Mehta, Ved (Parkash) 1934-

views updated

MEHTA, Ved (Parkash) 1934-

PERSONAL: Born March 21, 1934, in Lahore, India (now Pakistan); naturalized U.S. citizen, 1975; son of Amolak Ram (a doctor and health official) and Shanti (Mehra) Mehta; married Linn Fenimore Cooper Cary (an assistant program officer at Ford Foundation), December 17, 1983; children: Alexandra Sage, Natasha Cary. Education: Pomona College, B.A., 1956; Balliol College, Oxford University, B.A. (with honors), 1959; Harvard University, M.A., 1961; Oxford University, M.A., 1962. Hobbies and other interests: Indian and Western music, cycling, wine.

ADDRESSES: Home and offıce—139 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10021-0324. Agent—Georges Borchardt, 136 East 57th St., 14th Fl., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: New Yorker magazine, New York, NY, staff writer, 1961-94; American Heritage Dictionary, member of usage panel, 1982; Yale University, New Haven, CT, Rosenkranz Chair in Writing, 1990-93, lecturer in history, 1990-93, lecturer in English, 1991-93. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, visiting scholar, 1974; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, visiting professor of literature, 1985, 1986; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, Noble Foundation visiting professor of art and cultural history, 1988; Balliol College, Oxford, visiting fellow in literature, 1988-89; New York University, New York, NY, visiting professor of English, 1989-90; Williams College, Williamstown, MA, Arnold Bernhard visiting professor of English and history, 1994; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, Randolph visiting distinguished professor of English and history, 1994-96.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa, Council on Foreign Relations, Century Association (trustee 1972-75), Tarratine Club of Dark Harbor (Maine).

AWARDS, HONORS: Hazen fellowship, 1956-59; Secondary Education Board Annual Book Award, 1958, for Face to Face; Harvard, Eliot House residential fellowship, 1959-61; Ford Foundation travel and study grants, 1971-76; Guggenheim fellowships, 1971-72, 1977-78; Dupont Columbia Award for excellence in broadcast journalism, 1977-78, for documentary film Chachaji, My Poor Relation; Association of Indians in America Award, 1978; Ford Foundation Public Policy grant, 1979-82; John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, 1982-87; Asian/Pacific Americans Library Association, distinguished service award, 1986; New York City Mayor's liberty medal, 1986; Pomona College, centenary Barrows award, 1987; New York Institute for Humanities fellowship, 1988-92; New York Public Library, Literary Lion medal, 1990; Asian-American Heritage Month award, New York State, 1991; Literary Lion centennial medal, 1996; Columbia University, New York, NY, Freedom Forum, Media Studies Ctr., senior fellow, 1996-97; Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, CA, fellow, 1997-98; Balliol College, Oxford, honorary fellow, 1999. Honorary degrees from Pomona College, D.Litt., 1972; Bard College, D.Litt., 1982; Williams College, D.Litt., 1986; Stirling University, Scotland, Doctor of Letters, 1988; and Bowdoin College, L.H.D., 1995.

WRITINGS:

"continents of exile" series, autobiographical

Daddyji (also see below; originally published in the New Yorker), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1972.

Mamaji (also see below; originally published in the New Yorker), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1979.

Vedi (originally published in the New Yorker), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

The Ledge Between the Streams (originally published in the New Yorker), W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1984.

Daddyji/Mamaji (combined edition of Daddyji and Mamaji,, Picador (New York, NY), 1984.

Sound-Shadows of the New World, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1986.

The Stolen Light, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1989.

Up at Oxford, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1993.

Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The InvisibleArt of Editing, Overlook Press (New York, NY), 1998.

All for Love, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on anEnchanted Island, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2003.

The Red Letters, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2004.

other

Face to Face: An Autobiography, Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1957.

Walking the Indian Streets (travel; originally published in the New Yorker), Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1960, revised edition, with new introduction by the author, Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London, England), 1971.

Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (originally published in the New Yorker), Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1963, 2nd edition, with introduction by Professor Jasper Griffin, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1983.

The New Theologian (originally published in the NewYorker), Harper (New York, NY), 1966.

Delinquent Chacha (originally published in the NewYorker), Harper (New York, NY), 1967.

Portrait of India (originally published in the NewYorker), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1970, reprinted with new introduction, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1993.

John Is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word (originally published in the New Yorker), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1971.

Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (originally published in the New Yorker), Viking (New York, NY), 1977, 2nd edition, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1993.

