Mehta, Ved (1934-2021), was an Indian-born writer known primarily for his autobiographical writing and his journalism. He also wrote several books on Indian society and politics, discussing the ways that they have changed since the end of British rule in 1947 and the partition of colonial India. Most of his writing first appeared in The New Yorker magazine, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1994.
An attack of meningitis at the age of 3 left Mehta blind, but his work often contained detailed visual descriptions. He dictated his writing to assistants. Mehta referred to his blindness in his first book, Face to Face: An Autobiography (1957). He chronicled the lives of his parents in Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979). Vedi (1982), The Ledge Between the Streams (1984), and Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986) followed Ved Mehta’s own life from the age of 5, when he was first sent away to school, and through his early adulthood, when he began studying in the United States. The later 5 books became part of an 11-volume autobiographical series called “Continents of Exile” (1972-2004).
Mehta wrote an account of his return to India after a 10-year absence in Walking the Indian Streets (1960). Portrait of India (1970) is a long, ambitious study of Indian society. Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1977) is a study of the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi and his philosophy, and the way interpretations of these changed after Gandhi’s death in 1948. Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom (1994) is a collection of Mehta’s essays on India that focus on the country’s social and political difficulties. The book is a sequel to A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers (1982). Mehta also wrote a novel, Delinquent Chacha (1967), and Three Stories of the Raj (1986). Collections of his shorter essays on non-Indian subjects were also published.
Ved Parkash Mehta was born on March 21, 1934, in Lahore, India (now Pakistan). He attended the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay (now Mumbai), after which he moved to the United States to study at the Arkansas School for the Blind, in Little Rock, Arkansas. He later graduated from Pomona College, in Claremont, California, in 1956, and gained further degrees from Harvard University in the United States and from Balliol College, Oxford University, in the United Kingdom. He became a U.S. citizen in 1975. Mehta died on Jan. 9, 2021.
