Odisha Chief Minister Navin Patnaik’s sister Gita Mehta who served as a war correspondent in Bangladesh between 1970 and 1971, passed away on Saturday, September 16, in New Delhi, aged 80. Gita was last in the news after she declined the Padma Shri in 2019 citing political reasons. However, that was just one of the reasons why she was famous much before her younger brother, Navin Patnaik, became the Chief Minister of Odisha.
Daughter of Biju Patnaik, the distinguished aviator and one of the most loved Odia leaders, Cambridge-educated Gita Mehta served as war correspondent in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, for the American television network NBC, between 1970-71. She had also chronicled her experience of covering the war in her much acclaimed documentary, 'Dateline Bangladesh'. With her passing, India has lost a vanguard of its first generation of post-Independence Indo-Anglian writers who spoke for a new nation brimming with the confidence of the young.
Although she made 14 television documentaries for international networks, Gita, who divided her time across three continents -- in New York, London and New Delhi -- was a close observer of India and the engagement of a nation emerging out of colonialism with the rest of the world.
Gita was well known for her debut novel, Karma Cola (1979), which narrated the story of Western 'pilgrims' who swarmed India in search of salvation, which was followed by the less-celebrated Raj (1989)- the anthology of short stories, River Sutra (1993), and a collection of incisive essays on the occasion of the country's golden jubilee- Snakes and Ladder: Glimpses of Modern India (1997).
It was in the last that Gita's sharp eye for detail was most obvious. She describes a country, in the words of Publishers Weekly, "that is not one but several civilisations in different states of development, a subcontinent rather than a single state, with a multitude of cultures, religions, languages, races and customs, where 'most Indians view other Indians as foreigners'." India's lack of a cohesive identity, Gita emphasised, had frustrated rulers, past and present, in their efforts to "centralise a land that has no centre but is only a field of experience". Words that politicians today would do well to remember.
The democratic urge, according to Gita Mehta, as summarised by the Publishers Weekly, brings disparate elements out to vote in numbers that might shame more cohesive states: "half a billion ballot[s] ... in 17 different languages, each with individual scripts".
As Publishers Weekly put it then: "Mehta's reports ... suffused with outrage, pride, love and humour, have the immediacy of sharp personal reactions and the distance of a critical eye." Her ability to traverse two diverse universes gave Gita's prose the necessary suppleness and depth to interpret India for the world. And yes, the world listened when she wrote.
Gita Mehta was married to the New York-based publishing guru, Ajai Singh alias Sonny Mehta, who was the influential editor-in-chief of Alfred Knoft and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. He passed away in 2019, after being married to Gita Mehta for more than five decades since 1965. They are survived by their son, Aditya Singh Mehta, and his family.