Mamaji

Mamaji

Continents of Exile: 2

Summary

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.

Translating individual experience into the universal, Mehta recounts the story of his mother's arranged marriage to a British-trained doctor and, by extension, of an ancient Indian family's struggle to find its place in a modern, rapidly changing world.

Reviews

  • His fall into blindness had broken open his perception so that nothing escapes him . . . he has a clarity that is sometimes like clairvoyance
    Peter Ackroyd

About the author

Ved Mehta

Ved Mehta is a journalist, novelist, and one of the most prolific memoirists of the twentieth century. Blind since the age of four, Mehta spent his early years in India, before first moving to America, where he studied at Harvard, and then to Britain, where he studied at Oxford. A MacArthur Prize fellow and member of the British Royal Society of Literature, he was a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for over thirty years. His 27 books include the acclaimed multi-volume memoir Continents of Exile.
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