Ved Mehta

Ved Mehta0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

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For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty four, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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Our castaway this week is the writer Ved Mehta.

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Ved, is music important in your life?

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Yes, actually after I lost my sight at that time I was four

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Uh this was in India and um

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It was thought the only thing I was fit to do in life was to become a musician. Most blind people in India at that time were beggars or stayed with their relations like wounded animals. And so my musical education was taken in hand when I was very small. What were you taught to play? Well, actually, I wasn't taught to play much because all the instruments in India have very sharp strings, or often many of them at that time were thought of sharp strings. And my father feared that I would develop calluses on my fingers and would have trouble reading Braille. So I didn't have much of a voice, but a terrific effort was made to teach me singing. Successfully? Well, I was quite a good singer, I think, but when I reached my early teens, I lost my good voice. Do you find music helps inspiration? I mean, if ideas aren't flowing, do you put on music to clear your mind? Well, for me, writing is little like dreaming. If I know a piece particularly well, so that it's almost second nature to me, I'm apt to put it on the gramophone and just let my mind drift. And all kinds of associations of which I wasn't aware of would suddenly surface. And I find that quite helpful. I wouldn't say that it's in any way a direct inspiration at all. It's just a sort of an aid to memory. What was your plan in choosing your eight for the desert island? Is this mostly great music or nostalgia or both? I wouldn't sort of categorize my choice in either of those terms. I chose my eight records really from my sort of eight different periods of my life where I have different associations and different periods and they're really representative selections from those periods. Where do we start? Well, I think obviously we start in India where I spent my childhood. And what have you chosen? I've chosen a song by K. L. Seigel, who was the superstar, we didn't use those terms in those days, of the stage and cinema. And this particular song I used to sing, and there was hardly a time when I sang when I and everybody around me didn't start crying.

Speaker 43:01

Omzi must nana supuhade la yena jana.

Speaker 43:12

Haye Hai Ye Ye Tha Ling Damana.

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The Voice of K. L. Seigel

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Whereabouts in India were you born? I was born in Lahore,

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Actually the city of uh Kipling and um Kim. A big family?

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One of seven children. I had

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four oppressors above me and I was the fifth child and two to oppress. Your father was a doctor of medicine. Had he been trained in England? Yes, he had in those days. He came to England in nineteen twenty one, I think.

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English education was almost mandatory for a successful career in the government. You had a serious illness when you were very young, when you were four, that cost you your sight. That's right. What was that illness? It was meningitis. It was misdiagnosed. And I was born in 1934 and I got it in 1938. It was just before antibiotics had reached India. I mean, today I think meningitis, if it's diagnosed properly, is no threat to anyone. But the time the disease struck me,

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you usually either died of meningitis or

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At the very least, your brain was damaged, and if you were extremely lucky,

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You only lost your hearing or your eyesight. In my case, it was the eyesight. Facilities for looking after blind children in India at that time could not have been elaborate.

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Actually there were only a handful of schools for the blind, and these were little better than orphanages.

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Blindness was a disease that usually was not associated with well to do people. It struck the children of the poor.

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And all these schools therefore were really little better than asylums. Which school were you sent to? Well, I was actually sent to a school which was thirteen hundred miles away from my home in Lahore. It was in Bombay and called the Dadar School. It was located in an industrial slum area of Bombay. Had your father inspected the school? No. In those days travel was very difficult. You couldn't get leave from the government and so on. No, he simply um sent me off in a train with a cousin who actually was going to Bombay to try to make his career in the cinema. And did he successfully? Uh actually, no, he ended up being a customs collector. But

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Anyway, he did leave me at the school and I was there off and on for three years. How old were you when you were? Five. Five. Actually a couple of months short of five.

Ved Mehta6:08

See,

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Let's break off here for your second record. What's that to be?

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I've chosen Blue Daniel by Strauss. Why? Well, I grew up in what my father would call, though I'm not sure the historians would agree, the noon of the British Raj. It was the noon for him. It was a period of

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clubs and cards and cricket and tennis and hockey.

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And he did all those things. He was usually the first

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Indian to be taken into a club which was really a turf of the British and I remember as a child going with him to a British type club and listening to these waltzes and listening to people dancing and longing for being able to do what the people in the club were doing. In other words, being able to play the music and perhaps dance on the floor.

