The Arabs brought the Medica Indica, their herbal phrarmacology, to India and we became the herbalist for medieval Europe. The Medica Indica became the Ayurveda, which means “meaning of life” and is a whole medical system. They were doing brain surgery and eye surgery in India in 500 BC. When you practise acupuncture, you’re pursuing a knowledge of the nervous system that goes back 2,500 years.” In vain does one bring up the Enlightenment, or indeed the existence of Hippocrates Mehta snorts derisively. “The assumption that these were primitive cultures is just a sideline of imperialism; you believe that everything that’s available to you must be Western. Europe is simply ignorant of its own knowledge.”When Gita Mehta goes into one of her spectacular transcontinental and transcultural riffs, no-one could stem the flow of her eloquence even if they had a mind to. She can hurl connective wires across 15 different disciplines in a single paragraph, pulling Plato, Machiavelli, Confucius, Gore Vidal, Louis IV (“or was it Napoleon?”), Borges and Milton, St Sebastian and St Augustine and, good heavens, Bruce Chatwin into broad but coherent circuits of argumentation.The magisterial strain in her make-up is, thankfully, tempered by a more playful impulse, a slightly disdainful charm “Would you mind awfully if I…

chain-smoked throughout?” were her first words in the Halkin Hotel restaurant, where Armani-suited young waiters flickered to and fro at her bidding. At 53, she is handsome, slightly husky, louche, risque and yet rather maternal She talks about her family with reluctance and pride. Her father was a businessman (“Heavy industry, that sort of thing”) but also a rebel and gun-runner, endlessly in trouble with the British authorities. Gita remembers “being sent to a convent when I was barely three, because my parents were in jail – my father actually inside, my mother trying to get him released. I remember the nuns saying, when I cried, “We don’t allow crying here”.

They were Irish nuns – I have a little passport still, saying I’m an `Enfant du Sacre Coeur’ My brother and I spent the entire time trying to escape. We once collected biscuit tins, waited until 9pm and tried to stack them up by a wall and climb over it, but…”Her enormous family (“There’s no such thing as an Indian nuclear family”) was full of contradictions. At one extreme were the Anglophile adventurers (“There was a time when my mother had seven male cousins up at Cambridge simultaneously. Others were in the RAF”) while at the other were gun-toting insurrectionists like her dad. One uncle was sent to prison for 17 years for attacking a British armoury He was 14 at the time Through him, Gita made some interesting acquaintances. “When I was filming in Bangladesh I met a lady who knew my uncle.