Ved Mehta

Up at Oxford

'Up at Oxford' is Ved Mehta's account of his time as an undergraduate at the university. When he was growing up in India, it was his great ambition to study there. Thus when he actually arrived as a new student he was rather overawed by the reputation of the place, and was constantly struggling to live up to what he feels was expected of him. On the other hand he had already completed a degree and what is more had had a book published. Hence this work gives a fascinating account of his life in an elite society, while being beset by doubts about whether it is where he 'really' belongs.

As a blind student, Mehta had problems that which other students didn't have to face. However when reading this book, one doesn't notice his blindness as making him somehow 'different' from his colleagues, rather the problems he had seem to be rather artificial, brought on by a society which doesn't think things through properly.

The book was published in 1991, and looking back from that time one sees the late 1950's as being the end of an era for Oxford. No longer was it to be a place which would take students (often from boarding schools) and prepare them for their place in running the Empire.

The book also follows through on the later careers of some of Mehta's undergraduate friends. Some of them achieved the great things expected of them, while the lives of others seemed to fall apart, some even ending in suicide.

Amazon.com info

Hardcover 432 pages
ISBN: 0393035441
Salesrank: 1481008
Weight:1.4 lbs

Published: 1993 W W Norton & Co Inc

Marketplace:New from $14.59:Used from $5.43

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Amazon.co.uk info

Hardcover 400 pages
ISBN: 0719552877
Salesrank: 1314428

Published: 1993 John Murray Publishers Ltd

Marketplace::Used from £11.93

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Amazon.ca info

Hardcover 432 pages
ISBN: 0393035441
Salesrank:
Weight:1.4 lbs

Published: 1993 WW Norton

Marketplace:New from CDN$ 47.95:Used from CDN$ 7.81

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Synopsis
Up at Oxford continues the evocative autobiographical series 'Continents of Exile' which Ved Menta began with Daddyji and Mamaji. Oxford had engaged his imagination since he was a small, blind Hindu boy growing up under the Raj In those days in India, education for the blind amounted to not much more than confinement in an orphanage. To make his way from that to what he saw as the pinnacle of academic excellence was an extraordinary achievement as well as the realization of a dream. Few foreign undergraduates have entered the stream of English life with more gusto than Ved. He struggled (successfully) to keep up with brilliant and sighted contemporaries, debated, became part of a literary circle led by the mercurial and captivating Dom Moraes, was charmed by young ladies with sophisticated accents, and strove to adopt the mannerisms of the English upper class. The Oxford of the late Fifties was very different from today's. Many of those whom Ved met there appear memorably in these pages, among them W.H. Auden, Christopher Hill, Neville Coghill, Peter Levi, Allen Ginsberg, John Masefield, Isaiah Berlin, John Sparrow, Lord David Cecil and E.M. Forster. This book is a poignant, witty, candid account of the journey made from freshman dinner to anxious Finals by one of the most extraordinary undergraduates ever to go up to Oxford. No one who has memories of that place, or who has enjoyed previous books from Ved Mehta's engaging series, should miss it. Ved Mehta has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. For the last three years he has held the Rosenkranz Chair in Writing at Yale College. The earlier books in 'Continents of Exile' are Daddyji, Mamaji, Vedi, The Ledge Between the Streams, Sound-Shadows of the New World and The Stolen Light. New editions of his well-known books on the country of his birth - Portrait of India and Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles - were recently published by Yale University Press.

Synopsis

Up at Oxford continues the evocative autobiographical series 'Continents of Exile' which Ved Menta began with Daddyji and Mamaji. Oxford had engaged his imagination since he was a small, blind Hindu boy growing up under the Raj In those days in India, education for the blind amounted to not much more than confinement in an orphanage. To make his way from that to what he saw as the pinnacle of academic excellence was an extraordinary achievement as well as the realization of a dream. Few foreign undergraduates have entered the stream of English life with more gusto than Ved. He struggled (successfully) to keep up with brilliant and sighted contemporaries, debated, became part of a literary circle led by the mercurial and captivating Dom Moraes, was charmed by young ladies with sophisticated accents, and strove to adopt the mannerisms of the English upper class. The Oxford of the late Fifties was very different from today's. Many of those whom Ved met there appear memorably in these pages, among them W.H. Auden, Christopher Hill, Neville Coghill, Peter Levi, Allen Ginsberg, John Masefield, Isaiah Berlin, John Sparrow, Lord David Cecil and E.M. Forster.

This book is a poignant, witty, candid account of the journey made from freshman dinner to anxious Finals by one of the most extraordinary undergraduates ever to go up to Oxford. No one who has memories of that place, or who has enjoyed previous books from Ved Mehta's engaging series, should miss it. Ved Mehta has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. For the last three years he has held the Rosenkranz Chair in Writing at Yale College. The earlier books in 'Continents of Exile' are Daddyji, Mamaji, Vedi, The Ledge Between the Streams, Sound-Shadows of the New World and The Stolen Light. New editions of his well-known books on the country of his birth - Portrait of India and Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles - were recently published by Yale University Press.

Up at Oxford ****
This account of Mehta's years at Oxford focuses on the depth of the upper class English education, and on the fragility of the young men who survive it. Although Mehta doesn't dwell on his blindness, there is a strong unspoken contrast between his own physical and spiritual courage and resourcefulness and the narrow intellectual pursuits of his peers. Best for me was the tenderness with which he recalled his parents' experiences in England while he was at Oxford.

Up at Oxford ****

This account of Mehta's years at Oxford focuses on the depth of the upper class English education, and on the fragility of the young men who survive it. Although Mehta doesn't dwell on his blindness, there is a strong unspoken contrast between his own physical and spiritual courage and resourcefulness and the narrow intellectual pursuits of his peers. Best for me was the tenderness with which he recalled his parents' experiences in England while he was at Oxford.

