It took only a few books, published over two decades, for Gita Mehta to introduce western readers to an India that veered sharply away from stereotypes of the exotic east. As a writer, documentary film-maker and effortlessly charming host in New York, London and New Delhi, she had a gift for belonging everywhere, bringing disparate worlds together with irreverence and insight.
Mehta, who has died aged 80, blended glamour with grit all through her colourful life. She wore chiffon saris at Manhattan parties with élan, but was equally at home reporting on the 1971 Bangladesh war, visiting drought-stricken villages or taking the pungent trek up the first garbage mountains of India’s capital city. She was married to the publisher Sonny Mehta, who died in 2019. They are both survived by their son, Aditya Singh Mehta.
Gita Mehta was born in New Delhi in 1943, a few years before India gained independence from British rule — a moment that she recorded memorably in Snakes and Ladders (1997): “It was three o’clock in the morning and my mother was still dancing at the Roshanara Club in Delhi when her labour pains began.”
Revolution and a fierce love of her homeland ran in her blood, along with the dancing genes. Her father, Biju Patnaik, was one of India’s most respected freedom fighters and a formidable politician in the state of Odisha; her mother, Gyan, ran a home so friendly to revolutionaries on the run that it was known as Absconder’s Paradise.
Mehta studied in Shimla and Bombay before going on to Girton College, Cambridge, followed by film school in London. At Cambridge, she met Sonny Mehta while they were standing in line to see Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; they married some years later, in 1965.
Ian Jack, the late British editor and writer, recalled in his book, Mofussil Junction: “The Mehtas threw parties at which it was possible to meet, say, the Rajmata of Jaipur, or Imran Khan, or Bruce Oldfield, the fashion designer, as well as a gamut of authors that could run to . . . Salman Rushdie, Bruce Chatwin, Germaine Greer, Michael Herr, Ryszard Kapuściński, Clive James . . . Sonny listens to his guests, Gita talks to them.”
Gita had no intention of being a writer — as the wife of a publisher, she felt safely inoculated against that ambition — but at a cocktail party, a guest grabbed her sari, pulled her into his group and said, “Now here’s the girl who’s going to tell us what karma is all about.” She replied tartly: “Karma isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
The guest was Marc Jaffe, head of Bantam Books, and he promptly commissioned one of the most famous books of the 1980s and beyond. Karma Cola, published in 1979, was pithy and cheerfully robust in its scepticism of the flourishing guru industry and the hippies and seekers who flocked to India for their fix of spiritual opium. “Everyone suspected that whatever America wanted, America got,” Mehta wrote. “Why not Nirvana?”
She wrote sparingly in the decades ahead. Raj (1989) is a gossipy blockbuster about princely India that skewered British rule and decadent maharajas alike; A River Sutra (1993) is a loosely connected string of short stories, mellow and reflective in tone. Snakes and Ladders is a collection of punchy essays on modern India, where Mehta took on Indira Gandhi’s 21-month-long declaration of a state of emergency across the country in the mid-1970s, calling the former Indian prime minister “quite loopy”. She also published a coffee-table book on the elephant-headed god, Ganesha.
Mehta felt no pressure to write for the sake of publication, telling the journalist Madhu Jain in 1993: “Our house has always been full of writers greater than I’ll ever be. It makes you think that the world doesn’t need another author.”
But it did, especially in those decades, need Gita Mehta’s confident, sharp-eyed gaze on her homeland and the world beyond. “I wanted to write a postcolonial book which was not an apology,” she told the Independent in 1997. She kept her word, never ironing out the rough edges of India, or British rule, or the western response to both.
One of the stories Mehta committed to paper was about her college days in Bombay. The nuns who ran the institution had posted a notice on the bulletin board, warning students not to go to certain parts of the city because of a huge political demonstration. “I immediately,” Mehta wrote, “caught the first bus to the forbidden.”
For the rest of her life, the writer did exactly that — wherever she was not supposed to venture, she went, gladly.
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