Mehta, according to the Times, explained in interviews, “the act of writing in general - and his modus operandi in particular - was a way of retaining mastery over a visual universe that had been denied him nearly all his life, a continuing project of self-location in a world bristling with image.”
In the line of duty, he traversed India, Britain and the United States, including the teeming streets of New York, nearly always alone, with neither dog nor cane, it noted. “One of the most striking hallmarks of Mehta’s prose was its profusion of visual description: of the rich and varied landscapes he encountered, of the people he interviewed, of the cities he visited,” the Times said. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1982, Mehta was long praised by critics for his forthright, luminous prose - with its “informal elegance, diamond clarity and hypnotic power,” as The Sunday Herald of Glasgow put it in a 2005 profile cited by the Times. Mehta “explored the vast, turbulent history of modern India through the intimate lens of his own autobiography,” the New York Times wrote in its obituary. READ: Bharati Mukherjee (J– January 28, 2017): ‘She begged for death’(February 2, 2017) “He gave me a shove, and we’ve been friends ever since,” she was quoted as saying. Madhur Jaffrey, the Indian-born actress and cookbook author, once told Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, that when she first met Mehta, “I tried to take his arm” to help. Mehta walked the streets of the city without a cane or a seeing-eye dog, and he bristled when someone dared try to assist him, the New Yorker wrote. After studying at Pomona College and Oxford University, he began to flourish in his working life as a writer. Mehta came to the United States when he was fifteen, and attended the Arkansas School for the Blind, in Little Rock. “I felt that blindness was a terrible impediment, and that if only I exerted myself, and did everything my big sisters and big brother did, I could somehow become exactly like them,” he wrote.
“Throughout his youth and his maturity as a writer, Mehta was determined to apprehend the world around him with maximal accuracy and to describe it as best he could,” the New Yorker wrote. His book “ The Ledge Between the Streams” describes his life as a blind child in the India of the nineteen-forties, as he learned to read Braille and to ride a bicycle and a horse. Sometime after, he was sent to live and study at an institution for the blind in Bombay.īesides his multivolume memoir, published in book form between 19, his more than two dozen books included volumes of reportage on India, among them “Walking the Indian Streets” (1960), “Portrait of India” (1970) and “Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles” (1977). Mehta’s death at his home in Manhattan Saturday morning was announced by The New Yorker magazine, where he had been a staff writer for 33 years.īorn in pre-partition Lahore to a well-off Punjabi family, Mehta lost his sight when he was three years old, to meningitis. Follow novelist and journalist introduced India to Americans.Ĭelebrated Indian American writer Ved Mehta, who overcame blindness to provide Americans their first introduction to India through his prolific writing on a broad canvas has passed away.
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