The New India (originally published in the NewYorker), Viking (New York, NY), 1978.

The Photographs of Chachaji: The Making of aDocumentary Film (originally published in the New Yorker; also see below), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1980.

A Family Affair: India under Three Prime Ministers (sequel to The New India; originally published in the New Yorker), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

Three Stories of the Raj (fiction; originally published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly), Scolar Press, (Berkeley, CA), 1986.

Rajiv Gandhi and Rama's Kingdom (sequel to A Family Affair; originally published in the New Yorker and Foreign Affairs), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1994.

A Ved Mehta Reader: The Craft of the Essay (special collection of writings originally published in the New Yorker), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1998.

contributor to anthologies

Christs, Henry I., and Herbert Potell, editors, Adventures in Living, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962, 1968.

Kneer, Leo, editor, Perspectives, Scott Foresman (Chicago, IL), 1963.

Knickerbocker, K. L., and H. W. Reninger, Interpreting Literature, Holt (New York, NY), 1965, 1969.

Cousins, Norman, editor, Profiles of Nehru, Indian Book Company (Delhi, India), 1966.

Arms, George, William M. Gibson, and Louis G. Locke, editors, Readings for Liberal Education, Holt (New York, NY), 1967.

Havighurst, Walter, Arno Jewett, Josephine Lowery, and Philip McFarland, editors, Exploring Literature, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1968.

Barker, Nicholas P., editor, Purpose and Function inProse, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1969.

Gaver, Mary V., editor, Background Readings in Building Library Collections, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 1969.

Cousins, Norman, editor, Profiles of Gandhi, Indian Book Company (Delhi, India), 1969.

Archer, Jerome W., and Joseph Schwartz, editors, AReader for Writers: A Critical Anthology of Prose Readings, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1971.

Sadasivan, T., editor, Rajaji-93 Souvenir, Sadasivan, T, for Rajaji Ninety-Three Souvenir Committee, 1971.

Cormack, Margaret, and Kiki Skagen, editors, Voices from India, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 1971.

Savage, John F., editor, Linguistics for Teachers, Science Research Associates (Chicago, IL), 1973.

Kitzhaber, Albert R., editor, Style and Synthesis, Holt (New York, NY), 1974.

Fremantle, Anne, editor, A Primer of Linguistics, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1974.

Johnson, Donald J., and Jean E. Johnson, editors, Through Indian Eyes, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 1974.

Havighurst, Jewett, Lowrey, and McFarland, editors, Houghton Mifflin Literature Series, Grade 8, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1978.

Beck, Robert E., editor, Experiencing Biography, Hayden Book (Rochelle Park, NJ), 1978.

Bagchi, Ganesh, editor, ISCE English Language TestPapers, Oxford University Press (New Delhi, India), 1982.

Zola, Irving Kenneth, editor, Ordinary Lives: Voices ofDisability and Disease, Apple-Wood Press (Cambridge, MA), 1983.

Tuttle, Dean W., editor, Self-Esteem and Adjusting with Blindness: The Process of Responding to Life's Demands, Charles C. Thomas (Springfield, IL), 1984.

1985 Medical and Health Annual, Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, IL), 1984.

India: A Teacher's Guide, Asia Society (New York, NY), 1985.

Weiner, Harvey, editor, Great Writing, McGraw Hill (New York, NY), 1987.

Bacon, Phillip, editor, World Geography: The Earth and Its People, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 1989.

Rubinstein, Helge, editor, The Oxford Book of Marriage, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Perkins, George, and Barbara Perkins, editors, Kaleidoscope, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Bates, Linda, editor, Transitions: Paragraph to Essay, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Angela Thirwell, editor, The Folio Anthology of Autobiography, Folio Society (London, England), 1994.

Rustomji-Kerns, Roshni, editor, Living in America:Poetry and Fiction by South Asian American Writers, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1995.

Mazer, Anne, editor, Going Where I'm Coming From:Memoirs of American Youth, Persea Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Purves, Alan C., editor, Scott Foresman Literature andIntegrated Studies, Scott Foresman (Glenview, IL), 1996.

Traveller's Literary Compaion: The Indian Sub-continent, In Print Publishing (Brighton, England), 1996.

Divakaruni, Chitra B., editor, Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings, second edition, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1997.

Harrell, Stevan, editor, The Human Family, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1997.

Rushdie, Salman, and Elizabeth West, editors, Mirror-work: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, Holt (New York, NY), 1997.

