SOURCE: Mukherjee, Bharati. Review of Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, by Gita Mehta. Times Literary Supplement, no. 4923 (8 August 1997): 12.

In the following review, Mukherjee praises Mehta's insight into Indian social, cultural, and political viewpoints in Snake and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, drawing particular focus to the nostalgia of Mehta's more personal essays.

At the time of the Raj, it was fashionable for British and American writers as diverse as Maud Diver, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Beverly Nichols, John Masters and Katherine Mayo to present the Eastern and the Western thought-processes as opposed. These writers' pronouncements, such as “never the twain shall meet” and “not yet”, may have come as a relief to their readers. The enlightenment highway has been designed for a one-way traffic in ideas: from the rational West to the child-like, intuitive East. Even in the 1960s and 70s, when the...