This article is taken from the Braille Monitor March 2009.
At the Confluence of Arrogance and Tragedy: A Conversation with Ved Mehta
by Daniel B. Frye
**********
Because the National Federation of the Blind is committed to
preserving its history, the Federation regularly records interviews with
people who knew our founding leaders as part of our oral history project.
Ved Mehta is a blind immigrant from India who came to the United States in
1949 to study at the Arkansas School for the Blind and who has since
enjoyed academic and commercial success as a teacher and writer. During his
college years he knew Jacobus tenBroek, our founder and first president, so
Mehta agreed to be interviewed about his connection with Dr. tenBroek and
his own career for this project. I accompanied Lou Ann Blake, research
specialist with the Jacobus tenBroek Library in the NFB Jernigan Institute,
to New York City to conduct this interview on January 21, 2009.
According to the biographical sketch on Mehta's Website, "Although
blind since he was nearly four, the Indian-born American writer Ved Mehta
has surmounted his disability to become one of the most versatile
contemporary men of letters. In 1957, when he was twenty-three, he
published his first book, a young autobiography titled Face to Face.
Following the success of that book, Mehta went on to publish several
nonfiction books in which he created his own brand of roving journalism. He
has written with equal felicity about events and personalities in India,
Great Britain, and the United States and about more abstract matters, such
as philosophy, history, theology, and linguistics. In 1972 Mehta received
much acclaim for his book Daddyji, a delicately crafted portrait of his
father, a distinguished Indian public health officer. Between 1961 and 1994
he was a staff writer and reporter with the New Yorker magazine. Since then
he has held distinguished chairs at many colleges and universities,
including Yale and Williams College.
"Ved (Parkash) Mehta, the fifth of seven children and second son of
Dr. Amolak Ram Mehta and Shanti (Mehra) Mehta, was born on March 21, 1934,
in Lahore, in the Punjab, then in British India and now in Pakistan....
Mehta was blinded by cerebrospinal meningitis. The boy, not yet five, was
sent by his father to an American missionary school in Bombay, some
thirteen hundred miles from his home in Lahore, in order to learn Braille
and arithmetic. He was sick much of the time and was returned home in
broken health after three years. For the next seven years he had very
little schooling but learned to play chess, to ride a bicycle, and to form
mental images of people and places from the descriptions of others. ...
"After receiving his high school diploma from the Arkansas School,
Ved Mehta spent four years at Pomona College in California, and during that
period he attended several summer sessions at Harvard University and the
University of California at Berkeley. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa during his
junior year, he obtained his BA degree from Pomona College in 1956. He then
went to England for three years of study in modern history at Balliol
College, Oxford, which granted him a second BA degree in 1959. Returning to
the United States, Mehta undertook an additional year and a half of
graduate study at Harvard under a fellowship, and he obtained his MA degree
there in 1961.
"Although Mehta had originally planned for an academic career, he
found himself drawn more and more to writing during his student years. When
he was twenty, he completed most of his first extended piece of nonfiction,
an autobiography that was published under the title Face to Face and drew
praise for its candor, elegant prose, and lucid style. Later he contributed
stories and articles to British, American, and Indian newspapers and
periodicals. In 1959 he met William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker,
who encouraged him to contribute to the magazine and invited him in 1961 to
join its editorial staff. ...
"The central themes of his literary career have always been India and
his own life as an expatriate Indian. As part of a continuing
autobiographical project on an almost Proustian scale, and a step in his
own search for identity, Mehta wrote Daddyji, which was serialized in the
New Yorker. The book, whose title is derived from a hybrid diminutive,
meaning "Beloved Daddy," is a short, sparely written account of his
father's life, with the narrative ending a few years after Ved Mehta's
birth....Daddyji was a cornerstone of a vast autobiographical series
bearing the omnibus title, Continents of Exile.