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The Bluer Danube, Johann Strauss the Third, conducting a symphony orchestra back in the nineteen twenties.

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We had thirteen hundred miles to a school for blind children in Bombay. How many children were in the school? Goodness, I would say about forty. All ages? All ages. In fact, uh I remember sitting in a kindergarten with a boy who had been picked up from a Bombay street. He was a beggar and he must have been thirteen and at the time I was five. So they were very mixed children. They were beggars and middle class children? No middle class. In fact

Ved Mehta8:33

No ma

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In the entire time I was at the school there was only one other boy who came from what we might call a middle class home, and his father was an eye surgeon, and he only stayed there for four or five months, and then his father took him out of the school.

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and put him into an ordinary sight at school, where he did quite well.

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You had come thirteen hundred miles from home. Did they speak the same language? Oh, no, they didn't. They spoke totally different language. It does sound like a very heartless thing for my father to have done, but you have to remember

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that my father shared something with

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the American Jewish community. That was that

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He believed that in in life nothing mattered, money didn't matter, property didn't matter.

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Love didn't matter. What really mattered was education and he himself had gone from a mud village to University College London and then into the government service. And when he sent me to this school, he was trying to do for me what he was doing for all his other children, giving them the best education that was available at the time in India. Was the school clean? Were the staff kind? Oh, well, the principal was trained in America, and he and his wife were kind, but it was really, in every sense of the word, a Dickensian whole.

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It wasn't clean and I think all told I spent there three and a half years and half of that time I was in the hospital with various infectious diseases. And of course with forty blind children you were knocking each other about unwittingly. Well they weren't all blind. Some of them could see and this is a common misconception people have that blind people run into each other. It's very seldom they do because most people who go blind early in life develop what's what is sometimes called facial vision, which is really a sixth sense which uh helps them to tell when they're in front of objects or walls and so on. Did they teach you Braille? Yes, and that was perhaps the most useful thing I got out of the school. Did you tell your parents of the conditions you were living under? Well, no, because as a child I assumed these were the conditions of any school. I had no basis of comparison. I just assumed that's what all boarding schools were like.

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Let's get back to music. What's your third record? My third record is from Arkansas, a school I went to.

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when I was fifteen in the United States, and it's a Negro spiritual called Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Why does that remind you of Arkansas?

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Well, this will strike you odd, Roy, but I was desperate to get out of India and get proper education.

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And the only school which accepted my attempts to gain admission was one in Arkansas. And when I went there, I had no idea whether it was school for white children or black children. Or in those days we would have said Negro children. And my father said, will you just go there? If it happens to be for Negro children, then you will just have to get out of it and get into a proper white school.

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And when I arrived there, I discovered that they had two schools, one for white children, and

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another one, much poorer and much further away, for negro blind children. And this particular song I heard first in Arkansas, and it touched me very much because it's basically

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Negroes wishing for their death. I mean, they were so miserable in America that they preferred death to life.

Speaker 411:55

Swing low, sweet chariot come and

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But it carry me a home.

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Swing low, sweet chariot.

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Robin

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For the carry me home I looked over Jordan and what did I see?

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Coming for they carry me home, A band of angels coming after me.

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Coming.

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But I can

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Paul Robeson, swing low, sweet chariot.

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Let's go back to your childhood, Ved. When you were back from Bombay, did you go to school?

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No, there weren't any schools I could go to. My father tried, but

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In those days, most schools, actually I would say all schools, stopped with the primary education. And I was so pulled down that my father thought that I better stay home and try to regain my health. So

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Really, the first school serious school I went to in India was when I was thirteen, and it was Saint Dunstan's, which had been organized by

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Uh Which

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an Englishman, not for Indian children, but really for soldiers who had been wounded in the Second World War. Yes. And blinded in the Second World War. Now your six brothers and sisters had been going to school, of course, all right along, yes. And they went to the best schools that could be found in the country.

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Right along.

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And they'd been going to school on bicycles and you wanted a bicycle too. You more or less built one, didn't you? Well, no, I that's not quite accurate. What happened was that

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It's an odd thing. I was extremely different from my brothers and sisters because I didn't have sight, but

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My entire time was spent trying to be like them.