Fries, Kennedy, editor, Staring Back: The DisabilityExperience from the Inside Out, Plume (New York, NY), 1997.

Bates, Linda, editor, Transitions: An Interactive Reading, Writing, and Grammar Text, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Banks, James A., and others, editors, Regions:Adventures in Time and Place, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1999.

Hedencrona, Eva, and others, editors, Progress: Topics, Corona, 1999.

Asian American Writers, McDougal Littel (New York, NY), 2000.

Texts from Other Cultures, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Biyas, John and Carol Wershoven, editors, AlongThese Lines: Writing Sentences and Paragraphs, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 2001.

Reath, Mary, editor, Public Lives, Private Prayers, Sorin Books (Notre Dame, IN), 2001.

Globe Literature 2001, Globe Fearon (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2001.

Moseley, Ann, and Jeanette Harris, Interactions: AThematic Reader, Houghton Mifflin (New York, NY), 2003.

Writer and commentator of documentary film Chachaji, My Poor Relation, PBS, 1978, BBC, 1980, the filming of which is recounted in his book The Photographs of Chachaji: The Making of a Documentary Film. Contributor of articles and stories to American, British, and Indian newspapers and magazines, including Atlantic, Saturday Review, New York Times Book Review, Village Voice, World, Political Science Quarterly, Hindustan Times (New Delhi), Asian Post, and Debonaire (Bombay).

Several of Mehta's books have been translated into Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Marathi, Spanish, and Urdu.

SIDELIGHTS: Ved Mehta was born in India and returns there often in his writings, making this country of contradictions his backdrop, whether his account is political or personal. According to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times Magazine, William Shawn, Mehta's editor at the New Yorker (where Mehta was a longtime staff writer), believes that "more than any other writer Mehta has educated Americans about India, illuminating that country with an insider's sensibility and an outsider's objectivity."

As natives of Lahore, India, which is now Pakistan, Mehta's own parents typified the split in India between West and East, between science and ancient tradition. Mehta's father was educated in medicine in British India and England and became an important figure in India's public health service. Mehta's mother, who had a meagre education, was a woman of superstition, confident in the powers of faith healers. When Mehta lost his sight at age four from a bout with meningitis, his mother was convinced his blindness was only a temporary form of punishment and followed a local medicine man's advice, applying antimony to Mehta's eyes and flogging him with twigs, among other things. Mehta's more progressive-minded father believed an education would be the only way for his son to avoid the lot of a blind person in India—alms beggar or chair caner. At age five, Mehta was sent to Bombay's Dadar School for the Blind, an American mission school so lacking in sanitation that the once-healthy boy suffered from numerous infections, including ringworm, typhoid fever, malaria, and bronchitis. At age fifteen, after experiencing the upheaval that accompanied the Partition of India in 1947, he traveled alone to the United States to study at the only American school that would accept him, the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock. From there, Mehta went on to excel at Pomona College in California, at Balliol College at Oxford, England, and finally at Harvard University. In 1961, at the age of twenty-six, he became a staff writer on the New Yorker magazine. Most of his books have appeared first in installments in the New Yorker.

Mehta's first book, Face to Face: An Autobiography, addresses his blindness, but many of his subsequent works avoid this topic. In fact, for a while Mehta demanded that his publishers avoid any reference to his blindness on his book jackets. Writing in the New York Times Book Review in 1960, Herbert L. Matthews noted that "Mehta plays an extraordinary trick on his prospective readers and on anyone who does not know about him or has not read his previous book, Face to Face. . . . He has written [Walking the Indian Streets] about his return to India after ten years' absence as if he had normal vision."

Many of Mehta's books contain elaborate visual imagery, and reviewers refer to him as the blind man who can see better than the rest of us. Carolyn See explained in the Los Angeles Times: "When Mehta shows us the building of a dam; hundreds of brightly clad peasants carrying just a few bricks at a time; when in 'Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles,' Mehta conjures up the evenings when the movement was still young, when the fragrance of blossoms was everywhere and Gandhi's followers stayed up late, out of doors, laughing, rubbing each other's backs—a whole world is given to us, and of course the kicker in all this is that . . . Mehta is blind." It was not until Daddyji, Mehta's biography of his father, that Mehta made reference to his blindness once again, and it was not until a later autobiographical work, Vedi, that he wrote "from the perspective of total blindness," according to Janet Malcolm in the New York Review of Books. "[Vedi] is entirely without visual descriptions. We follow the blind child into the orphanage, and, like him, we never learn what the place or any of the people in it looked like. We hear, we feel, but we see nothing. . . . As the child misses the familiar persons and things of home, so the reader misses the customary visual clues of literature. . . . Not the least of Vedi's originality is this very stylistic denial, which amounts to an approximation of the experience of blindness."

