Gita Mehta 1943-

Indian novelist and essayist.

The following entry presents an overview of Mehta's career through 2001.

With her first collection of essays, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (1979), Mehta joined a growing number of critically and popularly acclaimed female Indian authors who write primarily in English. Although the essays in Karma Cola function as sarcastic responses to the West's infatuation with India, her novels Raj (1989) and A River Sutra (1993) seek to create a deeper understanding of Indian history, culture, and mysticism. Mehta's fiction displays a preoccupation with the inherent difficulties behind social interactions, either through examining the cultural disconnects between Great Britain and India during the era of colonial rule or through the myriad social and cultural divisions within traditional Indian society.

Biographical Information

Mehta was born in 1943, in Delhi, India. Her father, Biju Patnaik, was a political activist in the Indian Independence movement who was arrested for his activism three weeks after the birth of his daughter. At the age of three, Mehta was sent to be raised in a convent in Kashmir, allowing her mother to travel and campaign for her husband's release. After India regained sovereignty from Great Britain in 1947, Mehta's father was released from prison and resumed his political career. Mehta travelled to England for higher education, earning her university degree at Cambridge University. While at Cambridge, she met and later married Ajai Singh “Sonny” Mehta, with whom she has a son. Having chosen a career in journalism, Mehta has covered a number of significant world events, including the Bangladesh War of 1971 and the first elections in the former Indian princely states. She has also written and directed several television documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).

Major Works

Mehta's first work, Karma Cola, was written as a critical response to the ways that the Western counter-culture community has regarded India and Indian culture. Due to the fascination of spiritualists, hippies, and popular rock musicians The Beatles with Hindu mysticism, large groups of Americans flock to India each year in search of religion, drugs, and enlightenment. Through the essays in Karma Cola, Mehta seeks to debunk the notion that all Indians are experts on spiritual matters and to contrast the irony of Western materialism being used to obtain traditionally Eastern religious beliefs. In such essays as “Om Is Where the Art Is” and “Sex and the Single Guru,” Mehta humorously and sarcastically exposes the emptiness behind placing one's hopes for the future in the hands of gurus and transcendental meditation. Set in the early- to mid-twentieth century, Raj recounts the life of a sheltered Indian princess, Princess Jaya, as she witnesses the end of British imperial rule in India. Her father, once a powerful man in the community, is slowly being forced into obscurity by the strict rules imposed on him by the British Raj—the British government in India. Jaya is eventually sent to marry a prince in a neighboring kingdom, though her husband—like many in India at the time—is obsessed with emulating the British. Her husband's preoccupation with Western values causes him to view anything Eastern as inferior, including his wife. After the era of colonial rule ends in 1947, Jaya is finally able to exert her own independence by registering for a position in the newly formed Indian government. The style and structure of Mehta's second novel, A River Sutra, has frequently been compared to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The plot is constructed around a series of short sketches—“The Monk's Story,” “The Teacher's Story,” “The Executive's Story,” “The Courtesan's...