"Ved Mehta has widely commented on radio and television on Indian
politics and has also narrated and written a documentary film called
Chachaji: My Poor Relation (PBS, 1978 and BBC, 1980), which won the DuPont
Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. He has received many
honors, including half a dozen honorary degrees (Williams, 1986 and
Stirling University, Scotland, 1988), several Ford Foundation grants, and
two Guggenheims. He was a MacArthur Prize Fellow (1982-1987). In 1999 he
was elected honorary fellow of Balliol College, Oxford."
There you have a much-abbreviated sketch of Mehta's life and work. We
were interested to know what influence Dr. tenBroek had on his life and
career and what his perspective was on his own blindness. The answers we
gathered to these questions says a great deal about Mehta and his
character.
Mehta recalled meeting Dr. tenBroek in the summer of 1952 to seek
advice about what college to attend. After he was rejected by the "obvious"
East Coast schools because of low SAT scores, his father, then a Fulbright
professor at UCLA, arranged for him to meet with Professor tenBroek. He
remembered being struck by the fact that a blind man could live in such an
imposing, three- or four-story home, and he recalled a conversation with
his father in which they both recognized that a blind person living in such
overt luxury was a cultural phenomenon that would not have occurred in
India. Mehta spoke of being escorted into a room where he sat by Dr.
tenBroek at the foot of an enormous fireplace almost as tall as he was. "I
was very impressed with his friendly, outgoing, imposing manner. I vividly
remember that he had a beard, and I can remember hearing his fingers
running through it."
Mehta was drawn to tenBroek, who measured up to a standard of
normalcy that appealed to him. "He was married--had three children--besides
the fact that he was blind. His mind was never asleep. He was alert,
talkative, and never dismissive. I would have liked to have had him as a
friend, but I knew from the start that he couldn't be because of our age
differences."
As recounted in The Stolen Light and confirmed during our interview,
Mehta said that tenBroek urged him to attend Berkeley. He reports that
tenBroek promoted the advantages of a Berkeley education and discussed the
special resources available to blind college students in California. He
told Mehta that he would help him enroll and get settled there. Mehta
speculated during our conversation that Dr. tenBroek may have wanted to
have a small group of blind students around him that he could influence and
guide. "But I was truculent. I didn't want role models, and I didn't want
to associate too closely with blind people."
Indeed, despite Mehta's positive memories of Dr. tenBroek, in
response to a question about tenBroek's influence on him, Mehta said that
he did not regard him as a role model. "I don't believe in role models. I
am my own role model." Instead Mehta said, "Really he was much more of a
resource." Dr. tenBroek explained how to get readers and deal with campus
life. Mehta occasionally appealed to him for financial support, and he
generally obliged with a "little check" from one or another of his friends
in his Berkeley network. Later in our conversation Mehta conceded that
William Shawn, former editor of the New Yorker; Eleanor Gould Packard, the
New Yorker's proofreader and unofficial grammarian; and various professors
in college and tutors at Oxford may have been role models for him.
When invited to imagine what his relationship with Dr. tenBroek might
have been had he been more open to building one, Mehta said, "It is hard to
speculate on what our relationship might have been. I don't have, for
whatever psychological reasons, any friends at all who are blind--actually
I never have had--any relationships with blind people since I moved out of
the Arkansas School for the Blind. I had several black friends, and it
always made me sad that these friends ended up studying or writing about
black culture or welfare for black people. I, for whatever psychological
reasons, wanted to be done with the business of blindness from the very
beginning." He told us that his only real foray into the blindness arena
was writing a paper condemning the professional blindness establishment of
the 1950s for its censorship and unwillingness to translate literature with
any overt sexual content into alternative formats. Mehta recalled that Dr.
tenBroek liked his paper and urged him to write others, but he also said
that his work gained him nothing but the enmity of the blindness
profession. That enmity might have served as a source of inspiration to
continue his advocacy for blind people, but this was not his reaction.
After this experience Mehta said that he moved to England and washed his
hands of any further involvement with the blindness community.
