Kashmir to Kerala

...When a study is generally as perceptive as Portrait of India, one feels disinclined to point out its minor flaws...

...There are many illustrations of this mental process at work in the second part of Portrait of India, where Mehta takes us to the dark and shadowy regions of Indian life: to the horrors of Calcutta, a dying city (its harbor is silting up) filled with dying people, and the lesser but more flamboyant miseries of Bombay...

...Although Mehta is ready to hear every side, he never fails to point out what has always impressed—and depressed —observant travelers to the subcontinent: the contrast between the high moral tone Indian leaders, in imitation of Gandhi, give to their utterances, and the low morals of ordinary politics that often characterize their actions...

...Once Jayaprakash Narayan was seriously considered as a possible heir to Nehru...

...The needs of the New Yorker dictated a basically episodic structure, which the author adapted in a quite skillful way to organize his material thematically, and so take his readers on a compelling journey from light toward darkness...

...it is, rather, the reactions of politicians bred in a tradition where face must be saved...

...An intensely traditional land, it contains the world's greatest reservoir of unrelieved destitution, yet more than any other region preserves a village-dominated, as opposed to a city-dominated, society...

...Portrait of India, however, is not in strict terms a travel book...

...I have come across no Indian journalist-not even the formidable Frank Moraes—who looks upon Indian government policy with quite so sharp an eye for the specious...

...But as Mehta notes, it is mainly a matter of terminology: While the British proclaimed a famine when there was evidence that one person had actually died of starvation, the Indians talk of such conditions as merely "food shortages...

...The superpimps of Bombay are still —as they were when I first visited the city a decade ago—a gang of powerful Congress politicians who have successfully prevented any genuine cleaning up of the abuses that enable them to prosper...

...His life has made him very much a man of two worlds...

...He taught the method to all his employees and thereby quadrupled the production of cement...

...Long odds indeed, but in India all the favorites have already run and been beaten...

...It is in these chapters that one realizes how far Mehta has in fact drifted from his background...

...Mehta actually found new industrial towns laid out in such a way that untouchables would live apart from the rest of the community, in mat huts appropriate to their social standing...

...India has produced a number of excellent practitioners of literary English, such as R. K. Narayan, Nirad Chaudhuri and Bhalachan-dra Rajan...

...He went to remote military outposts, saw rebel Naga leaders, and called on the breathless American queen of Sikkim...

...Its features, in short, are cause for both hope and despair, and it is hard for either an Indian or a foreigner to write of the country without passion and commitment...

...Not that the eye he sees with is one of cold detachment...

...Here, certainly, the pure spirit of the early Congress party survives, supported by a few thousand idealists, and bringing improvement to the lives of a few hundred fortunate villages...

...Indeed, Portrait of India is not only one of the most honest works written about the country in recent years, it is also something very different—a formidably true book that employs a unique perception, without sensation or bias of any kind...

...clearly, the barriers between politics and the great amorphous realm of religion and pseudoreli-gion are very flimsy...

...This curious incident of religious desecration set off communal riots in other parts of India and led eventually to the miniwar of 1965 between India and Pakistan...

...The situation, of course, is not as simple as I may appear to suggest...

...It is appropriate, then, that from the devoted throngs at Allahabad the author should take us to Kashmir, ripe with the troubles that were created by "The Theft of Mohammed's Hair" in 1963...

...author, "The Writer and Politics" India will always have a particular claim on the attentions of the Western world...

...to the rampant overpopulation of Kerala, and the endemic famine in Orissa and Bihar...

...Finding themselves confronted by situations that are insoluble either absolutely or in terms of the higher politics the Congress party once aspired to, they take refuge in lofty phrases and expedient actions...

...From art, with its own relentless logicalities, we proceed to the stranger world of Indian religion, so far in the sky, so deep in the earth...