Very enjoyable ****
I read this book over 5 years ago and remember enyoying it quite a bit. It paints a certain portrait of Oxford and contains many interesting stories. Having graduated from Oxford in 1997, my experience was very different from his and perhaps not as positive. However, I take issue with the other reviewer who disliked the book- of course different individuals are going to have different experiences. Mehta went to Oxford over 40 years ago and clearly during all this time, the university has changed. Regardless of the other viewer's negative experience at Oxford, I highly recommend this book.

Very enjoyable ****

I read this book over 5 years ago and remember enyoying it quite a bit. It paints a certain portrait of Oxford and contains many interesting stories. Having graduated from Oxford in 1997, my experience was very different from his and perhaps not as positive. However, I take issue with the other reviewer who disliked the book- of course different individuals are going to have different experiences. Mehta went to Oxford over 40 years ago and clearly during all this time, the university has changed. Regardless of the other viewer's negative experience at Oxford, I highly recommend this book.

Bewitched by Oxford *
I read Ved Mehta's Oxford memoir while I was a foreign grad student at Balliol, where he had been a student. That explains my overwhelmingly negative reaction to it. Granted, by the time I arrived in the 1990s both Balliol and Oxford had fallen far from the heights they reached in Mehta's day, particularly the former. But I found his glowing, even reverential, account of Oxford utterly one-sided and infuriatingly uncritical. Actually, nauseating is the best word to describe his portrait of Oxford. He admits that he had been in awe of the place since childhood, like so many people from former British colonies (I'm a "colonial" too). But having been there, he should have seen through the image to the often quite sordid reality that underlies it. The impression he gives is that he is hugely impressed that he went there, and you should be too. He describes how charmed and delighted he was by the SOCIAL life of Oxford, and by its traditions and history and general "gaiety". He appears to have loved hob-nobbing with the "Brideshead" types and sipping cherry with the dons and playing croquet in the college quad. Yet he says very little about it as a SCHOLARLY institution. It is a university, after all. Therein lies the essential problem: too many people are drawn to it for the wrong reasons. They are bewitched by Oxford as a social institution, a place at the heart of the British class system that many people who suffer from acute status anxiety find so fascinating. Alas, it lures people with such neurotic social hang-ups from every corner of the planet who admire the intricacies and social elitism of the British class system, which has been honed to perfection by centuries of revolution-free development. If they can make it there, they seem to think, they can make it anywhere! (The worst snob I met in 4 years "up at Oxford" wasn't English--he was Australian!) That's why there are so many obnoxious, slavish Anglophiles about the place. Some, like me, are repulsed by it and become Anglophobes. (Not quite what Rhodes had in mind with his Trust!) Others, like Mehta, never see past the glittering exterior. There's something faintly sad about that. When I finished Mehta's book, I felt a slight touch of pity for the man. He was there and he's had a lifetime to reflect on it and still hasn't figured it out. If you are an Anglophile who wants an uncritical "insider's view" of the imaginary Oxford (the "dreaming spires" view), then Mehta's will please you greatly. But if you want a thinking person's view of Oxford from a contemporary perspective--one that rips off the veil and exposes it as an ugly, anti-intellectual fraud rife with snobbery, greed and hypocrisy--then you are much better off with Rosa Ehrenreich's "A Garden of Paper Flowers".

Bewitched by Oxford *

I read Ved Mehta's Oxford memoir while I was a foreign grad student at Balliol, where he had been a student. That explains my overwhelmingly negative reaction to it. Granted, by the time I arrived in the 1990s both Balliol and Oxford had fallen far from the heights they reached in Mehta's day, particularly the former. But I found his glowing, even reverential, account of Oxford utterly one-sided and infuriatingly uncritical. Actually, nauseating is the best word to describe his portrait of Oxford. He admits that he had been in awe of the place since childhood, like so many people from former British colonies (I'm a "colonial" too). But having been there, he should have seen through the image to the often quite sordid reality that underlies it. The impression he gives is that he is hugely impressed that he went there, and you should be too. He describes how charmed and delighted he was by the SOCIAL life of Oxford, and by its traditions and history and general "gaiety". He appears to have loved hob-nobbing with the "Brideshead" types and sipping cherry with the dons and playing croquet in the college quad. Yet he says very little about it as a SCHOLARLY institution. It is a university, after all. Therein lies the essential problem: too many people are drawn to it for the wrong reasons. They are bewitched by Oxford as a social institution, a place at the heart of the British class system that many people who suffer from acute status anxiety find so fascinating. Alas, it lures people with such neurotic social hang-ups from every corner of the planet who admire the intricacies and social elitism of the British class system, which has been honed to perfection by centuries of revolution-free development. If they can make it there, they seem to think, they can make it anywhere! (The worst snob I met in 4 years "up at Oxford" wasn't English--he was Australian!) That's why there are so many obnoxious, slavish Anglophiles about the place. Some, like me, are repulsed by it and become Anglophobes. (Not quite what Rhodes had in mind with his Trust!) Others, like Mehta, never see past the glittering exterior. There's something faintly sad about that. When I finished Mehta's book, I felt a slight touch of pity for the man. He was there and he's had a lifetime to reflect on it and still hasn't figured it out.

If you are an Anglophile who wants an uncritical "insider's view" of the imaginary Oxford (the "dreaming spires" view), then Mehta's will please you greatly. But if you want a thinking person's view of Oxford from a contemporary perspective--one that rips off the veil and exposes it as an ugly, anti-intellectual fraud rife with snobbery, greed and hypocrisy--then you are much better off with Rosa Ehrenreich's "A Garden of Paper Flowers".