India gives her perspective

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 10

India gives her perspective

“In the East, the grander you are, the more people you can feed in your house. Here, the posher you are, the more people you keep out."

With freedom came a new experience: loneliness. “In India we have no concept of loneliness. We have solitude. “It has been said that people from the subcontinent don’t have a personal ego, they have a community ego. “In the East the wealth of spirit is inclusive. The grander you are, the more people you can feed in your house. Here, the posher you are, the more people you keep out.” Among her close university friends were Germaine Greer, Clive James, Richard Eyre and, of course, Sonny. Theirs was an arranged marriage —. of a sort. “When I got to Cambridge there were a lot of Indians, including the present Prime Minister. For some reason the Girton girls thought my husband was the one I should meet, and so arranged it.”

The Mehtas married when Gita was 21.

After teaching at Bombay University, Gita began making political documentaries for British television. She was still only 24 — not that young, she

insists with a dismissive wave of her cigarette. “What drove me was a belief in the issues. I used to go shrieking into people’s offices.” Later she covered the Bangladesh war for NBC,

but when she felt herself “becoming sort of hooked on danger — just another form of sensationalism,” she decided to quit. Ten years ago someone “banging on about karma at a cocktail party” in-

spired Ms Mehta to tackle her first book, a series of impressionistic essays entitled “Karma Cola.” “I started to write and it made me laugh so much. I remember reading the first chapter to my

husband, who was appalled. Friends said, ‘You can’t write like that,’ it’s not grammatical’.” A wickedly funny account of gurus, ashrams and the Dharma Bums, the book took her just

three weeks. “It’s about instant gratification: the Western assumption that salvation can be bought for the price of an air ticket, and the Indian desire for the endless adolescence promised by the material goods of the West.” "Raj” was to be a second stab at satire but turned out differently. Set in the Indian states ruled not by the Viceroy but by Indian royalty, it spans the period from Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee to Independence. Native India is a subject which “has not been talked about, not been written about.”

“As a product of British India I had been taught to despise the Princes or love their eccentricities. As I began to research I became fascinated by the extent to which these rulers (who, after all, were the first fighters against the British Empire) had been emasculated.

“I found it curious that you could convince an anointed king to think like a slave and to collaborate in his own sense of inferiority.” Her central character, however, is a princess. “The British could not enter the harem, so women kept alive the idea

of historical continuity. They didn’t become cultural drag queens until their husbands forced them to."

Her research unearthed many intriguing women, from the British governesses whose diaries remain in the India Office Library to the royal matriarchs. some of whom Gita has known since childhood.

One, an 80-year-old Himalayan queen mother, first unveiled her face in public standing as a candidate in the inaugural Indian elections. ("Raj” ends with the heroine also embracing politics). Employing Indian folktelling traditions, “Raj" isn’t a novel in the Western sense.

“It doesn’t have a massive interior life.” And it’s not about setting the record straight. When “Karma Cola” was published, Eric Idle wrote to Gita saying, “You have restored my faith in doubt.”

She hopes this book may make others doubt some nostalgic myths about British India.

“The one thing I hate is the nostalgia industry. It is easier to settle for the sentimentalities of nostalgia than to address yourself to something more.”