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Penguin Books Ltd - Ved Mehta

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358 pages

English

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Portrait of India (1970) is a vivid account of 60s India and some of its most interesting figures Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray, among others. Travelling across the country from the Himalayas to Kerala, through its villages and cities, Ved Mehta s observations of and insights into India remain relevant and thought-provoking even today.

Sujets

Travel writing

India

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351182771
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

VED MEHTA

Portrait of India
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Book One
1. Forbidden to Come to the Shore
The Guide
Son et Lumi re
Birth Control
College Girls
2. Native Wood-Notes
All India Radio Music Festival
The Two Systems and Subbulakshmi s Voice
Pupil
Master
The Sacred Handbook of the Arts
Jazz in Bombay
3. The Sacred River of the Hindus
The Ageless Festival
The Loins of the Earth Are Betwixt the Ganga and the Yamuna
From the Sindhu
The Commingling Streams
4. The Holy Hair of the Muslims
The Vale of Kashmir
The Theft of Mohammed s Hair
Believers at the Gate
May Peace Be on Them
5. The Himalayas: Toward the Forest of Arden and the Dead Land
Chini Hindi Bye-Bye
NEFA
Nagaland
The McMahon Line
Bhutan
Sikkim
Nepal
Ladakh
Tibet
Interpretation Thereof
Book Two
6. Development: The Pulsating Giant, the Aging King, and the Strong Brown God
The Blast Furnace Is Alight
On the Banks of the Potomac
At the Confluence of the Volga and the Ganga
The Richest Man in India
Famine and the Masonry Across the Waters of the Krishna
7. City of Dreadful Night
On the Banks of the Hooghly
Come Again If You Leave the City
It s the Crying Baby That Gets Picked Up
Notes and Thoughts on Calcutta s Imperial Past
One Life, One Chance
The Poorest of the Poor
8. Leaden Echo, Golden Echo
Reflections: Gaze of Lazarus
Enclave: Few Ways of Life Can Equal the Goan in Merriment and Mad Abandon
City: Only Four Annas on the Mat
Arts: Om on the Infant s Tongue
Religion: We Don t Agree
State: A Palanquin, a Parasol, a Drum
Politics: My Father s House
Village: Revolution in the Heart and Revolution in the World
Glossary
You May Also Like
Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
Face to Face
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Portrait of India
VED MEHTA is the author of twenty-seven acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in 1934 in Lahore and educated largely in the USA. A staff writer on the New Yorker from 1960 to 1993, he has won many awards and is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and the Royal Society of Literature. Mehta lives in New York.
Praise for the Book
It is immensely readable, and the reader not only has the sense of immersion in the sights, scents and sounds of India, he also meets representative people from high and low walks of life, and he is supplied with taped information, as from one of those talking machines spectators may obtain at museums - New York Times Book Review
Mehta has created a vast mosaic of scenes, impressions, moods all of which together convey as nothing before has done, the essence of this awesome land. A first-class book. Highly recommended - Daily News (UK)
His book can be commended to all readers interested in its subject, including the Indians: it is no less informative than provoking - Sunday Times (London)
It is essentially a book to keep . . . and refer to again - Daily Telegraph
He notes with the eye of a novelist, a travel writer or poet the incidents and conversations which tell more about India than truckloads of statistics - Oldham Evening Chronicle
This book is an exhaustive and loving look at everything that makes India the complex, beautiful, ugly, optimistic and exasperating country it is. Mehta s [prose is] sharp, vivid - Sunday Sun-Times (Chicago)
A book that has fascinated, entertained, moved, and very much edified me - Saturday Review
It has avoided the danger of becoming merely encyclopaedic because Mr Mehta writes uncommonly well and is a remarkable observer - Scotsman (Edinburgh)
To L. K.
Book One
Forbidden to Come to the Shore