Although Mehta has written nonfiction, a novel, essays, and even a documentary script, highest critical regard has been for his contributions to the autobiographical genre. Face to Face, written when Mehta was in his early twenties, chronicles Mehta's early life, from his childhood in India to his three-year stay at the Arkansas School for the Blind where, among other things, he first encountered racism—"I wondered how dark I was, how much I looked like a Negro," Peter Ackroyd quoted Mehta in the London Times. Commenting in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, Gerald W. Johnson observed, "It is extraordinary when a man at twenty-three has the material for an autobiography that deserves the serious attention of the intelligent, and still more extraordinary when a man so young can present his material in an arresting fashion. . . . Mehta has both material and ability."

Three years after Face to Face came Walking the Indian Streets, Mehta's memoir of his two-month-long visit to India after a ten-year absence. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times Magazine recorded how Mehta had idealized his native country during those years by listening to Indian music and dreaming about an arranged marriage to a beautiful Punjabi girl. The India Mehta encountered, however, disturbed him and shattered his idealistic vision. "Everywhere I went, I was assaulted by putrid odors rising from the streets, by flies relentlessly swarming around my face, by the octopus-like hands of a hundred scabrous, deformed beggars clutching at my hands and feet. My time in the West had spoiled me and I could now hardly wait to get back," Mehta wrote of his experience.

While he wrote numerous books on the politics and culture of a changing modern India during the twelve years following the 1960 publication of Walking the Indian Streets, Mehta eventually turned once more to the autobiographical form and began disclosing his life in very small chunks, developing the years of his earlier autobiography Face to Face into several volumes and then proceeding to cover new ground. Indeed, Mehta's biographical/autobiographical Daddyji and Mamaji describe his parents' lives before he was born. Both books are noted for their adept presentations of the middle-class family in India. "[Daddyji's] value," commented P. K. Sundara Rajan in the Saturday Review, "lies in the fact that . . . Mehta transforms an individual experience into one that is universal." And in his New York Times Book Review assessment of Mamaji, Clark Blaise wrote, "family is the tidiest metaphor for the vastness of India. To understand its compelling and often terrible hold is to possess a special understanding of the culture. . . . Mehta patiently delivers that understanding and courageously presents it without interpretation, limiting even its expected 'warmth' in the service of a sharper clarity." It is also with these two books that "Mehta draws a sharp contrast between his rational, decisive, tough-minded, Western-educated, physician father and his superstitious, backward, uneducated, childish, tenderhearted mother," remarked Malcolm.

The author followed the biographical portraits of his parents with Vedi, which begins with Mehta boarding a train for the Bombay school for the blind, located 1,300 miles from his home. Mehta recounts his years at the Dadar School from age five to eight. In a London Times article, Philip Howard stated that "without sentimentality or self-pity [Mehta] recreates that vanished and alien world in one of the richest works of memory of our century." Though Mehta was frequently fighting disease, reviewers comment on how effectively this well-to-do boy adapted to his slum-like surroundings. Blaise notes in the New York Times Book Review that Vedi "is clearly a mature work. . . . Readers of the two earlier volumes of family biography [Daddyji and Mamaji] will find less of the overt 'India experience' in 'Vedi,' and more of the dreamlike landscape of childhood. The touch and smell of parents, the test of wills, nightmares, pets."

"Now I want to proclaim this autobiography as nothing less than a literary masterpiece," declared Times Literary Supplement contributor R. K. Narayan of Mehta's memoir The Ledge Between the Streams. Howard wrote that in The Ledge Between the Streams "nothing much happens; except the most important thing in the world, a child growing up to accept life and enjoy the world." The Ledge Between the Streams encompasses Mehta's years from age nine to fifteen. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized the Mehta described in this memoir as a "clumsy blind boy, plucky but hopelessly gauche when it came to participating in . . . fun and games—flying kites, riding bicycles and ponies, playing hide-and-seek. . . . In any case, having spent the first half of 'The Ledge' documenting the innocent world of his youth, . . . Mehta then goes on to show how that world was destroyed by the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan," an event that "turned many families, including . . . Mehta's own, into political and religious refugees. It is this depiction of the partition, as filtered through the sensibility of a 12-year-old boy, that distinguishes 'The Ledge' as a memoir." What reviewers also found successful about The Ledge Between the Streams is the fact that the reader forgets its author is blind, which is precisely Mehta's goal.