...To temper these emotions so that perception remains true and judgment balanced is the most difficult task of all, and because he has succeeded in this I find Ved Mehta's Portrait of India one of the best books on the subject to appear in recent years...

...It is through the sublimities of art that we first enter the Indian world, in a series of brilliant chapters on music and dancing...

...Among other things it is, as Ved Mehta remarks in the concluding pages of his Portrait of India, "a country where today one-sixth of the world's people and one-half of the world's democratic people live...

...India is—and every page of Mehta's account underlines this reality—an intensely conservative land...

...We notice the defects of Indian leaders precisely because Gandhi and Nehru were so censorious in their criticism of the leaders of other countries...

...Born in Lahore, which is now Pakistani, his family suffered the upheaval of emigration at the time of Partition, when he was in his early teens...

...even Gandhi failed here...

...For example, when he attends the great mela (festival) at Allahabad, the mass ceremonial bathing in the waters of the Ganges, he perceives what motivates the naked Indian sadhus (holy men) with a far clearer apprehension than the naive Western occultists who go there imagining that they are really participating in the ancient mysteries of the East...

...Moreover, much of what seems perfidious to the outsider is nothing of the kind...

...Portrait of India ends on a positive note, but one with an ironic twist, for in the final chapters Mehta tells of his search for the remnants of Gandhi's heritage...

...Mehta equals the best of them, and in his latest volume he writes at the top of his form...

...The author traveled over most of the land, from the little dependent kingdoms of Sikkim and Nepal in the north down to Cape Comorin in the far south, and visited all the problem areas of the 1960s from Kashmir to Kerala...

...For the traveler who intends to visit the country for the first time, his new book is excellent preliminary reading...

...Now he is in his late 60s, far out of the running, and his venture seems a forlorn hope in view of the mass of Indian misery...

...There is no Western panacea that can solve the country's problems...

...A collection of New Yorker pieces Mehta wrote after a visit to India, the impressions of things seen and experienced are, in the New Yorker manner, blended with historical and other background information intended to give depth to the reader's view...

...he must have been informed entirely by Catholics, since he underestimates the importance of the Syrian church, and did not even go to Kottayam, the center of Keralan Christianity and the seat of the Catholicos of the East...

...In India, the most Western-seeming politicians regularly consult their astrologers, and horoscopes are indispensable preludes to marriage...

...From here, Mehta guides us to the international field, going back a few years to the fantastic days of 1962 when the Chinese poured down out of Tibet onto the edges of the Assam plains...

...At the age of 15, he came to the United States, where he spent three years at a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, continuing his education afterward at Pomona College, overseas at Oxford, and finally at Harvard...

...Anyone who has read Mehta's earlier and much slighter volumes, Face to Face and Walking the Indian Streets, will be aware of his peculiar relationship to his country of origin...

...In arranging the book, Mehta does not use the journal method, of the chronological approach of the ordinary travel book writer...

...Mehta knew the right people to get him permits into the normally forbidden sensitive border regions of nefa (Northeast Frontier Agency), Sikkim, and Ladakh...

...Perhaps, in the end, Gandhi will be vindicated, and India will save itself by using intelligently its greatest resource—the peasantry...

...His account of the Christian sects of Kerala is very inaccurate...

...there are times when the reader is aware of an extraordinary intuitive understanding of some aspect of Indian life that otherwise seems completely alien either to Mehta's own personality or to the Western way of existence he has elected...

...At the same time, though, Mehta sees it all from the outside...

...Thus his judgment is unclouded by the rather hysterical false patriotism that at times can dim even the clearest Indian vision, and he is able to see through the smoke screens created by that special vice the Indians have shared so abundantly with their British conquerors: hypocrisy...

...Mehta draws this aspect of his theme into sharp relief when he takes us down to the "cages" of Bombay, those appalling dens where the cheapest of prostitutes trade their bodies for a few annas a jump...

...On Kashmir, for instance, he scrupulously presents all the views that were presented to him...

