When Ved Mehta enrolled as an undergraduate at Balliol in 1956, he thought he had arrived in heaven. He was at 'the holiest of holy places'. For three years he would be dwelling 'among the world's liveliest minds, in one of the most beautiful spots on the planet'. As a child in India and as an adolescent studying in the United States, he had been told, by his father, his teachers, by the books he read, that Oxford for the British was 'like the Hardwar of the Hindus, the Mecca of the Muslims, the Golden Temple of the Sikhs'. To be an Oxford man was to enjoy a 'state of being' akin to the sublime. He also learned that, of all the Oxford colleges, Balliol was the tops, the cream: it housed young men who would one day 'grow into some of the most notable figures in British intellectual and social life'. Had not this one college supplied India with three viceroys?

LRB 7 October 1993 | PDF Download