The Guide
Today, in the course of a prolonged visit I am paying to my native country in late 1965 and 1966, I go on a tour of New Delhi. Since I was here last, on another visit, in 1959-I have spent nearly all my adult life in Britain and the United States-the city has fanned out in all directions. Where once there were waste tracts, there are now little self-contained suburbs, each busily searching for an exclusive identity. (There is Defense Colony, Diplomatic Enclave, Golf Links, and one that is called simply Friends Colony.) An index to the status of the denizens of a particular suburb is the size of their houses, and an index to their snobbery, perhaps, is their system of naming, numbering, and lettering these dwellings-which are, however, no easier to tell apart than the streets. The general plan seems to be to confound the interloper from the next suburb-and, certainly, the stranger to the city, who is additionally burdened with the necessity of remembering English street names from the days of the British raj along with new Indian street names (for instance, King Edward Road, named after Edward VII, has become Maulana Azad Road, named after the late Indian leader), for the two sets of names appear to be used interchangeably. Nor is there any limit to the burgeoning of oppressive suburbs (which now also have English and Indian names; for instance, Diplomatic Enclave is called Chanakya Puri)-the Indian version of the nightmare that is Los Angeles, and with, even for the well-off, nothing more advanced than a bicycle or a tonga or a scooter-driven rickshaw to cover the distances that go with them.
I present myself at nine o clock at the Imperial Hotel, an embarkation point for city tours. I notice that foreigners, for the most part, head for big private cars with their own private guides, but I wait by two public buses, amid tourists from other parts of India, who show a curiosity about things Indian that would have been inconceivable when I was here last. In the babel of Indian languages, I can distinguish Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada; most of my fellow-tourists, I gather, are from south India. I take a seat in the front of the first bus, near the guide, who is an elderly Sikh with a long beard. He is clad in a dingy beige turban, a patched beige tweed coat, loose gray flannels, and brown sandals, with a white drip-dry shirt, which is the only immaculate part of his dress; the shirt is open at the neck, showing a bit of maroon neckcloth. He talks through a microphone over the deafening noise of the bus s motor: Gentlemen and ladies, I am your friendly guide, and perhaps I ought to begin by giving you a tour of myself.
I brace myself for anything.
He goes on, Gentlemen and ladies, I have three daughters and they are all well married, thank God. One of my sons-in-law is a successful veterinarian. One of my sons-in-law is a horticulturalist in London, and if you go to London he will be pleased to meet you. One of my sons-in-law, without asking me, applied for the Air Force and was accepted as one of the few; I wanted to encourage him to prospect in Canada or America. I have officiated as a personal secretary to a celebrated maharaja; I still have a telephone, even though I have retired from the maharaja s service.
A voice directly behind me asks, What do you mean, officiated ?
Officiating from leave vacancy, the guide says, clarifying little.
A voice, this time from the back of the bus, shouts, Sirdarji, I cannot hear you! I shall have to write a letter of complaint to the Government of India Tourist Office! The voice belongs to an old man who is, if anything, more rumpled than the guide. He is obviously ready for a good verbal joust.
But the guide, raising his voice until it almost cracks, says to the bus in general, with perfect good humor, I suggest, gentlemen and ladies, all of you write letters of complaint to the Government of India Tourist Office. You must state in the letter (a) that the microphone should be more up-to-date and that instead of being placed here in front it should be planted in the middle of the bus, and (b) that the motor should be well oiled, so that you can all hear my words and be rewarded for your pains and money. The roar of the motor diminishes a little as the driver changes gears, and the guide continues, Gentlemen and ladies, I want you to know that I have done my share of the work well. I went to the classes held by the Government of India Tourist Office. I attended them for two or three months and I qualified with a license. Now I get three or four requests a month to lead bus tours. This trade has been increasing, but it is not so good this year, owing to the war with Pakistan. From nine to twelve-forty-five I give the tour of New Delhi, and from two-fifteen to six I give the tour of Old Delhi, the ancient seat of power on the banks of the sacred river Yamuna. For one day s service, I get twenty-two rupees-four dollars. Other days, I call around at a dozen or so travel agencies here in the hope of finding an American tourist who will want a private guide. But there are more than forty of us licensed, about a dozen of whom are lady guides, and they are the most popular. Some of them are very highly connected-wives of Deputy Secretaries-and they are very good at taking the American tourists to shop, and they get good commissions from the tourists as well as the shopkeepers. Some of the men guides may only be able to get American tourists to send them Terylene shirts from abroad.
The pugnacious old man, who turns out to be a Delhi-wallah, moves up to the front and, pencil and pad of paper in hand, settles himself on the right, practically under the guide s nose. Get to the business of the day, he says menacingly, writing something on his pad. The bus has been moving through New Delhi, and I have heard you talk only about your family and-
On your right, sir, the guide breaks in smartly, is the Indian Institute of Technology, which is one of the five such institutes in India; the others are in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Kanpur. It gives education in mechanical, civil . . . The admission here is very difficult; a candidate must be a first divisioner in the intermediate and