to his amanuensis.

His forays into fiction include "Three Stories from the Raj". Ved Mehta has been writing books for over fifty years, and chose to be a writer over the option he had of being an academician. He writes because he has to, from an inner need and compulsion, and often, as he wryly adds, he "goes on adding to a book long after it has been published."

But notwithstanding his books on India, his forays into fiction, and his long tenure as a staff writer for the New Yorker from 1961 to 1994, his writing appeal is intensely autobiographical.

His eleven volume memoir, "Continents of Exile", was completed while working at the same time on other books, over a period of thirty-two years, from 1972 to 2004.

Beginning with the first two volumes, "Daddyji" and "Mummyji", "Continents of Exile" covers the saga of the Mehta and Mehra clans from mid-nineteenth century British India, through Independence and the turmoil of Partition in 1947, as well as his own experiences in a boarding school for the blind at the age of five, as a college student in California and at Oxford in the 1950's, his agonized search for love, his dangerous attempts to live a "normal" life, as though he were not blind, and culminates in "The Red Letters", in which he writes about his father's passionate love affair with a long-lost love who came back into his life as his wife's best friend, and how it affected his mother.

Each of the volumes of "Continents of Exile" can be read independently. They are rich in detail, vivid descriptions, and permeated with his compassion, and his profound insight into himself and his fellow men. At the heart of the series is "Vedi", in which he vividly recalls his experiences at a boarding school for the blind in Bombay in the 1940's. His father had sent him there at the age of five in the mistaken belief that it was a posh, British-type boarding school for blind children. In fact, it was a school and an asylum for destitute blind children, some of them had been beggars. Though little Vedi was given special privileges because of the handsome fee his father paid, like sleeping on a bed with a mattress, instead of wooden planks, and having his meals with the Principal and his family, and was exempted from the class of learning "how to cane chairs", he grew to love his humble classmates.

In "The Ledge between the Streams" he describes the lonely years that followed, as his family did not know how to educate a blind child. He spent much time with the servants in their simple quarters on the grounds of his parents bungalow and learned to feel a profound compassion for their humble but useful lives of loyalty, love and service.

Old photographs of the author's extended family and himself as a child can be seen on his website, as well as Ved Mehta with his wife and children to-day.

Criticism

Mehta was the subject of an unflattering profile by Jennet Conant in the September 1989 issue of Spy magazine. Titled "Slaves of The New Yorker," it documented his reliance on and emotional abuse of a string of editorial assistants, known as "Vedettes." The article and an accompanying sidebar (titled "The Long and the Short of It--But Mostly the Long of It") described Mehta's autobiographical writings as prolix, self-indulgent, and boring.

Publications

*“Face to Face,” Atlantic-Little, Brown, Boston, 1957, and Collins, London, 1958. (Secondary Education Annual Book Award, 1958. BBC, serial reading on Light Programme, 1958; dramatization on Home Programme, 1959.)
* “Walking the Indian Streets,” Atlantic-Little, Brown, Boston, 1960, and Faber & Faber, London, 1961 (revised edition, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1971).
*“Fly and the Fly-Bottle,” Atlantic-Little, Brown, Boston, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1963 (second edition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, with introduction by Jasper Griffin).
*“The New Theologian,” Harper & Row, New York, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1966.
*“Delinquent Chacha” (fiction), Harper & Row, New York, and Collins, London, 1967.
*“Portrait of India,” Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970 (second edition, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1993).
*“John Is Easy to Please,” Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, and Secker & Warburg, London, 1971.
*“Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles,” The Viking Press, New York, and André Deutsch, London, 1977 (reissued, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1993).
*“The New India,” The Viking Press, New York, and Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1978.
*“Photographs of Chachaji,” Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, and Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981.
*“A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers,” Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, and Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983.
*“Three Stories of the Raj” (fiction), Scolar Press, Berkeley and London, 1986;
*“Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom,” Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995.
*“A Ved Mehta Reader: The Craft of the Essay,” Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998.

*CONTINENTS OF EXILE (autobiography):
**“Daddyji,” Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, and Secker & Warburg, London, 1972
**“Mamaji,” Oxford University Press, New York, 1979, and Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980
**“Vedi,” Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, and Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983 (BBC, serial reading on “Book at Bedtime,” 1990)
**“The Ledge Between the Streams,” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, and Harvill Press, Collins, London, 1984
**“Sound-Shadows of the New World,” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, and Collins, London, 1986
**“The Stolen Light,” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, and Collins, London, 1989
**“Up at Oxford,” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, and John Murray (Publishers), Ltd., London, 1993
**“Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker,” Overlook Press, Woodstock and New York, 1998 and Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 2005
**“All For Love,” Granta Books, London, and, Thunder’s Mouth Press/ Nation Books, New York 2001
**“Dark Harbor,” Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, New York, 2003 and Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 2005
**“The Red Letters,” Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, New York, 2004 and Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 2005 (concluding volume)

External links

* [http://www.vedmehta.com/ Ved Mehta's website]
* [http://wiredforbooks.org/vedmehta/ 1986 audio interview with Ved Mehta at Wired for Books.org] by Don Swaim
* [http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2002/01/17/3/a-conversation-with-author-ved-mehta Interview with Charlie Rose]