The story of Ved Mehta’s vast body of memoirs is well-known. But the republication of Daddyji, the first book in his “Continents of Exile” series (12 volumes, and hopefully still counting), comes as a reminder of his staggering achievement.

To reread Daddyji, first published in the Seventies, today is to find in Mehta a unique, though in no way unlikely, social historian of 20th century India. Mehta, 1934 born, was left blind at the age of three by cerebrospinal meningitis. The family he was born into was in many ways typical of those times. His father, a high-ranking public health official in the colonial government in west Punjab, came from a family and was married into another making their way into newly opened opportunities. Education was their vehicle of progress, and when Mehta lost his sight, he was bundled off, alone, to a school for the blind in Bombay, and later a special school in Arkansas, US.

It may be diversionary here to inquire whether Mehta’s life-long pursuit of detail — that rendered his writing so graphic and that made him one of New Yorker magazine’s most celebrated writers as a staffer for three decades — was a consequence of his childhood circumstances. But in assembling volume upon volume of his life stories, stories of generations of his family as they found their way from the smaller towns and villages of Punjab to the opportunities of Lahore and after 1947 into newly made lives in independent India and also overseas, he conveyed the essence of a century defined worldwide by movement, by exile, migration and travel.

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