“You stand on geography as a writer. Even if you’re writing about Superman, you have to invent a planet for him to come from; you can’t write in a void.” Gita Mehta’s writings, as she testified in the aforementioned 2002 interview to her publishers, were rooted in a love for the Indian street while brimming with an unsentimental air of critique. She was unafraid to criticise India and those looking down on India – as is apparent with her many stories that assumed the role of bureaucrats, pilgrims and orientalist foreigners, unpeeling the unthinkable contradictions that make up India. “She would’ve been very dismayed by today’s Hindutva and hate politics, as well as the Congress’s dynastic politics,” says historian Ramachandra Guha. The daughter of former Odisha CM Biju Patnaik and sister of current CM Naveen Patnaik, Mehta died on Saturday at the age of 80. Mehta, who was born in 1943, grew up to “make modern India accessible to Westerners and a whole generation of Indians who have no idea what happened 25 years before they were born.” That is evidenced in her first book, a satirical non-fiction work, Karma Cola (1979), about a group of foreigners seeking mystical enlightenment from the east and getting bungled up in their pursuit. “The seduction lay in the chaos. They thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong,” reads a passage tweeted by writer Nilanjana Roy after Mehta’s passing. Her second work, Raj (1989), turns to fiction and tells the story of a princess in pre-Independence India, the daughter of a king who ruled over two provinces. This was her first stab at making stories up, a sharp departure from her rigorous and prolific career as a journalist, making documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corporation and the American National Broadcasting Corporation, with her work on the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War bringing her widespread acclaim. In the 2002 interview, when asked what fiction allows that non-fiction doesn’t, she invoked 19th century French writer Honoré de Balzac: “Fact is finite, emotion is infinite.” Mehta was married to veteran editor and publisher Sonny Mehta, and the couple lived across London, New York and India. Her saris, irreverent wit, eclectic knowledge and domestic collection of textiles and carpets were legend, as was her large-heartedness. At a cocktail party in the 1990s, designer Laila Tyabji was feeling guilty over the champagne everyone was drinking, capable of funding an entire family of female yarn-spinners she knew from rural Bihar, bonded to a moneylender’s astronomical interest rates. “How much money would it cost to pay off their debts?” asked Mehta. Tyabji quickly calculated the amount for roughly 100 women. “I’m writing another book at the moment,” replied Mehta, “I’ll give you the royalties when it’s published, then you can pay off that horrible man.” Months later, River Sutra (1993), a short-fiction collection about a jaded bureaucrat exploring the Narmada River, was published. A paycheque was timely delivered to Tyabji, who relieved the women’s debts and helped set up a weaving project for the women which sold for lakhs of rupees in Delhi. Mehta returned to non-fiction with Snakes and Ladders (2002), a collection of essays about India having completed 50 years of Independence. “India is a place where worlds and times are colliding with huge velocity: we're putting satellites into space, and we have bullock carts; there's that constant tension and contradiction of immense sophistication and an almost pre-medieval way of life. I thought the only way I could describe that collision was anecdotally, by taking snapshots, as it were,” she said in the 2002 interview, adding, “I thought that readers had to know where I was coming from, so that they could judge whether they felt my position was valid. Just because I'm an Indian doesn't mean I know India. I did not want this to be a book where I play the expert and the reader plays the student; in every book I've written I've been very much against that.” She wrote a final book, Eternal Ganesha (2006), about the cultural ubiquity of Ganesh as an Indian symbol, “on village walls, in cafés, on handbags, in ancient sculpture and neon lights.” She didn’t publish much, avoiding the road to becoming a “cottage industry” according to writer and translator Kalyan Raman. “She was uncommonly perceptive, original and had a cosmopolitan imagination. But she published only [five] books. Had she written more, she might have been a source of inspiration for many,” he said. Mehta also refused the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour, in 2019, because “there is a general election looming and the timing of the award might be misconstrued, causing embarrassment both to the Government and myself, which I would much regret.” Condolences poured in from the literary and political world upon her death, including from PM Narendra Modi, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge. Historian William Dalrymple tweeted, “I adored Gita Mehta and can't believe she's gone! She was the warmest and funniest firecracker of a women, full of spark and pizzaz and humour and warmth. I met her first when I was writing City of Djinns and was dazzled by her irreverent wit, but also by her kindness, and indeed patience, with a young Firangi writer blundering into her territory. Later, when Sonny became my publisher, I saw a great deal of the both of them between Delhi, London and New York, and they were the very definition of cosmopolitan Indian brilliance, intelligence and elegance on the world stage. What a woman – and what a terrible, terrible loss.” Guha said, “If I published a piece somewhere, she would often call me from New York and argue, debate or endorse my opinion. She represented an India which wasn’t xenophobic or discriminated on the basis of what you ate or wore, or which religion you practised. She was inspired by Gandhi and Tagore and saw no inconsistency between a cosmopolitan view of the world and appreciation of Indian culture… It is the passing of a world.”