Despite this decision he started further correspondence with Dr.
tenBroek when he returned to the United States for graduate study at
Harvard. Mehta could not clearly recall what prompted his resumption of
this correspondence, but he surmised that it was probably either to solicit
career advice about his ambition to be a writer or to grumble about his
dissatisfaction while at Harvard, which seemed to him "like an intellectual
version of Hollywood."
In concluding his reflections on Dr. tenBroek, Mehta acknowledged
that despite differences in their early childhoods (Mehta grew up in
relative affluence in India under the guardianship of his father, an
important public health official, while tenBroek was reared on the prairies
of Canada by a farmer) they might have had a lot in common. "I would not
protest against that comparison. tenBroek was an intellectual, self-
confident man."
Passages from Mehta's book The Stolen Light make it clear that he
struggled to reconcile himself to his blindness during his college years.
He resisted the requests of college administrators to use a cane and admit
his turmoil about matters as simple as disclosing his need for assistance
or directions to the bathroom while out with friends or dates. Nevertheless
he did write of using Braille and readers and of taking advantage of
leaders in the blindness community like Dr. tenBroek
Wondering if his perspective on blindness had evolved over the years,
we questioned him indirectly about his current attitudes toward his
blindness. Mehta required little coaxing on this topic. In virtually
everything he said, he good-naturedly admitted that his views on blindness
were paradoxical. On one hand he works to distance himself from anything
blindness-related and obviously loathes the fact that he is blind; on the
other hand he capitalizes on his blindness to distinguish himself in some
of his autobiographical writing and recognizes that blindness has had a
significant influence on his life. On his Website he says, "Partly I write
because of blindness, because of the heightened sense of loneliness that
many intelligent blind people feel." He reaffirmed this view during our
interview. "I found my liberation in writing."
Asked why his attitude toward his blindness was so different from
that articulated by Dr. tenBroek, Mehta maintained that his view was not
different from that of many blind people. "I think a lot of blind people
would take my view if they could. I think nobody enjoys being a cripple. If
they could step out of it, they would." Mehta told us that his mother never
really accepted the fact of his blindness, and he said that he always acted
as if he could see around her because "that's what she wanted."
He continued, "I don't think my attitude is abnormal. I didn't want
to be a blind writer. I wanted to be a writer who is blind." Mindful of the
recent presidential election and in an effort to characterize his feelings
as mainstream, Mehta reminded us that Roosevelt went to extraordinary
lengths to conceal his disability too. In closing this subject, he reminded
us, "My feelings are a normal, human phenomenon." Sadly, for all too many
blind people today, Mehta remains correct.
We were curious about the logistics of how a prolific blind writer
works. He explained that mostly he works with a Perkins Braillewriter and a
typewriter. He said that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks and that
he no longer has the patience to try to learn JAWS, though he has had it
installed on his computer. He told us rather defensively that he relies on
an amanuensis to do much of his work. He pointed out that sighted authors
like Henry James and Joseph Conrad also used this time-tested strategy. "I
just stitch together different methods, and they serve me."
When invited to comment on what bolstered his resolve and
determination to succeed, Mehta offered, "With respect to determination,
often the talent will drive you. If you have talent, you have an obligation
to that talent." He also noted that he always felt pressure to succeed and
be like his six accomplished sighted siblings. Mehta attributed much of his
determination to his father's fervent determination that he should succeed.
After leaving Mehta's large and beautiful New York apartment, where
we had been cordially welcomed, I found myself torn: I was impressed by the
indisputable achievements of this blind scholar and author. Yet I felt
heartsick at how emotionally tortured Mehta continues to be about his
blindness and regretful that this fact will curtail his ability to
influence the next generation of blind people. Mostly, though, I was
troubled that a blind man of Mehta's standing does not want or feel any
obligation to influence blind people who follow him or to give back to the
blind community that has--whether he recognizes it or not--done much to
bring about his success.
Let us celebrate his many achievements, but mostly let us hope that
Mehta can find some measure of peace--with or without accepting our hand of
friendship. Blindness is too much a part of every blind person's life for
it to remain a torment.
To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with
the subject unsubscribe.
To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please
visit the list home page at
http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
