Mehta produced and directed television documentaries for various British, European, and American networks. From 1970 to 1971 she was a television war correspondent for the US television network
NBC. Her film compilation of the
Bangladesh liberation war of 1971,
Dateline Bangladesh, was shown in cinemas both in India and abroad. Mehta's first book,
Karma Cola (1979), took a shot at the western audience that believed that they could obtain instant spiritual enlightenment by going to India and finding a
guru. In
Raj (1989), a fictional work, Mehta focused on the story of a princess of two
Indian princely states. Her second fictional work,
A River Sutra (1993), was a collection of short stories that interpreted Indian life for a western audience. The book connected stories from Indian mythology to life in then present-day India and were connected by the Indian river
Narmada. Her fiction and non-fiction works focus largely on India's culture and history, and their Western interpretation. Speaking about her work in an interview with
Publishers Weekly, she said: "I wanted to make modern India accessible to Westerners and to a whole generation of Indians who have no idea what happened 25 years before they were born." She was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2021. == Personal life ==