[In the following review, Mukherjee praises Mehta's insight into Indian social, cultural, and political viewpoints in Snake and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, drawing particular focus to the nostalgia of Mehta's more personal essays.]

At the time of the Raj, it was fashionable for British and American writers as diverse as Maud Diver, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Beverly Nichols, John Masters and Katherine Mayo to present the Eastern and the Western thought-processes as opposed. These writers' pronouncements, such as “never the twain shall meet” and “not yet”, may have come as a relief to their readers. The enlightenment highway has been designed for a one-way traffic in ideas: from the rational West to the child-like, intuitive East. Even in the 1960s and 70s, when the West's affluent young discovered Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Buddhism, Hinduism and the I Ching, the traffic remained one way, only this time speeding from the East to the West. The Nirvana-poachers' invasion of industrializing India and the resultant “mythological osmosis” was the subject of Gita Mehta's first work of non-fiction, Karma Cola. Now after eighteen years, the novel Raj and a collection of short stories, A River Sutra, Mehta has returned, in Snakes and Ladders, to monitor the progress of the traffic in enlightenment.

Although the game of snakes and ladders may have been invented centuries ago “as a meditation on humanity's progress towards liberation”, Mehta remembers that in her childhood “the actual board was suggestive of danger”. By using the game as a way of summing up India's fifty-year experiment in sovereignty, Mehta suggests that although the political leaders after Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi are spending too much time in serpents' bellies, ladders prop themselves against walls for the use of future idealists.

Her epigraph is taken from Goethe, who was tempted to visit India “not for the purpose of discovering something new but in order to view in his way what has been discovered”. This establishes Mehta's focus: look for eccentric insights, not exhaustive analysis. Mehta, who lives in New York, but thinks of herself as an Indian, is treated in India by the locals as a not-quite or a clueless transient. Her awareness of Indians' limited tolerance of her right to speak to a wide audience about contemporary India gives her observations a touching self-consciousness.

While expatriate Indian scholars are still prospecting the gold of victimology in the exhausted mines of post-colonialism, Mehta discovers a lively population of farmers who prefer watching television to meditating, and describes urban youth in “saris and mini-skirts, anklets and Doc Marten boots, salwar kameezes and torn Levi's”, who dance Raga-rap and Indi-pop. The most singular achievement of Snakes and Ladders is that it celebrates rather than satirizes or trivializes cultural symbiosis.

In thirty-one brief chapters with titles such as “Who's Afraid of Being Indian?” and “Losing It,” Mehta speed-reads Indian political history, sociology, ecology, communications systems, land-reform movements and middle-class taste in novels and films, and comes up with this original, heartening thesis: “in a world of perpetual motion India remains a perpetual becoming, a vast and protean sea of human improvisations on the great dance of time”.

Not all the chapters are equally intriguing. Mehta is at her best when she draws on personal reminiscence instead of serving up a digest of easily available official data. Among the most lively are “Freedom's Song,” in which Mehta, defying political correctness, reviews freedom-fighting from the point of view of the child of a privileged, princely family, and “Reading,” in which she evokes the indiscriminate range and the intemperate love of reading among the literate, well-off Calcuttans of her generation. In “Freedom's Song,” Mehta's late father, who was a prominent politician and industrialist, emerges not as the ambitious, canny politician that many Indian journalists have portrayed, but as a dashing Scarlet Pimpernel who pulls off impossible nationalist feats. Reading Mehta's “Reading,” I revisited my own girlhood and the many hours spent in the collected works of second-rate Victorian women novelists, as well as those of Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Bennett and Galsworthy. Colonialism is heinous, of course, but, like Mehta, I find myself unable to apologize for the ecstasy and the imaginative freedom that the colonizers' books gave me.