Mehta moves into his adolescent years with Sound-Shadows of the New World, the account of his first three years in the United States at the Arkansas School for the Blind. According to Mary Lutyens in the Spectator, "the vivid, detailed descriptions of this homesick boy's gradual adaptation to an alien culture are uplifting and enthralling," while Ackroyd believed "the single most important quality of the young . . . Mehta was his courage; Sound-Shadows of the New World is a record of that courage." Ackroyd continued, "Mehta records his life as if his fall into blindness had broken open his perception so that nothing escapes him, and his account has a clarity that is sometimes like clairvoyance . . . he sees the world very clearly; he describes it so carefully, and yet from such an oblique angle, that in parts it is rather like reading some compelling travelogue of an unknown country." This autobiography reveals how the boy who did not know how to eat with a fork and knife when he first arrived in America eventually became president of the student senate and editor of the school newspaper, an experience that convinced him of his desire to become a journalist.

The next installment in the "Continents of Exile" series is The Stolen Light. Beginning when the author is eighteen years old, the book chronicles his years at college during the 1950s when he comes of age and launches himself as a writer. Blind and newly emigrated from India, Mehta "poignantly conveys the agony of wanting to fit into the rigidly coded world of a small American college," wrote Susan Allen Toth in the New York Times Book Review. Praising the author's "self-deprecating honesty, scrupulous memory and finely honed perceptions," the reviewer finds The Stolen Light "awe-inspiring" and a "remarkable story of indefatigable energy and determination."

Up at Oxford recounts the author's undergraduate years at Oxford University in England. An outsider on a number of levels, Mehta nevertheless adapted well at Oxford and graduated with honors. He describes his years at the university's Balliol College from his foreign perspective, exploring the gulf between the university's wealthy public-school boys and its less-privileged grammar-school boys; detailing the formal dress and rigid social mannerisms that still prevailed during his period there (1956 to 1959); and remarking on the college's storied past, with its generation after generation of famous graduates. Reviewing the work in Spectator, Bevis Hillier notes, "Written with a stripping-the-willows honesty, [Up at Oxford] joins the apostolic succession of the best Oxford memoirs."

In 1998, Mehta recalled his experiences writing under William Shawn's editorship in Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, wrote that the book "is a chronicle of [Mehta's] thirty-three years at the New Yorker, twenty-six of them under the editorship of William Shawn." Lehmann-Haupt concluded that "if [Mehta] is not so comprehensive as Brandon Gill was in Here at the New Yorker, he sheds far more light on what the magazine was like to work at."

All for Love breaks the chronological order of the "Continents of Exile" series, returning to Mehta's early twenties shortly after arriving in New York. He narrates with brutal honesty the bitter pain and anguish of four loves—Gigi, Vanessa, Lola, and Kilty—and how they ultimately bring him to Freudian psychoanalysis. According to Kathleen Norris of the New York Times Book Review, the analyst "helps him understand that the willfulness that had served him so well as 'an Indian in permanent exile, belonging nowhere and everywhere' and had driven him to pursue success against incredible odds, was counterproductive in romance."

Miranda Seymour of the London Sunday Times explained that Mehta requires one condition of each of his four loves—they must understand that, and act as though, his blindness is irrelevant and meaningless. Seymour commented on Mehta's "fatal attraction to a type. . . . Beauty is one quality shared by the four deities by whom Mehta is in turn obsessed. Cruelty is the other. It comes in the form of a spectacular indifference to the emotional damage they cause. . . . Love is presented as a trial of endurance, a challenge to his inability to keep up his role as the invincible hero, master of the universe." Seymour found Mehta's approach to relationships intriguing and complex and his confessional tone laudable. She concluded that "the book is remarkable. Mehta is a great stylist; combine this with a story of searing honesty and you have a book that demands an intense response."

Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island is Mehta's tenth book in the "Continents of Exile" series. Seduced by his dream of finally putting down roots in the New World, he finds himself buying a fifteen-acre lot of land in the rugged terrain of Dark Harbor. To build his house, Mehta hires the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, famous for designing the IBM Building in New York and museums that include the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. Underlying this narrative is an allegorical tale about Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man. Even while constructing the house, he finds himself building another edifice—helping to bring into being an enchantment he had thought might elude him. For the house in Dark Harbor is destined to become a home for the woman he falls in love with and marries and, over the years, the children they have together. The eleventh and final book in the series is The Red Letters, which is announced for publication in the spring of 2004.

From 1970 to 1982, Mehta wrote four nonfiction books aimed at sketching the social and political milieu of modern-day India. According to Dowd, Mehta's "reports include vivid descriptions of Indian politics, dinner parties given by the viceroy, the assault of the industrial revolution, the attempts at birth control. His work explores the conflict between East and West in the Indian culture and its mixture of grace and vulgarity." Dowd further recorded professor of modern Indian literature at Columbia University Robin Lewis's estimation that "in a very quiet way, . . . Mehta is breaking the Western stereotypes and getting America to look at India as something other than a grandiose stage setting. He's taking the raw material of his personal experience and combining it with some of the pains, crises and historical dislocations that India has gone through."

Mehta's Portrait of India, published in 1970, "seems as vast as India" to Stephen Spender in the New York Times Book Review: "it is immensely readable, and the reader not only has the sense of immersion in the sights, scents and sounds of India, he also meets representative people from high and low walks of life." New York Times writer Thomas Lask believed that if the reader can get through the first seventy-five pages, "you will find yourself in a first-class book. . . . It is surprising how, by the end of the book, the Indian continent has managed to assume a knowledgeable shape and how the problems begin to make sense in terms of the people and the land."

Of Mehta's political books, his 1977 account entitled Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles received the most attention. Though reviewers have stressed that some four hundred biographies have been written about the "acclaimed father of India," Mehta's tactics have been singled out as unique. As Mehta states in the preface to his book, his desire is "both to demythologize Gandhi and to capture something of the nature of his influence on his followers and the nature of the influence of their interpretations of his life on India." To do this, Mehta traveled to India and England to speak directly with a number of the remaining disciples of Gandhi, something no other biographer had thought to do. As New York Times contributor Paul Grimes remarked, "the interviews make it clear that Gandhi-ism did not survive with them. Some profess to be still propagating the Mahatma's cause, but it is obvious that over the years their interpretations of it have become warped if they ever were otherwise."

Grimes found Mehta's account of Gandhi "much more than a biography" and "a remarkable examination of the life and work of a human being who has been extolled around the world as one of the greatest souls of all time." Other reviewers have criticized Mehta for concentrating too heavily on Gandhi's personal life. Times Literary Supplement reviewer Eric Stokes felt that Mehta, while "busy destroying old myths . . . is silently weaving a new one of his own. . . . The ultimate distortion in Mehta's picture of the Mahatma is . . . that it allows almost no place for the politician." Leonard A. Gordon in the Nation likewise sensed that "Mehta has spent so much time with the private Gandhi, fascinated like his subject with food, sex and hygiene, that we learn almost nothing about the man's great appeal and political skills." Nevertheless, Stokes noted, "Mehta's highly readable book may mark the beginning of a phase when Gandhi is eventually rescued from the hagiographers and given a juster appraisal by his countrymen." In Dowd's interview with Mehta, Mehta mentions his hope that Mahatma's idealism be restored in his native country: "Gandhi had the right vision for a poor country. . . . What people in India need basically is fertilizer, clean water, good seed, good storage facilities . . . , and proper sanitation. Those are the priorities. That's what Gandhi taught."

After the 1982 publication of A Family Affair: India under Three Prime Ministers, Mehta did not write again about modern India until the 1994 publication of Rajiv Gandhi and Rama's Kingdom. Containing essays produced during his visits to India between 1982 and 1993, the book again focuses on the social and political troubles of his native land. In the book, Mehta ponders the assassinations during this period of two Indian leaders, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi; explores the continuing government neglect of the hundreds of millions of Indians who live in severe poverty; and describes social and religious issues such as women's rights and Hindu fundamentalism.

Despite his numerous autobiographical works and political tomes, it is as a staff writer on the New Yorker that Mehta is best known in the United States and England. And though to some he may be an easy man to classify, he said to Dowd: "I don't belong to any single tradition. I am an amalgam of five cultures—Indian, British, American, blind and [the New Yorker]." Publishers Weekly contributor Stella Dong recorded Mehta's lifelong literary intentions: "I'm not just slavishly