Write a short note on Gita Mehta
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Nationality: Indian. Born: Gita Patnaik in Delhi, India, 1944. Education: Cambridge University. Career: Writer, journalist, and filmmaker. Lives in New York, London, and Delhi. Gita Mehta is a writer known, perhaps, more for her essays than her novels. She is also a documentary filmmaker and a journalist. These activities all share a focus on India, the country of her birth—its history, politics, and cultures. The same concerns inform her novels: Raj, a historical novel set during the early stages of India's struggle for independence from Britain, and A River Sutra, a modern revisitation of prevalent traditions of Indian aesthetic and philosophical thought. Mehta has made a number of documentary films about India, covering the Bangladesh war, the Indo-Pakistan war, and the elections in the former Indian princely states. Her essays, as represented by two collections, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East and Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, muse on things Indian, from politics and social unrest, the endless clash of religions and cultures, spirituality, and the Indian textile industry to Indian literature and film, and so on. The style of the essays is personal and lucid, often bitingly clear and always honest. This same lucid immediacy and intimacy marks A River Sutra. Raj, lacking this intimate voice, is a more distanced work, valuable rather for its meticulous and even-handed grasp of a complex and important period in history.
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