Passionate commitment

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 10

Passionate commitment

Gita Mehta is disdainful of nostalgia for British India. Her first novel, the critically acclaimed “Raj,” is set in the Indian states ruled by Princes, reports MARIANNE BRACE, “Observer.”

“Will you excuse me for a moment while I go up to the next floor and have hysterics?” Builders’ rubble abandoned on the street had stopped the rubbish from being collected on this sweltering hot day in Belgravia. Looking ravishing in a purple sari, writer Gita Mehta thought a short telephone call would sort it out. You feel she could sort out anything. Gita Mehta has every reason to be confident. Her debut novel, “Raj” already on the West German bestseller list, is being called “the most important historical novel ever written about India,” by the influential magazine, “India Today.” Married to publishing guru Sonny Mehta, formerly head of Pan Books in London, now president of Knopt in New York, Gita commutes between New York, London (her son Aditya, aged 22, studies in Britain) and Delhi, where she was born.

“India’s the place which gives me my perspective.” But London is where she works.

Born in 1944 — “a first generation post-colonial” — Gita comes from “one of those huge Indian families that seem to spread across the subcontinent.” It includes professors, film stars, nationalists, terrorists, and reformers. Passionate commitment is in their blood.

Ms Mehta, for instance, has fierce views about caste.

"• think it is wrong. It is infinitely more savage than class. When did the British ever kill a work-ing-class person ■ because his shadow fell on them?”

Gita’s grandfather campaigned against the caste system and for the abolition of suttee (self-immo-lation on a husband’s funeral pyre).

An uncle’s older brother was shot dead in 1930 leading an insurrection by the nationalist Indian Republican Army in the Chittagong Armoury Raid, while the uncle was sent in chains

to the Andaman Islands. He was 14. The British also imprisoned Gita’s politician father just after her birth. “What I find unique about that generation is that they seem to feel no bitterness. I think the only time my parents expressed any view about Independence was when I was expecting Aditya. Ihey said would I mind coming back to India to have him as they had spent a certain amount of time in British jails.” Despatched at the age of three to boarding school (“my father was in jail, my mother busy petitioning”) Gita studied at Bombay and Cambridge Universities. Heavily chaperoned at

home, in 1960 s Britain she found herself invited to people’s rooms and offered sherry at all hours, “which seemed incredibly fast” and sent her into “a complete Indian flap.”

Her family “had spent a certain amount of time in British jails.”