Return to India

The author of this book is an Indian, a journalist with an Oxford education, and a friend of the poet Dom Moraes. It is a lucid, sometimes witty account of his return to India in the company of Moraes, and their adventures in Delhi, Benares, Nepal and Calcutta. He does not avoid the knottiest problems of the New India – extreme poverty, and the deficiencies of political life. The most interesting sections of the book describe his meeting with the dying Nepalese poet, L.P. Devkora, a pilgrimage to Hardwar to bathe in the Ganges, and a long interview with Nehru. Mr Mehta is an orthodox Hindu.

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The tension between Oxford culture and diffidence and the pieties of Indian family life give his account a deeply confessional flavour. As a portrait of the situation of a modern Indian intellectual, it could hardly be improved on. The family tailor, who has known and loved Mr Mehta as a child, rebukes him –

Though he loves Englishmen, and therefore England, he chides me for my English ways. ‘Sahib,’ he says, ‘you’re Indian, and not English.’ Then he returns to his machine and spins the wheel, circle upon circle, stopping now and again to give me counsel. He recommends a visit to Hardwar, where for untold centuries Indians have washed away their sins and deposited the ashes of the dead . . .

The suggestion strikes me as bizarre. My English self recoils from the centuries of superstition behind his words. But somehow I feel impelled to go to Hardwar . . .

In a sense Mr Mehta, like Dom Moraes, belongs neither to India nor to England. But his final choice is to identify himself with his motherland; and he is helped towards it by Nehru’s tolerant wisdom and encouragement.

It is a surprise to find out from the Publisher’s Note that Mr Mehta is totally blind.

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