Nilanjana S Roy on Ved Mehta in Business Standard:
Ved Mehta
“I hate the word ‘memoir’,” says Ved Mehta, after I’ve used it for the fifth time. “I prefer biography, or autobiography.” We’re discussing the Indian reluctance to write in the autobiographical vein. My theory is that there are too many unspoken taboos on writing about the personal, the familial. Ved’s hands flicker in disagreement, like an unconscious turning of a page to a different chapter.
“Indians aren’t reticent,” he says. “Maybe we still have a Victorian morality that won’t let us speak our minds. But there’s a freedom in the West you don’t have here. Writers there are not afraid of not making a living. They have the freedom to write about sex. The freedom not to appear dignified, noble, likeable. What would Henry Miller have written if he’d wanted to be liked by his middle-class relatives?”
I think of my impatience as an adolescent reading Mehta’s “endless biographies”, wading through these meandering accounts of parents, relatives, lovers, friends, editors, partners. It was years later before I realised how deeply embedded Mehta’s portraits had become in my mind, as though his family had become mine, as though I knew Kiltykins and Daddyji as well as he did. It took years to see how tight, how taut — Mehta’s adjectives, not mine — the narrative was; how much had been skillfully omitted, how accurate the details were. More:
