VedMehta, who brought India to NewYorkers, dies at 86
Blind from the age of 3, he composed all of his work orally
Ved Mehta, a longtime writer for The New Yorker whose best- known work, spanning a dozen volumes, explored the vast, turbulent history of modern India through the intimate lens of his own autobiography, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, said.
Associated with the magazine for more than three decades — much of his magnum opus began as articles in its pages — Mehta was widely considered the 20th- century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India.
Memoirs
Besides his multivolume memoir, published in book form between 1972 and 2004, 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), as well as explorations of philosophy, theology and linguistics.
“Ved Mehta has established himself as one of the magazine’smost imposing figures,” The New Yorker’s storied editorWilliam Shawn, who hired him as a staff writer in 1961, told The New York Times in 1982. “Hewrites about serious matters without solemnity, about scholarly matters without pedantry, about abstruse matters without obscurity.”
The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1982, Mehta’s literary style derived partly from his singular way of working: Blind from the age of 3, Mehta composed all of his work orally, dictating long swathes to an assistant, who read them back again and again for him to polish until the work shone like a mirror. He could rework a single article more than a hundred times, he often said.
The fifth of the seven children of Amolak Ram Mehta, a physician, and the former Shanti Mehra, Ved Parkash Mehta was born on March 21, 1934, in Lahore, in what was then British India and known today as Pakistan.
Mehta had been educated in Britain and on returning to India became a prominent public health official.
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.”