Portrait of India
India contains one-sixth of the world’s people. It is the world’s largest democracy. Its culture is old and great. Its political importance to the future of mankind may prove to be crucial. Yet to much of the Western world India is still virtually unknown.Portrait of India, based on Ved Mehta’s years of study of India and his months of travel throughout the country, is the first definitive book on present-day India, and is likely to be historic in its singular power to make India, at last, real and comprehensible to Western readers. Born and brought up in India, educated in American universities and at Oxford, Mr. Mehta has a sensibility that is neither wholly Western nor wholly Eastern—an exquisite balance of the rational and the intuitive.
Employing the journal form, he sets down a first-hand report on, among a multitude of other things, India’s early experiences with the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution (introducing the spirit of free inquiry into an uncongenial society), the abortive invasion of India by China, India’s recent war with Pakistan, India’s Five-Year Plans, the abrupt arrival of the twentieth century in India’s villages, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Sikhism, Calcutta, Bombay, Goa, the Ganges, the Himalayas, and the southern (Communist-governed) state of Kerala, and he records talks with politicians, soldiers, engineers, planners, priests, maharajas, economists, workers, farmers, teachers, students, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, philosophers, and poets—a gathering that includes the incomparable film director Satyajit Ray, Jayaprakash Narayan (direct political descendant of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave), and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The scale and design of Mr. Mehta’s work on India are appropriately majestic. Mr. Mehta is, however, an artist, not an encyclopedist, and what he has created is a vast but subtle mosaic of scenes, impressions, atmospheres, moods, conversations, and historical and political reflections, all of which together convey, as nothing before has done, the essence of that awesome land.