...Some unscrupulous politicians have used it to grow rich through lesser forms of corruption (mere bribery), and to profit from the sheer misery of the people...

...He tripped rather superficially through Nepal as well, and met the Dalai Lama for one of those highly informal audiences that leave most visitors with an impression of slightly nervous good humor...

...The largest nation in the Third World, up to now it has been surprisingly unaffected by Maoist doctrines and practices, except in regions of peculiar social tension like Kerala and Bengal...

...He claims, quite inaccurately, that the main religion of Bhutan is the shamanistic cult of Bon, when in fact it is unre-formed Red Hat Lamaist Bud-dhism.with the Nyingmapa sect very powerful...

...But Tibetan Buddhists and Syrian Christians belong on the peripheries of India...

...The Kashmir question was the first of many tests in which the Indian leaders' sincerity was found wanting...

...I have been unable to find any error of fact—or for that matter, any important distortion of judgment—when Mehta deals with the mainstream of Indian tradition and contemporary life...

...The politicians cannot be blamed entirely for the country's condition, though, for too often they simply echo the urges of their constituents...

...But the picture that finally emerges is one of disingenuousness on the part of India's rulers, who deliberately went back on their promise to hold a referendum to test local opinion and have made no attempt to devise any real program of self-determination for the Kashmiri people...

...I compare its tone with Arthur Koestler's fastidious repulsion, with Ronald Segal's deliberately shocking sensationalism, with the horror that haunted V. S. Nai-paul when he returned to the land of his ancestors, and I find in Mehta's mingling of compassion, knowledge and perception, in his cool but relentlessly honest tone, an image of India far closer to the one I carry in my own mind and memory after many returns there...

...Yet Mehta has on the whole done such good work in his historical research, and has provided his book with so rich a background, that I feel it almost a debt to point out that in two areas where I have a special knowledge—Kerala and the northern Buddhist fringe territories—there are some errors which should be amended...

...And to its informational value one must add the quality of the prose...

...He finds it in the movement for village communities Jayaprakash Narayan inherited from Vinoba Bhave...

...no longer tied to the world of his childhood, he observes it with a detachment no writer still situated in India could achieve...

...There is the masterly description of the mela: at Allahabad, with its jolly hemp-sodden naked sadhus, and in the center the merry Maharishi, dispensing wisdom for money-makers: "I taught my simple method of meditation to a German cement manufacturer...

...They are still prisoners of the fact that they built their political careers on pretensions of having saved their land from the suffering under the British...

...of that one becomes more convinced than ever on reading Portrait of India...

...it is also a defensive posture on the part of politicians, who fear the panic that will follow if they admit the truth...

...But there are more powerful reasons for the decline of the Congress party in recent years...

...Then there are the invasion of Goa, such anomalies as the imperial attitude India still maintains toward Sikkim, and the insistence in Delhi on holding on to the Mc-Mahon Line, the Indo-Tibetan border so dubiously defended by the British...

...He knows at least some Indian languages, and therefore can travel on the subcontinent with a protective coloring that no European, and not even a Trinidadian Indian like Naipaul, can assume...

...For the last 10 years, Mehta has been on the staff of the New Yorker...

...It rejects nothing, regards nothing as obsolete, and preserves everything: from the British bureaucracy which served in the past but now is hopelessly outdated, to the caste system laid down before the Christian era in the Laws of Mani...

...This is not altogether a matter of hypocrisy...

...The Indians tend to point to the numerous famines under British rule and boast that catastrophes of this kind no longer take place...

...the present incarnation of the Karmapa Lama, however, is the incumbent Karmapa Lama, a monk who is the highest Buddhist dignitary in Sikkim...

...Nevertheless, India may be the one place where a revolution in life at the village level might eventually succeed, and in the process create a new model of society...

...Finally, Mehta asserts that the Chogyal of Sikkim is the incarnation of the Karmapa Lama...