Ved Mehta (1934–2021)

Ved Mehta, a prolific Indian American writer who is best known for his autobiographical works and long tenure as a writer for the New Yorker magazine, attended his first school outside of India at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1949 when he was fifteen years old. In 1982, Mehta received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” for fiction and nonfiction writing.

Ved Mehta was born on March 21, 1934, in Lahore, British India (now Pakistan) to Shanti Mehta and Amolak Ram Mehta. He was blinded by cerebrospinal meningitis just short of his fourth birthday, and he went on to learn Braille in India at the Dadar School for the Blind. Beginning at age fourteen, he wrote to more than thirty institutions in the United States that rejected him before he was accepted at the Arkansas School for the Blind.

In 1949, at fifteen, Mehta moved to Little Rock. It was his first time alone in a foreign country. Mehta wrote about his experiences at the school in the February 18, 1985, edition of the New Yorker magazine, and in 1986, he published Sound Shadows of the New World, the fifth volume of his twelve-volume autobiography, Continents of Exile, which detailed his time in Little Rock. In addition to Continents of Exile, Mehta wrote dozens of other books, on a wide range of topics, many of which focused upon India.

At the Arkansas School for the Blind, Mehta learned, among other things, etiquette, personal appearance, and hygiene. “Social adjustment,” Mehta wrote, was emphasized. He was told by Mr. Chiles, a teacher at the school, “To be blind is an uphill struggle. You’ve got to sell yourself to every seeing man. You’ve got to show him that you can do things that he thinks you can’t possibly do.”

“It was true enough,” Mehta wrote in a 1957 article for the Atlantic magazine, “if you were a donkey in the world of horses, you had to justify your worth and existence to the horses. You had, somehow, to prove to them that you could carry as much weight as they could, and if you couldn’t move as fast, you at least were willing to work harder and put in longer hours.”

“Anything you do wrong in the world of the seeing,” Mr. Chiles told Mehta, “like dressing untidily or putting your elbows on the table while eating, even if half the sighted world themselves committed these sins, people around you will chalk it up to your blindness. They’ll call you poor wretches, feel sorry for you, and they will commit the worst sin of all by excusing it because you are blind.” “In Little Rock,” according to his obituary in the New York Times, Mehta also “attained an elegant mastery of English and completed the 12-year curriculum in three years.”

After finishing high school, Mehta attended Pomona College in Southern California, graduating in 1956. He later earned a second bachelor’s degree in history from Oxford University in the United Kingdom and a master’s degree from Harvard University.

Despite his blindness, Mehta’s writing had striking visual elements. “I once described someone this way,” the New York Times quoted Mehta, “‘A Player’s cigarette hung from his lower lip and threatened to fall off at any moment.’ I knew the brand of his cigarette from his chance remark. The hanging bit I picked up from the way he spoke.”

He was hired in 1961 by the New Yorker; he was terminated more than thirty years later in the early 1990s by its new editor, Tina Brown, who let seventy-nine staffers go.

Mehta died on January 9, 2021, of complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was survived by his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, with whom he had two daughters, Sage Mehta and Natasha Mehta.

For additional information:
Fox, Margalit. “Ved Mehta, Writer Who Illuminated India, Is Dead at 86.” New York Times, January 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/obituaries/ved-mehta-celebrated-writer-for-the-new-yorker-dies-at-86.html (accessed July 2, 2025).

Mehta, Sage. “Growing up with the Writer Ved Mehta.” New Yorker, October 7, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/growing-up-with-the-writer-ved-mehta (accessed July 2, 2025).

Mehta, Ved. “A Donkey in the World of Horses.” Atlantic, July 1957. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/07/a-donkey-in-a-world-of-horses/640414/ (accessed July 2, 2025).

———. Sound-Shadows of the New World. New York: Penguin, 1986. Arkansas-related selection previously published in New Yorker, February 10, 1985. Online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/02/18/ii-sound-shadows-of-the-new-world (accessed July 2, 2025).

“Ved Mehta.” The MacArthur Foundation https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1982/ved-mehta (accessed July 2, 2025).

Jeff Waggoner
Nassau, New York