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No one thought that I could learn to ride a bicycle, but they would ride off to their schools every morning and I would be left behind in the compound with nothing to do, nothing to occupy myself. So I went to the servants' quarters and discovered an old discarded bicycle, which I then fixed up myself.

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and um learned to ride it around the compound. And then you got more ambitious and you followed your brothers and sisters to school. Yes, that was because I was very eager to go to school.

Ved Mehta14:29

Well cool.

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And I thought that if I only could go with my sisters, say, and sit in their classes, I might absorb by osmosis what they were learning. It was all a fantasy because obviously uh the teachers wouldn't countenance the thought of having a little blind brother sit in the same classroom and it would have very much crapped my sisters' style. They wouldn't have wanted me around. But one morning as they were setting off to school, my three sisters who were older than I was always rode off together and I just set off behind them, keeping my distance, and arrived at their school. But I didn't get there soon enough. By the time I got to the school, they'd already deposited their bicycle by the wall and gone in the school gate. So then I spent the day sitting outside, sleeping and feeling very lost because I couldn't find my way back home, of course. But you had got there by using this facial vision you were talking about. And this facial vision, it's basically...

Ved Mehta15:28

Yes, and

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You know, we are just building a house in Maine, in New England.

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And in Maine, before you had radar, that's in the 19th century, say.

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The sailors used to find their way by whistling. They didn't know where the rocks or where the islands were, and what they would do would be they would stop on their boats, wherever they were, and then they would blow something like a police whistle, and they would listen to the echo.

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and from that echo they were able to tell how close they were to an island or a rock.

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Now this is the same system that the blind use and perhaps the bats also use, which is that you tell the size of the room, whether you're next to a wall. The the object has to be fairly sizable, but if you're very good uh facial vision or whatever it is,

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Then you can tell smaller objects like chairs. Waste paper baskets are very hard to detect.

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So that's what I use. But in case of that bicycle ride, of course, I could hear my sisters chattering just in front of me. They were perhaps, oh, I don't know, thirty to to twenty yards ahead of me.

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And so I really followed their voices more than anything else, and aligned myself to the sound of their voices.

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Now there was no educational facility for for blind children in India, or virtually none. You got to Arkansas. How did you do that? How did you at Saint Dunstan's, where I spent six months, I learned typing, and you can't imagine what a

Ved Mehta16:57

Yeah.

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sense of freedom it gave me, because this meant

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I could write letters home from the previous school in Bombay, for instance, I could never write letters home no one could read Braille.

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But here, by touch typing, I had at my fingertips ability to correspond with anybody in the world and

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I used to receive all kinds of Braille magazines, some published by Royal Institute for the Blind, others published by American Printing House for the Blind in the United States and so on.

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And these magazines would have addresses of schools or would describe programs that the blind children were going through in British and American schools. So I every day I would sit down at my typewriter and send my biography and my aspirations to schools in Britain, United States, indeed even France, because for me the entire West was really one vast land of opportunity and it never occurred to me that going to France would be any different or worse than going to Britain or going to America would be any better or worse than going to Britain. So off you went to Arkansas. Let's break at this point for another record. What do we have? Well, the fourth record I've chosen is one from Monteverdi. These are spiritual songs that he wrote. And I first heard these in California, where I went to

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a college, and they meant a great deal to me.

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Uh

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A Monteverdi spiritual song

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Lautato summe by the Ensemble of Lausanne.

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So you were fifteen. You were accepted to study in Little Rock, Arkansas. How did you get there?

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Oh, I flew there by myself.

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And uh then I spent three years there cramming into my three years the um missed education of many more. And in Arkansas you took your high school diploma and moved on to Pomona College in California. Where I spent four years, yes. And it was while you were at Pomona, I think you were only twenty, that you wrote your first book, Face to Face? Well, I started writing it there, but it was three years before it was p it was published when I was twenty three, but I finished most of it when I was twenty, that's quite right.

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Did that book help you to get into Oxford University for a postgraduate course? Not at all. Actually, I was an undergraduate at Oxford. What I did was I did a BA.

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Not at all

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In California, and then became an undergraduate once more in Oxford. No, they didn't even know I'd written a book.

