Gita Mehta

Born in New Delhi in 1943, Gita Mehta was almost named Joan of Arc, which her grandmother felt fit the family’s political leanings. Her father was jailed for his involvement with the Indian independence movement when Mehta was three weeks old; her mother, hoping to focus on his release, sent her to boarding school at the age of three. Mehta covered the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 as a journalist and documentarian, then published her first book, Karma Cola, in 1979.