hitmouse
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- Jul 3, 2011
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Walking the Indian Streets (1959) by Ved Mehta. This was a chance purchase of a slim Penguin found in an Oxfam bookshop. It is essentially the travelogue of Mehta, returning home to India for a couple of months after years at school and university in the USA and UK (Harvard and Oxford) and trying to gain an understanding of his heritage. He hooks up with his Oxford friend Dom Moraes and they swing through aristocratic and literary Delhi, Calcutta, and Kathmandu in the late 1950s. They meet Jawaharlal Nehru, a young Dalai Lama, and have conversations with a number of literary notables including Han Suyin, Khushwant Singh, Nirad Chaudhuri, and the Nepalese poet Devkota as he lays dying on the banks of a holy river. They get drunk and have a series of misadventures, staying in an old palace in Nepal, getting lost in the red light district of Calcutta etc.
Beautifully observed and written. I had vaguely heard of Ved Mehta but knew nothing about him until I looked him up after reading this book. Clearly came from a family of some means. He was completely blind from the age of 3 (never mentioned in this book), wrote for the New Yorker for many years, and was based in the USA.
It turns out that Mehta’s partner in crime, Dom Moraes wrote his own account of the same trip as Gone Away: an Indian Journey (1960). I was curious, so I purchased that and have just finished it. A slightly Rashomon effect of reading the same story via 2 different writers. Moraes is equally funny but more melancholy. He is also trying to understand India after years abroad. This book starts in Bombay, returning to his parents' apartment (his father was editor of the Times of India) where the servants line up to great him, then heading off to Delhi with his father, where he takes a suite at Claridge’s and drinks a lot, meeting up with Mehta & co. After Mehta goes back to the USA, Moraes heads up to Sikkim with a Calcutta-based journalist to try to find out what is happening at the Indo-Chinese border, where there had been threats and skirmishes.
These two describe a post-Raj world that has now largely disappeared, and I found these books unexpected and fascinating. I think I will follow up on some of the previously unknown-to-me writers they mention, starting with Nirad Chaudhuri.
Beautifully observed and written. I had vaguely heard of Ved Mehta but knew nothing about him until I looked him up after reading this book. Clearly came from a family of some means. He was completely blind from the age of 3 (never mentioned in this book), wrote for the New Yorker for many years, and was based in the USA.
It turns out that Mehta’s partner in crime, Dom Moraes wrote his own account of the same trip as Gone Away: an Indian Journey (1960). I was curious, so I purchased that and have just finished it. A slightly Rashomon effect of reading the same story via 2 different writers. Moraes is equally funny but more melancholy. He is also trying to understand India after years abroad. This book starts in Bombay, returning to his parents' apartment (his father was editor of the Times of India) where the servants line up to great him, then heading off to Delhi with his father, where he takes a suite at Claridge’s and drinks a lot, meeting up with Mehta & co. After Mehta goes back to the USA, Moraes heads up to Sikkim with a Calcutta-based journalist to try to find out what is happening at the Indo-Chinese border, where there had been threats and skirmishes.
These two describe a post-Raj world that has now largely disappeared, and I found these books unexpected and fascinating. I think I will follow up on some of the previously unknown-to-me writers they mention, starting with Nirad Chaudhuri.
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