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At Pomona I had eight professors who had gone to Oxford and they were very keen that I should go to Oxford and they had written to Balliol and Maudlin and I was accepted, I think, in both colleges and I eventually ended up at Balliol. But I I was an undergraduate there, not a graduate. Were you read English or history? No, I read modern history. Was it already your intention to be a writer? Oh, not at all. I never thought of myself as a writer. I I thought I perhaps would end up as a teacher somewhere, an academic, I think. Well you went on to Harvard, didn't you? That's right.

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Record number five, what will that be? Well, I've chosen this from my Oxford period, and it has to do with learning to drink wine and enjoying it. When I arrived at Oxford, I'd never tasted any alcoholic drink, and at Oxford I developed a terrific taste for wine and became something of a connoisseur. And what's the music? The music actually is Purcell's Tavern Songs, and I think the title will be very obvious to your listeners when they hear it.

Speaker 421:21

Wine does wine wine does wine wine does wonder does wine us every day wine does wine does wine

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One does what

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Does one does every day, Does one does every day, makes the hasty and gay, Throws off all, throws off all Throws off all their men the collie, Makes the wisest go astray, And the busy toy and play, And the poor and needy jolly, And the poor and needy jolly

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Ah

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Yeah.

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Wine Does Wonders, one of the Purcell Tavern songs sung by the Della consort.

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You had now lived in three countries, Bed. You had decided to settle in the United States?

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Well, no. I just missed getting a first at Oxford. I was the eighteenth and they gave seventeenth first that year. After that the whole idea of living in England soured. If if I had got a first, I probably would have stayed on and become a Don, but I thought, goodness me,

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I haven't got a first, so um I can't make go of it here. And I'd in the meantime got a fellowship to Harvard, so I went off there and started doing postgraduate work.

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In India there'd been all the violence of partition. What had happened to your family? Oh, my family had become refugees. We were Hindus living in what was soon designated as Pakistan.

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And during the troubles over partition, as I'm sure all your listeners know, a million people died and 11 million people were made homeless within a space of few months in the Punjab. And we were one of those families who were made homeless. So we had to start again. It's really a story that's familiar to many Europeans who suddenly were dispossessed and became refugees and settled in England and America. When did you visit India again?

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Oh, immediately after Oxford. I left in 1949, two years after partition, and then I went back to uh India after finishing my degree at Oxford.

Ved Mehta23:49

Take it.

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And you wrote a book, Walking the Indian Street. That's right. It was my second book, which was really

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You know, three of my happiest years were spent in Oxford. I never had more fun or enjoyed my studies more or admired

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people I was with more. So I really went back to India with an arrogance of a youth and a recent graduate.

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and try to rediscover uh a country which I'd been separated from for ten years. Mhm. And and this book was really the distillation of that experience. You began to write for that very civilized weekly, The New Yorker.

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Yes, but that was while I was still a student at Harvard, I started. As early as that? Yes. My first book came out when I was a freshman at Oxford, and my first article in The New Yorker came out my first year at Harvard. But even though I started writing and publishing very early on, I never thought of myself as a writer.

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As early as that.

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Every article or piece I wrote seemed to be the only piece I could do and it just seemed to be a miracle and I did it and then forgot about it and went back to my studies.

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Well, you were appointed a staff writer on the New Yorker. Staff writer in New Yorker it doesn't mean very much. All it means is that you have confidence of the editor that you can write for him.

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I wasn't particularly happy at Harvard. By this time I had had nine and a half years of university education, and I was quite sick of it.

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So I left Harvard and came to New York and

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started writing professionally, as it were, for The New Yorker, and I was immediately drawn back to England. I came here and did a a series of pieces on British historians and philosophers, which became my next book, and that was serialized in The New Yorker.

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Record number six.

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I've chosen for number six Ella Fitzgerald because it was when I came to New York to write.

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that I first discovered serious jazz music uh Broadway it was a whole different life which bore no relation to California, to Oxford, to Arkansas. And Ella was my great favorite at the time. And what's she singing? By Strauss.

Speaker 326:11

Let the Danube flow along And the Flater Mouse Keep the wine and give me some Buy Strauss Buy Joe By Jing Buy Strauss is the thing So I say to Hacha Cha

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Hurose, just give me your womb, by straws.

