From Lahore to London to New York by way of India: Ved Mehta’s unflinching gaze — and prose

IN THE starting, arguably, was Ved Mehta. Long earlier than writers similar to Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth would change into the ambassadors of Indian English writing to the West, a younger man born in pre-Independent India discovered a voice and area within the New York literary scene within the Sixties. Mehta died in New York on the age of 86.
“We are extremely sorry to learn about the passing of Ved Mehta. He was a master of the autobiographical genre and a pioneer of Indian writing in English. We will remember him for his keen insight into Indian society and what it means to bridge the gap between the east and the West,” mentioned Meru Gokhale, writer, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India.
Mehta leaves behind a outstanding legacy as a memoirist, and essayist for The New Yorker — and a person who, early on, seized upon his topic: the outstanding life and instances of Ved Mehta and his household, which he wrote about, over three many years, in his 12-volume autobiography, Continents of Exile.
Born in 1934 in Lahore to a Punjabi household, younger Ved misplaced his imaginative and prescient on the age of three. Remarkably for that point, his father, a London-educated public well being officer refused to imagine that was a everlasting setback; he despatched him first to a college for the blind in Bombay — after which, on the age of 15, to a different blind college in Arkansas, US.
He was a scholar in California when he started writing his first guide, Face to Face (1957) — the autobiography of a younger man in his 20s, who had overcome nice odds, from blindness to the tumult of Partition, to style a sturdy self-independence. It was the primary occasion of what novelist and critic Nilanjana S Roy described as Mehta’s “need to set it all down”. “It was written out of a feeling that I could partly alleviate a life of deprivation by writing about it,” Mehta wrote.
In the following 20 years, Mehta discovered a mentor in The New Yorker editor William Shawn, who inspired him to write down on topics as diversified as theology and philosophy, R Okay Narayan and Satyajit Ray. In a 2009 Idea Exchange held within the Delhi workplace of The Indian Express, he recalled: “One thing I learnt from The New Yorker was the minute you start thinking about your readers you are lost.” Shawn, who thought-about Mehta a protege, known as his “prose style – airy, elegant, marvellously clear”.
More strikingly, Mehta’s writing carried a surfeit of visible element that might typically flummox his readers — and result in one of the vital fascinating instances of mistaken literary id. In The World is What It Is, the biography of V S Naipaul by Patrick French, the creator recounts, “A literary groupie is searching for Ved Mehta, disbelieving that a blind writer could produce such vivid descriptive prose. Finding a distinguished Indian man sitting on a sofa, she waves her hand in front of his face while he looks on unblinking”. She is satisfied Mehta is blind, till she is corrected by somebody: “That isn’t Ved, that’s V S Naipaul”. It was a narrative that Mehta was recognized to recount, too, with a depraved chuckle.

In the Nineteen Seventies, an opportunity dialog together with his father, Amolak Ram Mehta, set Mehta off on the collection of books — a million-plus phrases in all — that discover and doc the lifetime of his dad and mom and household. Writing at a time when, as he recalled, “the image of India was of a leprous beggar crawling along Calcutta streets”, he turned the deal with the common expertise of residence and household in books similar to Daddyji and Mamaji. “My process of writing is assembling details, assembling material,” he mentioned. The private story additionally advised a bigger story of the north Indian residence in pre-Independent India, and the large subterranean shifts in Indian society.
In his subsequent books similar to The Stolen Light, Up at Oxford, All for Love and The Red Letters, Mehta held up his outstanding life — of a person who misplaced his sight however normal a wealthy life — to a gentle, unflinching gaze. To the delight and exasperation of his readers in India and elsewhere, it was a narrative that discovered resonance in their very own.