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Ella Fitzgerald buys drugs.

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You were writing for the New Yorker autobiographical pieces about your childhood, which became autobiographical books. These, of course, were were comparatively easy for you to write because there was virtually no research. It was all memory.

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Ah, I wish I could agree with you, Roy.

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First of all, I didn't get to autobiography for many years. I've written 15 books, of which only two which appeared in the New Yorker are autobiographies. The rest of them, I wrote a biography of Gandhi, I wrote a book about making a film, I wrote a book about contemporary Christian theology, I did a novel, I wrote a book about India, and so on. And even my autobiography volumes have required quite a lot of research because I've developed a unique method of writing them. Instead of simply relying on my memory, which of course can be fallible, I've gone and interviewed my sisters and brothers about experiences I remembered and checked my experiences against theirs and then tried to reconstruct the period because after all, in these books what I'm trying to do is not just to tell about myself but to evoke and perhaps resurrect a whole period of history and life and how it was lived. And often when I'm writing, say, the current book, The Ledge Between the Stream, really deals with my life in India in the 40s, 1940s. During the writing of it, I immersed myself in the literature of the period, because it was also a very important period in the history of India.

Ved Mehta28:05

Uh yeah

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And there's a new installment of the story that you started work on? Yes, that's the Arkansas installment. And of course now there's a a misses Mater. It does she help you with your literary work or?

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Isn't she? Well, not yet. Maybe one day she will. She works for the Ford Foundation. I have some consolation because her office and my office are on the same latitude. We are separated by ten New York blocks. But no, at the moment she does read to me sometime in the evening and she's read some of my manuscript just before publication. But basically we haven't done any kind of collaborative work.

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Isn't she excited to participate?

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Yet. Yet. Right. Record number seven.

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I came to marriage very late, after having lived a little bit the life of a playboy, and this aria is is from my favorite opera, which is Don Giovanni.

Speaker 429:17

Agent, you are deep.

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His fairy.

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Be darn me.

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Peter Schreier singing one of Don Ottavio's arias from Mozart Don Giovanni.

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Now, Ved, back to the desert island. It would be only fair, I think, to cast away Lynne with you. Do you think if you supervised she could build a hut? I don't think you should make any special concessions for me.

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I think actually a blind person could get along better in on an island by himself than

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Perhaps people who can see. I don't know if you have ever read D. H. Lawrence's story called The Blind Man. It's a wonderful evocation of physicality of blind people. So I think in this instance I don't mind being a a solo or what about food? Well, I think I'm very good at climbing trees. And if if there were any trees, I think I could probably survive by

Ved Mehta30:51

Alright.

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plucking fruits or perhaps leaves. Would you try to escape? I certainly would. Most of my life i has been spent in solitude because writing is a very solitary activity. It's an internal activity.

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And it's a lifetime apprenticeship. You can never say that now I know how to write. Each book seems like a

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new struggle, um new land to conquer. So I'm not very interested in the kind of solitude that you would get on an island. I would certainly try to escape. Let's have your last record. What's that?

Presenter31:34

My last record is chosen really from Beethoven and it's his last quartet. As you know, through most of adult life Beethoven was deaf and these particular pieces were written when he was in terrific anguish, full of rage and pain and trouble. But the music has kind of ethereal quality that I don't think we meet with many composers and these pieces, these last quartets, are really among my favorite in the whole corpus of Eastern and Western music.

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The opening of one of the Beethoven last string quartets, op. 131 in C sharp minor, played by the Juilliard string quartet.

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If you could take only one disc of the eight you've played as which would it be? It would be the last one, Beethoven's. One book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which you'll already find there.

Ved Mehta33:21

Space code.

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The book um I would take with me is the one I use most often next to the Bible and the Shakespeare, and that's the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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I think it's the only book ever published which sums up all the knowledge of the time. I mean, after that Britannica was published, I think we lost our faith in ever being able to convey the entire human knowledge in few volumes or in one book. When was that edition published? The 11th edition, I think, was around 1911. And I think if I had that around me, I would feel I was in touch with civilized life. And thank you, Verd Mehter, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much, Roy. Goodbye. Goodbye, everyone.

Ved Mehta34:20

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.